Reduce Cognitive Load

Daniel Schwarz explains how UI isn’t your product but instead a gateway to it – and explores how you can clear the obstacles blocking a smooth UI

- Daniel Schwarz

How many buttons on a television remote have you never used or don’t know how to use? Ever wondered why lesser-used functions aren’t hidden behind the menu button?

Excessiveness can induce cognitive overload, an unfortunate circumstance where the user experiences stress, confusion and sometimes even ‘analysis paralysis’, where they freeze as a result of too many options. Here are some of the reasons why cognitive overload happens when using a TV remote:

Inconsistent language (eg ‘Input’ vs ‘AV’ vs Source)

Finding the right button is hard (because there are so many)

It’s difficult to work out what some buttons do (ie the often-unlabelled green, red, blue and yellow buttons)

It all boils down to usability.

What can We do about it?

Firstly, we can trim, move or even remove aspects of the UI.

Remember, the TV remote is not the product (the TV is), so while having direct access to all functions may sound intuitive, it’s actually not if the user has to spend time looking for the one they want. The real objective is to help users spend more time watching TV and less time trying to operate it.

Interfaces rarely come into the world being convoluted but instead become so over time as more ‘features’ enter the space without much thought as to how important said feature is in comparison to ones that are already there. When was the last time you changed the subtitle language? As humans, we tend to think that new features are more important than they actually are, either because they’re new, we came up with them or implementing them sounds like it’d be fun.