User experience in decision making and navigating complexity in an information age

Navigation Complexity in the Information Age, Source : Unsplash

As the internet continues to evolve to unimaginable lengths, it is trying to become more organized. This is increasingly overwhelming us. Content consumption is increasing, and we are getting overloaded by large amounts of information — noise and information anxiety continue to rise.

Seeking more choices is leading to substantial cognitive overload and decision paralysis. This is also causing a delay in an individual’s decision-making when he has too many options to consider. With people seeking fast and easy solutions with digital content, it is crucial to consider designing for information experiences and user experiences.

Considering many options is taxing to our cognitive systems and drains our energy more quickly. Having more options often makes us underconfident about our decisions and tends to lessen our satisfaction. With the rise of digital content being so freely available to us at our fingertips, we are constantly dealing with impulses to pick up something else to do, which snaps our attention.

As the number of decisions made throughout the day increases, the harder each decision becomes for us, leading to decision fatigue. Eventually, the brain looks for shortcuts to circumvent decision fatigue, leading to poor decision-making.

Our choices are influenced by how framing of options through several wordings, reference points, and importance. The most common framing, pictures awareness of either the positive gain or damaging loss associated with an alternative. We are sensitive to this sort of framing because we tend to avoid loss.

Our mind uses shortcuts called ‘heuristics’ to process and evaluate information.

Availability and affect heuristic contribute to framing effect. The availability heuristic is the tendency to use information that comes to our mind quickly and efficiently when making decisions about the future. The affect heuristic is a shortcut whereby we rely heavily upon our emotional state during decision-making, rather than taking the time to consider the long-term consequences of a decision.

This may be why we favor information and options that are framed to elicit an immediate emotional response.

Designing for information experiences is designing for the everyday use of technology at work and home. Understanding how people perceive, interact, and react to digital products and perceive information is crucial to any designer.

Here are some quick and efficient visual communication techniques that can enable better information processing and recall. I analyze ways in which we can make information more useable, graspable, and understandable. From a neuroscience perspective, we can design decisions to reduce cognitive load and not overwhelm users.

Making information more useable, graspable, and understandable, a design lens -

1. Information Architecture

When designing for information consumption, core human needs to be kept in mind when working with data. There are various methods of organization that can be followed. By using size, contrast, color, and alignment, elements can be arranged hierarchically as per the order of importance or relevance.

The content should be treated as objects with behaviors, lifecycles, and attributes to optimize the information architecture. Less is always more; giving users a preview of information and examples of content while describing categories reduces the load.

Information architecture is a technical aspect of design, a skeleton or a framework that focuses on goals and organizes content to create easy functionality for users that helps them navigate easily.

Data can be stacked into one icon or link and include hovering elements that add aesthetic appeal to avoid cognitive overload. Users need to be provided with guiding tools for complex interfaces; they can consist of filters and search bars to navigate through information easily. With simple navigation, multiple browsing options, and keeping the interface scalable, we can optimize the experience of viewing information by not including an excessive number of steps in the decision-making process.

2. Use of patterns, repetition, and grouping

Using repeating patterns reduces cognitive load as people start feeling more comfortable about using the product because the learning curve is reduced significantly.

Users learn by example faster than from explicit instruction.

The use of breadcrumbs in web navigation, making the menu bar stay at the top or bottom of a site, clicking on an item from a list, grouping for similar information, using sorting and filtering, and a search bar — as this helps people feel oriented because it lessens cognitive load when you have to decide what comes next.

3. Colour

The human eye is drawn to color. Using a consistent color scheme makes navigation easier for users as they will not have to spend much energy figuring out the placement of information or getting back when they make an error.

4. Icons

Icons are easy to understand and instantly universally recognizable, and perfect for quick interactions. They are an excellent way to communicate an action or object in the app.

The use of familiar icons and symbols helps reduce cognitive load. It can keep from content feeling too complex without becoming overwhelming.

5. Design for visual recall

When designing visual displays, UX designers need to make sure that users are only required to perform one visual task that involves focal vision because humans can only resolve one visual object into fine detail at a time.

With websites and apps presenting data visually for us instead of memory-based recall like before, users can easily see all their options at once without remembering them as they scroll through smaller screens (or by doing quick searches).

Making things bigger like buttons, text, etc., so that users can easily tap on them and read them with the least effort can ensure that the users know well what they can or cannot click. Using contrasting colors, can ensure that the user can easily see the object.

