Designed so that customers don't have to strain their brains

When clients enter your page and do nothing, the reason is often not that they are uninterested. A more common reason is that their brains have to process too many things at once, and instead of pushing through, they exit. This is a phenomenon of high cognitive load, and it occurs silently without any error notifications.

What is cognitive load?

Human short-term memory is very limited. The brain can only hold a certain amount of information at one time, and as the interface continuously adds more, it starts to drop off. Customers do not fill out forms not because they are lazy, but because the form is asking too many unrelated things, lacks prompts, and presents as a solid block of text.

Cognitive load comes from three main sources, all of which fall within the realm of design that can be intervened in:

• Visual noise: too many elements competing for attention at once on a screen.
• It is mandatory for customers to remember instead of recognizing: necessary information is not displayed in the right place.
• Request involves too many steps of thought in one action.

Three directions for realistic reduction

Nielsen Norman Group summarizes three main ways to reduce cognitive load: avoiding visual clutter, building on existing mental models, and offloading tasks from the user's mind. Sinh Vũ employs all three in the information architecture process.

Chunking: the simplest tool

Chunking is the method of grouping separate pieces of information into meaningful units. Instead of a solid block of text, you break it into groups with clear headings, allowing the customer's brain to scan rather than read line by line.

The important principle here is that the structure must be meaningful, not rigid numbers. Do not force everything into a fixed quantity, but group logically: items that belong together should stand next to each other, while those serving different steps should be separated. When information is grouped correctly, customers can quickly scan and know which part they need.

Common errors in flow design

• A block of text without line breaks or headings: customers feel uneasy just by looking at it, wanting to exit before even reading.
• It is mandatory for customers to remember information from the previous step without displaying it again: this creates unnecessary bottlenecks.
• Stuffing too many equal choices onto one screen: customers don’t know what to prioritize, resulting in choosing nothing.
• Create unconventional interaction methods: make customers learn from scratch instead of using what they are familiar with.

The final error is particularly noteworthy. Creativity in interactive design should only appear when there is a valid reason. In the absence of that reason, sticking to familiar conventions is a less stressful choice for customers and carries less risk for you.

The viewpoint of Sinh Vũ

Reducing cognitive load is not just the responsibility of the technical department, nor is it only about colors and fonts. It pertains to experience design and information architecture: organizing content in a way that makes sense to customers, clearly grouping items, and ensuring each page only requires what is necessary for that step.

Each screen should have a primary objective. If you cannot answer the question "What does the customer need to do here?", then that screen is forcing the customer to find the answer themselves, which is unnecessary cognitive load.

Users should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Options, actions, and subjects should all be displayed or easily found.

Nielsen Norman Group, 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

When Sinh Vũ develops the information architecture for a digital experience, the question is not "how much content to include" but rather "at each step, what does the customer need to know and what do they need to do, and how can we make both as clear as possible?" This is the underlying principle throughout Sinh Vũ's approach to experience design.