We have all heard in life that everyday we live we are surrounded by millions of adds, designs, and information, (the estimated amount is 40 billion pieces every second) of this amount we only a fraction actually make it into our conscious brain. (40 of the 40 billion to be exact). So if this is the case keeping your design is better if its simple because people wont remember all of it anyway.
Find a way to express your message in less words; this would mean that you are applying Progressive Disclosure which is providing only information people need in that moment. An example of this would be an info graphic it shows statistics that are important and separate it with pictures to represent a large amount of data instead of text that the reader might become overwhelmed with. People want to get the information and get out, if they want to read more you can include links for additional information. This is a great method but it only works if you do your homework, if you put up the wrong information your design is useless so make sure you know what people are looking for.
Some types of mental processing are more challenging than others in this chapter they talk about all three. The first is cognitive, the second is visual, and the third is motor. All three of these processes use different amounts of mental resources cognitive uses the most followed by visual, and then motor. You don't want to make something that is hard to use or people wont use it. Saying that; you should try and stay away from designing products that call for people to remember things, or that don't have any type of logical flow; this just gets the user confused. A good way to help with this problem is by looking for trade offs that can reduce a cognitive load by increasing a motor or visual one.
We are in a fast moving economy where we want things now and then we are on to the next thing, we are not used to waiting and in that way we have all become a little ADHD. Which goes on to the next topic, minds wander 30 percent of the time (we are always thinking about 100 different things). An example would be reading the same sentence over and over again and still not remembering what you read because your mind went somewhere else. A wandering mind can be both good and bad. It is good because you can multitask, but its bad because sometimes you don't realize your doing it, which means you can miss important information.
The next thing the author talks about is peoples uncertainty . The more uncertain people are the more they defend their ideas. when forced people change their minds, when not forced people dig in (they don't look for other possibilities), and if uncertain, people will argue. So keeping all of that in mind don't spend time trying to change peoples ingrained beliefs, instead get them to commit to something small and let them change on their own.
A lot of what people believe above is because of the mental models they create in their head, that they have learned through past experiences. Because everyone experiences things differently means that not everyone has the same mental model. Two people might look at a tomato and get two different experiences from it this is a small example in a grand scheme of things but that is why we do research to understand the mental models for our target audience.
People process information best in story form. When I was studying Art history I would sometimes make up stories about specific words I had a hard time remembering and it would help me to remember them later. Stories are the natural way people process information, it dates back to the beginning of time when people made stories with hieroglyphs, or the indians that told stories to help their children remember their history. Use a story if you want people to make a casual leap. Storytelling no matter how dumb it is will help to make it understandable, interesting, and it will help people remember.
This goes into the next segment that talks about people learning through examples, like stories examples can work in the same way. When you are explaining something you might reference an experience that is like a story. It is a way to show someone how to do something by talking to or leading them through the process. Don't tell people what to do show them. Screen shots are good in doing this but even that takes time now things like videos and you tube can do the trick.
People are driven to create catagories if you saw a grocery list of random things chances are you will want to group them into categories, in most cases you are already sorting them into categories when writing the list and not even thinking about it. If you go to a site and information is everywhere (most e-commerce sights) people will feel overwhelmed and try and organize the information on their own this is bad because it detracts from the overall message because they are to busy trying to fix your un-catagorized problem.
Earlier we talked about how everyone is always in a rush the author goes back into talking about how time is relative, people never seem to have enough of it. Time is categorized into low hurry, intermediate hurry, and high hurry (all of which pretty much mean that they are still in a hurry). People don't want to spend a lot of time on things, if they think it will take a lot of time then they will more than likely leave the site. So a good method for monitoring time is by providing process indicators, make the time it takes to do the tasks about the same so the individual can adjust their expectations, and last break the process into steps.
Another way to let people forget about the time they are spending on a site is by giving them control over their actions during the activity. You can also break up the difficulty into stages if you work on five hard problems it will feel like time is going so sow but if you mix it up and throw some easy ones in there they will tend to forget about the longer ones (let the user feel like the test is achievable). Give constant feedback and minimize distractions, encouragement makes people continue even if things are taking a little longer, and minimizing distractions help the individual focus and not feel like they might be missing out on something somewhere else.
Culture also plays a big role on how people think the example of the tomato plays into this. The example the book gave was of two cows with two different backgrounds; they asked what people noticed. Depending on where you came from you noticed different things. People from the east noticed the relationships where people in the west recognized individualistic patterns.People in different regions and cultures respond differently to photos and web site designs. In east Asian people noticed the background and context more than the people in the west do. So if you are designing your site for multiple cultures and geographical regions, then you should research those multiple locations.
definitions
goal-gradient effect- says that you will accelerate your behavior as you progress closer to your goals
operant conditioning- is a reinforcement method, it only works if you posses something that the audience wants.
dopamine- created in various parts of the brain and is curtail in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, motivation,seeking, and reward. Its a pleasure chemical.
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