2010-03-20
Cognitive Efficiency
This is fascinating, and I don't care what you say.
I find it fascinating to consider that there may actually be science behind art. That a good design could possibly be formulaic, or at least that we could find consistency in designs that can be refined to new principles and theories in design.
In case you've not been keeping up, the entry I linked is about a theory that rounded corners are literally more efficient for our brains to process than those with square corners. And if you think about it, the rounded rectangle is definitely more friendly. Could this actually be because we find it easier to think about?
Validity of the theory notwithstanding, we should consider the implications of these. The above linked post focuses on the rounded rectangle but asks us other questions.
- Are garish colour schemes literally harder to see?
- Are some fonts easier to read than others in various contexts?
- Is animated movement less cognitive processing than instantaneous movement? How about jerky animation vs smooth vs no animation at all?
Colour
Designers already know that garish colour schemes are bad, but do they know why? We don't like to see clashing colours, although Windows XP did a fair job of forcing an orange-and-blue colour scheme upon us. If indeed the reason we don't like the garish colour schemes is that it is physically more difficult to process, can we turn this to our advantage?
Colour is one aspect many designers tend to forget to think about. Sure, they will create a coherent colour scheme, or at least choose their colours on purpose, but will they consider the viewers of the colours? Will their colour scheme fall apart if someone is colourblind? What about if the viewer is a tetrachromat?
Understanding how much processing power our brains use to comprehend a colour scheme could be an important step towards understanding why some schemes work and others don't.
Fonts
Typefacing is already a practiced science. There are already theories in place. For example, it is fairly well established that serif fonts work in print and sans-serif works on screen. The serif creates a baseline on which the letters "sit" and for the eye to follow, but at the resolution our screens can display, the serifs look jagged and awkward.
Bold fonts stand out from narrow fonts and italic fonts have more of an emphasis but at the same level of importance as the standard font that surrounds it. Bold fonts are generally rounder and have thicker lines, whereas italics maintain the stroke width of the font but make them more angular.
Perhaps this theory about rounded shapes applies to fonts? The join between a serif and the letter it adorns is a curved line, intended to reduce the impact of the corner. Perhaps this curve is akin to the corners of our rectangles, making it easier for our brains to process the shape.
Perhaps the way this curve is rendered on our current screens is not accurate enough to create the effect of a curve in the first place, meaning that the shape of the letter is harder for us to process. At the same time, fonts without serifs have clear curves and the ends of the lines are well-defined. Perhaps, therefore, the ease with which we can read a block of text on its native medium in its particular font is related to the cognitive efficiency of the shapes as they are rendered on the page, be it virtual or physical.
Animation
Animation is not necessarily related to the shapes of the things we're looking at, but could the same theory be applied? Let's consider.
Imagine software whose functionality causes it to rearrange the way it is displaying data. Perhaps a grid layout of ordered data, and new data is introduced. If the new piece of data is just inserted in the middle of the grid, necessarily all the pieces of data following it must be shunted along. Some of them will stay on their current line, and some of them will move to the next line.
If this happens all at once and instantaneously, you are likely to become disoriented. If you were to suddenly be transported 900 miles away without even some inertial effects you are likely to be similarly disoriented, albeit in quite an exaggerated fashion.
But, like moving 900 miles, if it happens gradually at an expected speed, you can keep track of progress. You could see where the data item was inserted, and hence all the movements of the other items, just with a few simple frames of animation.
Well this is a clear violation of your brain's internal efficiency. If you move suddenly, you will be disoriented because you will not have been expecting it, but even if you were, you would still have to take a moment to get your bearings. Your brain holds a sort of cache of what is around it and if you move slowly enough it can keep up with the changes, but if it all changes at once you have to replace the whole cache with the new data. And there is our broken efficiency. Just as how when rendering graphics you only update the "dirty" areas of the screen because it is more efficient than redrawing the entire screen, so your brain will find it easier to track gradual changes than come to terms with complete changes.
And what of jerky animation versus smooth? Well. Have you ever tried to watch a video on a computer that cannot keep up with the framerate? Have you ever played a game and the computer cannot render it fast enough? Frame dropping never happens in the real world and so it is a fairly recent phenomenon, but can we express the frustration of low-frame animation in terms of cognitive efficiency?
Well, it only takes 1 frame per second to give the illusion of movement, but what if the movement takes less than a second to complete? That's 1 frame. So if we had poor rendering ability, the scenario above would not have been helped by animation, because no frames of the animation would have been played out. This means that we are back to square one, and like all good mathematicians, we sit back and claim that this problem has already been solved. Jerky animation is just a sequence of disorienting movements, and a series of disorienting things is much more frustrating than a single disorienting thing.
Practicality
Perhaps we can turn this concept of visual cognitive processing efficiency to our advantage. If something is easy to use, perhaps it should have more rounded than edged shapes; a coherent and presumably low-variation colour scheme; animations instead of disjointed movement; and suitable fonts.
Contrarywise and adversely as it were, if something is intended to be hard, confusing or just irritating we can focus on the opposite. Sharp edges, mismatching colours and disjointed animations can, in theory, put the user off, make it hard to concentrate and perhaps make a hard puzzle that much harder.