Keeping things traditional where they should be, for example — footer at the bottom of the page, side panel to the left, keeping simple navigation and layout can ensure that the user could learn to go around the website in one or two sessions. The better our design reflects these nuances, the more successful we’ll improve overall usability by emphasizing specific information or highlighting critical steps.

6. Designing for error

It is essential to keep in mind designing for error as people will always make mistakes.

It is vital to allow people to get back on track, as mistakes can trigger a wide range of emotions in people’s minds, chiefly negative ones like sadness and anxiety to procrastination and apathy.

They also create unclear and misleading scenarios which may misguide the user and prevent people from achieving their goals. By user testing, we can predict user behavior patterns and eliminate uncertainties. Simple solutions with providing pop-ups, action confirmations can help the user navigate better.

7. Tasks

When designing visual displays, UX designers need to make sure that users are only required to perform one visual task that involves focal vision because humans can only resolve one visual object into fine detail at a time.

Designing to reduce cognitive load, a neuroscience lens -

1. Least Effort

People always take the path or make an action that requires the least mental and physical energy. Keeping text as concise as possible, arranging information in a meaningful way, showing examples, removing unnecessary details or words, avoiding too many changes in the interface allows things to be consistent and helps learn how to navigate a system.

2. Psychology of Focus

Not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the amount of information is critical when designing digital products.

As the average human attention span comes down to 8 seconds, it is critical to design for keeping a user’s attention and retain it for as long as possible.

Removing random pop-ups, banners, and sounds, providing accessible and relevant information when users need it, using easy-to-recognize cues minimize cognitive strain. As the human brain can keep only 5 things in the working memory, critical and essential information should be at the beginning and end. The primacy and recency effect influences how we perceive information. It is necessary to highlight the most critical information at the beginning or end of an interface, placing less essential details between those pieces.

3. Most different is most memorable : The Von Restorff Effect

Von Restorff’s Effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar stimuli are presented, the most different one will be more memorable.

It refers to distinctive features such as size, shape, color, spacing, and underlining. Designers should use this principle to improve the usability of their interface by giving a prominent call to action or graphic design principles to highlight important information.

This principle is also used in usability tests to study the degree of similarity between 2 objects. Using this theory to design interfaces makes it easier for people with dyslexia to differentiate between the text of the ‘submit’ and ‘cancel’ buttons by using visual differences and being creative with fonts, colors, and shapes. Using bold and italics to highlight key text or points we want people to know more about makes it easier for the user to scan what you want them to see.

4. How choice affects us : Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law clarifies how long a person takes to make decisions based on the number of choices offered. The more options presented, the longer someone takes to decide as the cognitive load increases significantly and increases the product’s complexity. This Law is usually used for change blindness.

To design for information that fits the users’ needs, we need to create something that feels intuitive and not overwhelming, ensuring they don’t get lost in choices.

It can be used in cases where step-by-step instructions can be broken down into multiple screens to give necessary information without making them feel like they have too many choices at once.

5. How we remember information : Serial Position Effect

A cognitive bias dictates our ability to recall, recognize, and organize data in a list. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist from the late 19th century, coined this phrase based on profound short-term and long-term memory studies. These in-depth studies were further developed by psychologists B. Murdock (1962) and Glanzer & Cunitz (1966). The experiments resulted in two vital concepts: primacy effect, which states that items studied first are more likely to be remembered than those learned later; and recency effect, where information at or near the end of the learning list during an experiment has better recall when tested shortly after as opposed to memories not seen for weeks beforehand.

Our brain shifts focus when processing data. Anything processed first is considered salient and attention-grabbing and resonates more powerfully with our overall memory of an event.

People take more time to process information appearing at the beginning or end of a list since they expect it to be more meaningful. One study found that word order impairs sentence recall. When participants were asked about each sentence only once, instead of twice as usual (with an interval), they recalled fewer words toward their original positions but more within later parts in sentences. With 50% of the sentence remaining, the recall was facilitated by last words but inhibited by earlier words. The findings suggest that word order affects how we encode and retrieve items in memory — because people remember more information when they’re cued with later ones.

6. Ordering information for recall : Primacy Effect

The primacy effect is based on discovering that an individual will recall items, assets, or information from the start of a list. For instance, research has shown that when people try to remember something from a long list of words, they are most likely to recollect those terms at the beginning instead of further down.

