This week’s lecture focused on looking at research techniques, as well as inspiration for our healthcare related products.
We started with a reminder to remain open-minded by looking at the idea of Shoshin from Zen Buddhism. Shoshin in basic terms means “beginner’s mind” and reflects the idea of looking at something as if it is the first-time you have ever come across it, with no preconceptions allowing you to base all your thoughts off what you find at this moment. It is a very powerful idea especially as a designer, where we can be faced with a problem we already have views upon and ideas of how to fix.
We also looked at bias and how it can affect our research and overall designs, as well as two UX laws/techniques Postel’s Law and Chunking. It is the chunking technique that I will dedicate this week’s blog to.
Chunking comes from studies in cognitive psychology in particular the working memory of people. A description of chunking in cognitive psychology terms is:
“Chunking is the recoding of smaller units of information into larger, familiar units. Chunking is often assumed to help bypassing the limited capacity of working memory.”
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29698045/ (Last Accessed 12/02/23)
Chunking information therefore provides us with a way of handling more information than we otherwise could and improves our abilities to retain information while completing tasks. From a UX perspective this is key as we are often delivering information to users while they are completing tasks using our designs. Therefore, understanding and using the chunking technique is a key skill to obtain and use in UX design.
From the UX perspective chunking is defined as:
“In the field of user-experience design, ‘chunking’ usually refers to breaking up content into small, distinct units of information (or ‘chunks’), as opposed to presenting an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items.”
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking/ (Last Accessed 12/20/23)
So as designers, the aim is to group related content together to assist our users to understand and remember that content. We have several ways that we can do this within a design.
The key is that the information in each chunk is related, and that the chunks are split up in a logical way. For example, in a linear process each individual step should be a separate chunk from start to finish. Even if some steps are very simple and short to combine two distinct steps could confuse users and lose the power of the chunking technique.
Another interesting concept I found was from cognitive psychologist George Miller, who wrote the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” In which he shows his research that human beings can hold around seven pieces of distinct information in their working memory at one time. Although further research has placed this number anywhere between three and six. The fascinating piece of Miller’s research was the way that people could only remember up to seven distinct letters but if these letters were arranged into four-letter words they could remember twenty-eight letters, showing the power of chunking in increasing the abilities of the human working memory.
While some designers have got caught up with the power of the magical number seven and used it to restrict their designs, the true takeaway is that if we want to help our users when using our designs, we should pack our information into small, meaningful chunks. We don’t want to ask our users to hold more than a few simple pieces of information in their memory at any one time.
Again, we can use design to help us here, we can provide easy ways for our users to see previous information or even better make the process clear and so well-explained that retention of information is not required.