Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

This is roughly related to how some cognitive processes rely on “cues” to jolt them from long-term memory to working memory. And I’d posit that dfferent people respond more less effectively to different types of cues. For example, a visual person responds to color or position cues, abstract thinkers respond to a cue’s place in a sequence of steps, etc.

Also consider that unfamilar cues would get in the way of effective cognitive processes—like an unannounced site redesign. Or like cultural references with which one is unfamiliar (or worse: one that a user finds offensive!).

I’d like to see this addressed in an article if it was framed as “what cues, visual or otherwise, trigger those cognitive processes”.

Thanks Jamie – yes, it’s exactly this cognitive processing that I’m seeking to understand (coming from a copywriting not psychology background!) and some simple methods of integrating the knowledge that’s out there into our estimations of user responses when designing (and in particular redesigning) web activities.

The negative implications you mention – what gets in the way – are, I think, particularly important.

Louise.

Louise—

Without knowing the bank or seeing the layout, it’s hard to suggest what exactly did prompt the retrieval of your account details. It’s certainly fodder for a good old-fashioned quantitative study, eh?

Perhaps your cognitive tumblers aligning themselves was prompted by the position of the entry fields in relation to other elements on screen. Or perhaps your eyes tracked a familiar course over something that brought the info automatically/magically to your fingertips. Both of these might be related to mental processes similar to how I remember phone numbers: by the arrangement of numbered keys on a phone keypad (i.e. my number is across-jump-back-repeat-up-drop-over). It’s a pattern of sorts; we humans love patterns. If I have to change this visual processing to the verbal processing needed to recite this number to someone, it requires concentration focused on that mental translation from visual to verbal—it’s a chore for my working memory.

The color cues, the position cues, and the multiple steps you repeat each time you visit the pink website, all these combine to call up the final element in that familiar pattern: your pecking in the account info. A solution might be for you to close your eyes and visually imagine the pink bank visit when you’re at another bank’s machine. Another solution might be to practice reciting aloud the information so that it is also imprinted on your brain’s verbal centers (or inventing a rhyme/anagram/mnemonic). For example, it’s now easier for me to recite my phone number because I practiced saying it aloud—but I practiced reciting it with the area code and thus still struggle when verbalizing it WITHOUT reciting the area code first!

If you want more info on this kind of stuff, reference “dual-coding theory,” “cognitive load,” “Allan Paivio,” “Richard Mayer,” or “John Sweller.” Also, you may find Andruid Kerne’s ideas about the “interface ecosystem” interesting (interdependent onscreen elements).