[IxDA Discuss] Cognitive load question

[Jeff Howard]

Steve Krug argues that this isn't what happens when people see a new page.
He has a good diagram in Don't Make Me Think (pg 21) that shows his
assertion of how people dart around a web page. I've never used
eye-tracking software, but I do know that there's too much information in
our daily lives to make optimal decisions. Instead, we satisfice (from
Herbert Simon) by picking the first halfway decent option we come across
that could meet our goal.

Even if we do spend more time, we can often use the idea of chunking (also
from Simon) to group similar elements, so as to be able to more quickly
process our options. For instance, navigation bar, title bar,
advertisement bar etc... Each of those things might have dozens of
discrete bits of information, but we don't need to process them because we
recognize the overall "chunk" as something that doesn't apply to our task.

> When we view a Web page for the first time, we have to process
> every piece of information on it to decide what's relevant to what
> we are trying to accomplish. When a page is cluttered up with all
> sorts of unnecessary items, short-term memory is hit hard.
> There's a lot to see and learn and process.