Kathy Sierra has returned to the world of blogging after a 6-year hiatus, and her first post on her new blog is stellar. It’s called “Your app makes me fat”, and it’s a fantastic piece about cognitive load — that is, how much brain power you have to put into completing a task.
She talks about how cognitive load not only impacts how our users interact with our applications, but also how it impacts the lives of our users. It’s a great reminder that our user experience doesn’t stand by itself. Instead, our user experience is just a part of the day for our users. We often talk about “death by a thousand paper cuts”, and I think that we forget that those paper cuts still hurt even when our users leave their desks. After all, who hasn’t gone home after a bad technology day at the office and been unable to focus on anything else because they were so drained by what they’d experienced that day?
It’s a long post, and there’s a lot in there to think about. Make sure that you’re ready to settle in, read the post, and think about her points. I know I’m going to have to re-read it at another time when I’ve got more energy to focus on it.
This reminds me of when the folks at Wizards of the Coast talked about the different approach they were bringing to designing the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering a few years ago. This article discusses their motivation and the kinds of changes they made, largely to reduce the complexity of the majority of cards they print to lower the barrier of entry for new players.
“yep”
I cannot find anything to argue with in that. Especially after a day of managing Google.
Open Source Software and the FSS makes people very fat.
/nuffsaid