Do you want confusion or attention from visitors to your website?
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If you barrage your audience with information, they are less likely to perceive, understand and remember the key points. As we will discuss, complex or unusual navigation, unstructured information, and other site distractions do not help your visitors. In fact they may result in a slowdown of mental processing and a loss of focus that can be described as 'cognitive overload'.
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So what is cognitive overload?
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Cognitive overload is a form of brain inefficiency that results when excessive demands are made on a person's cognitive processes, in particular memory, from interruptions, multi-tasking and other forms of information overload. Working memory, or short-term memory is a powerful processing environment, however studies suggest that it is limited in its storage capacity to around seven separate 'chunks' of information.
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How does cognitive overload relate to web publishing?
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Consuming web content is a 'cognitively heavy' activity, especially for inexperienced visitors and others coping with modern-day distractions (office environment, emails, other open pages, and so on). Usually the audience is 'processing' the general site feel (branding), understanding the structure of the site (navigation), all in addition to the key messages (page content). The more challenging you make these items, the more likely you are to trigger 'cognitive overload' in your audience – a state of 'gridlock' where rather than trying to deal with the confusion, your site visitors are most likely to leave your website.
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Addressing the risk of cognitive overload ...
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Some things to consider as a web publisher to reduce the risk of cognitive overload and increase the likelihood of your principle message(s) getting through to your audience ...
1) Don't make people think about how your website works, stick with generally accepted web practice.
2) Have your audience only analyze your brand once – keep it consistent across your site.
3) Be aware of the hot spots on your web page and use them to make your key points.
4) Match your content to audience expectations and their cognition will remain focused on the content.
5) Keep web content brief and to the point (a theme we will cover repeatedly on this site).
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Now lets take a look at avoiding confusion and overload by utilizing accepted web practice.
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