Chris Atherton at ConCon4 (London, 22nd September 2016)

1. Chris Atherton
Head of Design
Dept for Business, Innovation & Skills
@finiteattention
Cognitive psychology and
content design
All of this was true when I
started writing this talk …

2. 1. attention
2. vision
3. working memory
4. cognitive load
5. words
6. stress
7. questions?

3. 1. attention

4. two attentional systems:

5. a) getting your attention
quick, free, effortless

6. Checking out some rusty old farm machinery
in a park in Stockholm, as you do …

7. O HAI, TWITTER LOGO

8. Must … not … press … most obvious button
… NNGGGGGGHHHH

9. b) keeping your attention
tends towards impossible

10. (content) design =
attention management

11. 2. vision

12. Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
Visual perception seems to happen
in a particular order:

13. Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
first
Grouping by spatial layout (things that are
near each other ‘belong’ together)

14. Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
second
Then we start looking at more qualitative
features, like colour …

15. third?
… or features and local shape

16. Visual object recognition progresses
(broadly) from global to local

17. So when we’re seeing a page on GOV.UK …

18. It starts as a grey-scale layout of shapes

19. … then colour and smaller features resolve

20. … before text and (eventually) meaning
(I say ‘eventually’ — less than half a second)

21. blocks of words
are objects first
my point:
visual weight on the page acts like a magnet
for attention long before meaning is involved

22. 3. working memory

23. Long term
memory
rehearsal
or meaning
Short term/
working
memory
working memory is a very leaky bucket

24. recall of words from
a list presented sequentially
"Serial position" by Obli (talk) (Uploads) - Obli (talk) (Uploads). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serial_position.png#/media/File:Serial_position.png

25. Rehearsed
and/or lacks
interference
Still in the
leaky
bucket

26. 7 ± 2
Miller, 1956Miller, 1956
the leaky bucket can hold
this relates to new, unrelated words/digits/etc

27. 4 ± ?
Cowan, 2001Cowan, 2001
the leaky bucket can hold
much more recent evidence suggests …

28. your screen
sidebar: it’s messed up that we mostly read in
landscape but design documents for portrait.

29. fuzzy
OK
OK
great

30. we should never ask people
to hold stuff
in the leaky bucket

31. 4. cognitive load
Cognitive load as a thing is kind of
unfalsifiable, but it’s a useful framework?

32. intrinsic cognitive load
~ number of moving parts
a task can have …

33. extraneous cognitive load
extra moving parts added
by the delivery medium
…and …

34. working memory has very limited capacity

35. intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to LTM
low intrinsic load and extraneous load
= more resources left for absorbing info

36. extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
intrinsic
load
a complex piece of information leaves you
fewer resources for storing the information

37. intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
likewise, an overly burdensome way of
presenting information makes it hard to grasp

38. your mission:
reduce extraneous
cognitive load

39. reducing policy complexity
(intrinsic load)
is the long game

40. we can reduce extrinsic load
right now
with better (content) design

41. 5. words

42. Psycholinguistic determinants of question
difficulty
http://www.suristat.eu/document/documentArticle/
Faass_et_al.pdf
Effects of survey question
comprehensibility on response quality
http://www.timolenzner.de/resources/Lenzner+2012.pdf
These are really interesting papers.

43. infrequently-used words
— context vs. word dominance
The authors talk about …

44. imprecise terminology
— vague pronouns (e.g. ‘it’)
The authors talk about …

45. imprecise terminology
— ambiguous word parts
The authors talk about …

46. complex syntax
— ‘garden path’ sentences
The authors talk about …

47. complex syntax
— burying the lede
The authors talk about …

48. many logical operators
— e.g. ’or’
The authors talk about …

49. passive voice
The authors talk about …

50. Nice.

51. nominalisations
— ‘enforce a restriction’
vs. ‘restrict’
The authors talk about …

52. bridging inferences
The authors talk about …
(making people do the hard work themselves
rather than spelling it out is, well, mean.)

53. how do we convince people
of the value
of plain language?

54. go play on
scholar.google.com
as content designers, you are well equipped
to make sense of this wordy stuff :)

55. your primary evidence
is always data
from user research
… your context matters, though. See the
current psychology replicability crisis.

56. 6. stress
disclaimer: way out of my wheelhouse.
See my former colleague @Drsurvival :)

57. this is the ‘dunker’, where oil rig workers have
to train to ditch out of a flying helicopter (!)

58. Survival — Mind and Brain
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-1/
survival-%E2%80%93-mind-and-brain
super-accessible paper on the effects of
acute stress on cognition. One to ponder.

59. design for limited
working memory
When we do this, we improve GOV.UK for
everyone, not just those under great stress.

60. don’t make people rely on
the leaky bucket

61. 6. questions

62. Susan Weinschenk:
100 things every designer needs to know
about people
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Every-Designer-
Needs-People/dp/0321767535
people always ask me what they can read.
This is great:

63. Thank you :)
@finiteattention