Cognitive Fluency through Affective Design
An interesting point to make is that often we equate good design, especially good web design, with the technical ability to make a graphically swish aesthetic that conveys emotion. More often than not the task becomes about pushing the designer’s portfolio, too. But why? In the hierarchy of people who we care about in a design the last consideration should be for the designer’s portfolio.
An article by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe titled Easy = True discusses a number of research papers about the psychological importance of cognitive fluency. Its a term that basically means we like things that are simple to absorb (with a lower cognitive load) and we dislike things that are more difficult (a higher cognitive load). It means Don’t Make Me Think! as Krug would say. It means we prefer rhymes, we prefer cognitively fluent situations and are automatically wired to be suspicious of the cognitively disfluent and the incongruous.
Anybody who has read about usability or web design probably has a decent grasp of the concept behind cognitive fluency. However, the really interesting part of Bennett’s article on the Boston Globe revolves around the use of cognitive disfluency, rather than its positive relation. Because if disfluent things make us stop and think, and the research supports this assumption, then we can include elements of disfluency within our design to affect the stop-and-assess reaction with site users that may be appropriate. So rather than simply making it simple-for-stupid we can say that sometimes making it not-simple-for-stupid is the right approach; if only to slow stupid down with an increase in cognitive load. Purposeful slowing down may lead to less intuition-based errors on certain tasks that stupid needs to consider.
With the number of research papers mentioned in Easy = True I would recommend you took the 10 minutes to engorge yourself within the content of the entire original article. I’m not sure that I would do Bennett’s journalism justice in a fast-and-dirty blogger’s condensation for the masses. I simply wanted to point to the flip side of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! with a second of thoughtful pause – unless you need to make me stop and think.
Sometimes increasing cognitively load might be an essential element in effectively affecting the user’s desired response. Which is pretty cool, in a way. While its no excuse to make things complicated to be cool, it does lead to more intelligent solutions.