When participants in experiments are asked to identify or recognize items from a list, they do so better when they are presented at the beginning of the list than at the end. For example, you might be more likely to remember the first item on your grocery list than one towards the end of your shopping trip.

7. Crafting perceptions of information : Recency Effect

The Recency Effect is a concept that contradicts the Primary effect. Instead of recalling information from earlier in one’s experience, the recency effect theorizes that people remember what they see last with more clarity.

This model relies on short-term memory and is prevalent within courtroom settings as well. Studies show jurors are far more likely to recall or agree with arguments put forth by attorneys if those statements occur at the end rather than the beginning of an argumentative account (or even during it).

The way an interface is designed can significantly impact the user’s perception and recall, which means it needs to be carefully crafted. As we mentioned earlier, two phenomena should be focused on: primacy effect (the items at the beginning of a list) and recency effect (things at the end). By understanding how these effects work, you can create more decadent designs for your interfaces by focusing on either end of this spectrum — primacy or recency.

8. The science of curiosity : Zeigarnik Effect

The Zeigarnik Effect is the unconscious urge to finish what we’ve started, even if we’re not particularly interested in the work. This concept was first introduced by Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. She found that people remembered unfinished tasks better than completed ones.

Not only do people remember these unfinished tasks, but they also experience greater psychological tension before starting an unfinished task than after it has been completed. And once the job is finished, people experience psychological relief. People are fascinated by incomplete information and lessons. And just like the cliffhangers in Game of Thrones, if that insufficient information isn’t paid off satisfyingly, people get upset. We can think of the Zeigarnik Effect as the science of curiosity — using it can catch people’s attention, help increase recall of your experience, and increase customer engagement.

There’s an overabundance of choice all around the web, from e-commerce stores with thousands of products to content generation machines pushing out new posts every day. We can hold only 7(+-2) items in our working memory, and we make 95% of our decisions subconsciously.

While we can’t do anything to stop the flood of information or items going out to visitors, we can design interfaces in a way that makes the decision-making process easier to bear. The user experience of navigation information becomes essential. A visual layout makes it easier to scan and remember options. According to the information foraging theory, the constant feeling of Information scent matters in your user experience. Users predict how satisfying the information they will encounter on a path is likely to be. After exploring a user interface, decide whether their predictions were accurate.

References and Readings :

1. The impact of the digital revolution on human brain and behavior: where do we stand?https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366944/
2. Social Psychology of the Digital Age: The Interpersonal Neuroscience of Mediated Communicationhttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07632-4_47
3. Why do we have a harder time choosing when we have more options? Choice Overload, explainedhttps://thedecisionlab.com/biases/choice-overload-bias/
4. Seven scalable ways e-commerce businesses can reduce choice overload https://cultmethod.com/articles/reduce-choice-overload/
5. 12 Research Techniques to Solve Choice Overload https://www.relevantinsights.com/articles/12-research-techniques-to-solve-choice-overload/
6. Analysis paralysis in product design. Improve decision making in your product https://uxplanet.org/analysis-paralysis-in-product-design-e3fda6e40cbf
7. Why do we lose interest in an activity after we are rewarded for it? The Overjustification Effect, explained. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/overjustification-effect/
8. Why are we satisfied by “good enough”? Bounded Rationality, explainedhttps://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bounded-rationality/
9. The Paradox of Choice https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice/
10. Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/hick-s-law-making-the-choice-easier-for-users
11. Best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces. https://lawsofux.com
12. How To Stop Analysis Paralysis With Design https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/stop-analysis-paralysis-design/
13. The Choice Overload Effect: Why simplicity is the key to perfecting your experiencehttps://medium.com/choice-hacking/choice-overload-why-simplicity-is-the-key-to-winning-customers-2f8e239eaba6
14. Design principle: Hick’s Law — quick decision making https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick-decision-making-3dcc1b1a0632
15. Analysis Paralysis: How to overcome the UX designer’s ultimate block https://uxdesign.cc/analysis-paralysis-how-to-overcome-the-ux-designers-ultimate-block-7358a30a3282
16. What is “Analysis Paralysis” in the design process? and how to avoid it https://maitraudit.medium.com/what-is-analysis-paralysis-in-the-design-process-and-how-to-avoid-it-ae0fda73dca8
17. The importance of neuroscience in the User Experience process https://uxdesign.cc/the-importance-of-neuroscience-in-the-user-experience-process-13a2d4fe5006