UX Design and usability design: cognitive fluency and design strategies

Article Description: How cognitive fluency affects decision making.

Why do the upscale restaurants print the menu in a graceful but very hard to read font?

Why is it difficult to pronounce the names of those horror tours in theme parks?

What do people think about the risk of food additives in the things they buy every day?

How does this relate to UX design and usability?

Each day your users are making decisions about the products and services you provide, and decisions depend on how you provide the products and services. In this article, I'll talk about why the seemingly insignificant display of information has an astonishing impact on people's perceptions and behavior.

Cognitive fluency

In previous articles, I have talked about how sensitive people are to decisions. Although it is at the subconscious level, people are still affected by the difficulty of knowing things. There is no doubt that people are more willing to do what they feel is easier than to feel difficult. This sense of ease or difficulty is called cognitive fluency. Cognitive fluency refers to the subjective feeling of difficulty in accomplishing a task of consciousness. It refers not to the process of consciousness itself, but to the feeling associated with it.

Fluency is important because it has a great impact on how we perceive things, and it works in two ways: subtlety and universality. Fluency leads us to think in a situation where we know nothing, and affects the balance of information. Its full strength comes from the fact that we often mistake the feeling of ease or difficulty of thinking about something to itself.

Sense of familiarity

To understand how fluency works, let's take a look at some of the research in this field. Some early studies were done in the 1960s, when Robert Zajonc a series of experiments to find that the more people were exposed to certain words, patterns or facial images, the more they liked them. Zajonc's findings reveal what we now know about the pure exposure effect-finding that people's exposure to specific stimuli has a positive effect on whether they prefer the stimulus.

This is an interesting finding, because after a few recent studies, it reveals that familiarity has a big impact on people's perception of whether things are attractive or not. In another series of studies, the researchers found that when they asked people to choose the most attractive face in a group of faces, people tended to choose features that compounded all the other faces. Psychologists call this the average beauty effect. The study revealed that familiarity is a powerful motivator for human behavior. Generally speaking, people like familiar things, because those different things than the new, do not need to move the brain of these things. Familiarity is attractive because the familiar things only need to mobilize limited cognitive resources and feel simple.

Sense of familiarity/fluency link

Because familiarity makes the brain easier to handle, it feels fluent. So people often associate fluency with a sense of familiarity. That is, when a stimulus is found to be easy to handle, people often feel that it is familiar. So fluency becomes a common shortcut, and people use it to quickly determine whether a particular stimulus is something they've encountered before. In many cases, this shortcut path behaves well. We don't have to spend a lot of time and brains looking up a new thing, if we've already met something like that before.

Sometimes, however, the brain's quick path may go astray-because there are many things that affect the sense of fluency. Let's take a look at some of the research that reveals some subtle aspects of the information presentation that affects cognitive processes.

In one study, the researchers showed the respondents the names of some virtual food additives and asked them to determine the harmful extent of these additives. People tend to think that additives that are difficult to pronounce are more harmful than additives that are easily pronounced by name. On the subconscious level, people equate the difficulty of pronunciation with the supposition of familiarity. When it is easy to pronounce, it is thought that it may have been encountered before, and the information has been processed in the brain. Because they look familiar, they think it's safe.

Conversely, the hard to pronounce additive is also the same. The name is more difficult to pronounce, perhaps because it is foreign, and therefore needs to be thought more carefully. These findings suggest that even the mere articulation (one aspect of cognitive fluency) can affect the perception of the task itself.

Font and cognitive fluency

Pronunciation is only one of many aspects of cognitive fluency. In another study, the researchers asked respondents to read a note on how to implement a workout schedule. As shown in Figure 1, they display these descriptions in two fonts-one that is easy to read and another that is hard to read.

When they asked respondents to estimate how long it would take to do such exercises, people thought it would take about twice times more time to do the type of exercise that was difficult to read. In the first example, it was thought that it would take 8 minutes to do this exercise, and in the second case, they thought it would take 15 minutes. With more readable fonts, they think the exercise schedule will be more natural and therefore more willing to integrate it into everyday life.

Figure 12 Exercise descriptions for different fonts

In this study, people actually pass on the difficult perception of reading this description to the task itself. This demonstrates the strength of fluency and how it affects people's judgment and motivation to accept new behaviors. If you want people to feel that a new act or new thing is easy, the important thing to consider is how the information is displayed in print.

In another study, the researchers asked people to choose one out of two phones. One of the phone's messages is displayed in a very readable font, and the other is displayed in a hard read font. The researchers found that font styles influenced people's willingness to make decisions. For readable fonts, only 17% of the participants deferred the decision, while 41% of the hard-read fonts were postponed. At the subconscious level, the ease with which people read information is one of the clues to whether the decision itself is difficult.

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