Web Interaction Design: High cognition and low awareness

This is the Love Apartment registration page, see this picture you will be happy, because of two buttons on the text; but we are not concerned with its emotional intimate statement, but its inclusion of high cognitive and low cognitive differential design.

High cognition and low cognition is a kind of dimension to the user, he has the same sex but also the difference between the novice user and the expert user according to the proficiency degree. The reason for the difference between high cognition and low cognition is more of the precipitation of culture and life habit, and the mutual transformation between them is also more difficult. In the design, it is necessary to consider the difference between the two users and design.

What is high cognition and low cognition?

Some people know most of the information in the chest, in the operation, more dependent on their own experience or habits, so they have very little information demand, sometimes they only need a little information to understand the state of the system. But sometimes they can also easily transition to follow their own habits in the experience, even if the error will repeat the operation.

Low-awareness is just the opposite, they are always careful in their operations, for fear of missing important information. They need to read a lot of information, or they will have difficulty determining whether to drive their operations. They are not "idiots" or "novices", they just pay more attention to details.

In this simple book, the author mentions:

Chinese users are mostly highly aware, because the Chinese people prefer freedom and extensive information flow, whether collecting information or handling goods delivery information, each other's search and opportunities are very frequent, belong to a high degree of information sharing. (Think about how people share movies, music)

In areas of low cognition such as Germany, information is quite fragmented and one-sided, and information is often not shared and usually filtered. (by research, they use search engines for very high frequencies) people in these areas are always accustomed to having a thorough understanding of the thing before they can trust it.

Aside from its user classification, we can consider trying to support this classification from the user's habits. Chinese users prefer to use SMS, QQ, and other short information to communicate, in contrast, German users prefer to use mail, telephone or interview to communicate. Can this be determined by this classification?

How do you provide information to both of these users?

While it is said that highly cognitive users need very little information, but their reading style is usually a leap, meaning that they can easily ignore the information you provide for him, they will not be very honest to follow your design to browse and practical, they like multitasking, to challenge the limits of the system you designed.

The problem is, designers can not predict these users for the information of the choice, to ensure the visibility of the system function, but also have to show all the information. This is really a contradiction.

For users with low awareness, their operations tend to be single-threaded, they read the information more carefully, and they are more patient, willing to learn, willing to try or dig up some advanced features.

Generally speaking, highly cognitive users of the operation will be biased wide and shallow, while the process of processing more, but not in-depth. Low-level cognitive users are narrow and deep, they can dig a process to the end, they will try more advanced features.

How to design?

1. For highly cognitive users, we should try to ensure that we do not interrupt their operation: In the feedback prompt, as concise as possible. As for the presentation of information, it should be presented in a comprehensive way, and the right of control and choice should be given to users.

   On the other hand, highly cognitive users lack the patience to dig, so try to make the function visible and one-step.

2. For the low level of cognitive users, designers are facing a greater challenge, although they are willing to learn, patience, which means that the system must be very strong and can be learned. At the same time can have more advanced features.
3. Note: both in terms of layout and visual orientation and metaphor are consistent for that design. A clear layout and architecture are necessary for any design.

Back to the original picture, it can be foreseen that full registration belongs to a low cognitive design, while fast registration is a highly cognitive user. Of course, we can also use the following two pictures for example comparison.

In two mailboxes, we click on another link on the navigation, two mailboxes are also provided "Loading" feedback. What's different is that when you click on another link, Gmail prompts loading in the floating layer, then renders the selected state of the left navigation and changes to the mailing list on the right. Aolmail first shows the selection of the navigation changes, and on the right side of the display loading, and then on the right side of the message list changes.

Perhaps only a short period of less than a second, can not find the difference, but we might as well make a hypothesis, this loading need time is 1 minutes. Can you feel the difference of design?

Highly cognitive design advocates multitasking, regardless of user behavior, does not directly interrupt the user's actions, allowing users to deal with these things (it may be a very serious problem). A bit like the CPU multi-core concept.

Low-awareness allows the user to focus on the current task as much as possible, helping him to better handle the current task, and for others, they don't care.

Perhaps you are not quite clear, then you can take a look at the following example.

The same form is filled with errors, and highly cognitive design does not recommend interrupting the user's actions, while low awareness emphasizes the interruption because he may be necessary and important.

Summarize

Of course, high cognition and low cognition are only a dimension of user's habit, which can be achieved in design. This article only makes some behavioral distinctions.

In the specific design, according to the function of the important level and its attributes, the use of different design options, flexible and more use. The design difference between high cognition and low cognition is only helpful to understand the starting point of design, and the guidance of design is not strong.