Cognitive Economy

I mentioned earlier about the cost of distractions.

The brain is part of a living organism, and like anything else it needs fuel to work effectively.

In the case of the brain, it’s main fuel is glucose.

Much like a muscle, our brain has limits to how long it can perform at an optimal level.

Glucose is depleted as our brain works, and once its stores are depleted, it kinda goes to shit.

Think of this like working out. Lifting or running.

When you’re well-rested and well-fed, you have a lot of energy, and your muscles can work effectively.

But the more reps you do, or the longer or faster you run, the more your glycogen depletes, your muscles fatigue, and eventually you’ll have to stop and rest.

The brain works much the same. The more we perform ‘high energy’ mental tasks, the more we deplete glucose, and eventually, we start running low.

But what happens when we run out?

In the short term, it mightn’t be super noticeable. Maybe some brain fog, a little bit of mental fatigue.

But if we keep trying to push through while our energy stores are depleted, we’ll eventually see more and more extreme negative results.

Extreme burnout is one example of this, where we’ve essentially ran our brain into the ground through overuse and not enough rest.

We’re also a lot more impulsive when our energy stores are depleted, finding it more difficult to show restraint or resist temptations.

One of these high energy activities is switching attention.

Every time our attention is drawn to something, we’re using mental resources.

If we’re constantly being distracted, putting our attention on several, sometimes dozens of different things a day, we will burn through our energy reserves.

We can’t just be switched on every moment of every day.

Much like training your body, you can mitigate a lot of these potential negative side effects with a good rest.

Taking time away from high intensity mental processing, and just relaxing helps a bunch.

So does eating well, staying hydrated, and having a good night’s sleep.

If our muscles are fatigued it’s quite obvious that we shouldn’t push through and keep working

Saving mental energy

The need for the brain to conserve energy is one of the most explored aspects of cognitive science and neuroscience.

The attentional system stuff we’ve already covered shows aspects of that already, with our ability to drown out background noise.

Imagine how much more energy, let alone time, we’d consume if we had to deeply process everything in our environment to make sense of it.

But that’s not the only way our brains save energy.

Biases and Heuristics

If we want to make an ideal decision in any given situation, we’d need to process things deeply.

This likely means performing an analysis of some kind, likely weighing up multiple options against one another, and spending a good amount of time and energy making a decision.

But most of the time, we don’t need perfect decisions. We need good enough. That’s where biases and heuristics come into play.

These are basically our brain’s way of working in low-power mode. Think of them as mental shortcuts.

Instead of diving in to in-depth comparisons to find a perfect solution, our brains will take many of these mental shortcuts throughout any given day.

We’re basically sacrificing accuracy for speed in these situations, and we don’t always make the best decisions.

Let’s take a look at some of the biases and heuristics we’re most likely to encounter when designing.

Salience Bias

Salience bias is a pretty straightforward bias to understand.

We focus more on things that stand out. Wow. Science is fab.

This most often plays out with primary calls to action. A super common pattern in design is to present a primary call-to-action in a high contrast button, with secondary actions being much lower contrast.

We can help people towards the most useful action by simply making it super high contrast.

Consistency Heuristic

The consistency heuristic is essentially what helps shape conventions.

Essentially, we expect similar elements and patterns to behave similarly.

This can play out at a local level, that is, consistency within your app’s elements and patterns.

But more importantly, it happens at a global level, across every product and interface a person uses.

This is why, broadly speaking, buttons look the same regardless of what site or product you’re on.

They might be slightly different shapes, colours, shadows, but broadly speaking, they’re almost always ‘words inside a rectangle’.

It’s also why you should not be a sadist and always underline your hyperlinks.

Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic is a broad heuristic that shows we bias towards what quickly comes to mind.

The classic example of this is hearing about a plane crash on the news leading to you overestimating the risk of flying.

In design, availability often plays out through recognition vs recall, and can be integral to creating intuitive environments.

If we’re able to recognise an element based on something we already know, something available to us, then we don’t have to recall that element’s purpose or function.

Icons are often great examples of this.

If we recognise an icon from the real world, or even other apps, we can often quickly fathom what it’s purpose might be.

A good example of this is the scissors icon in Da Vinci Resolve. Most people know that scissors are for cutting, and we can ‘cut’ clips in the video editor using this icon.

We don’t have to recall anything, or learn the purpose of some abstract shape, we’re able to recognise the icon and quickly ‘guess’ what its purpose might be.

There are hundreds more heuristics and biases that help us understand how the brain makes these mental shortcuts.

If you want to learn more, check out the resources in this lesson for links to a whole bunch of them.

Deceptive patterns

Many of these heuristics are exploited by technology, leading to what we now call deceptive patterns.

Deceptive patterns use our brain’s preference for heuristics and faster processing against us, tricking us into performing certain actions or engaging with certain elements of an interface.

For example, if we use salience bias to make the most profitable action the primary, not necessarily the most useful, we’re being deceptive.

If our primary actions on a site or app are all big green buttons, we could use consistency bias against people.

Like if we were to present adverts as big green buttons, to deceive people into clicking an advert instead of their intended action.

Like this site. This is a fun game. It’s called spot the fucking download button.

The point of heuristics though is to understand them, not to try to implement them for our own gain.

You can absolutely design positive experiences with heuristics in mind, but there’s a flip-side to all of this:

If we make too many assumptions about what people want or need to do in a given moment, we can essentially soft-lock people out of autonomous decisions.

If we make primary actions super high contrast, and secondary actions super low contrast, that might work great for everyone who needs the primary action.

But the people who don’t could find themselves lost, or needing to dig even further to find what they need.

Autonomy is important, and we can just as easily create frustrating experiences by trying to be too helpful when designing around heuristics.

The Cognitive Miser Theory

The research into biases, heuristics and cognitive economy culminates in the Cognitive Miser Theory.

This theory was proposed by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, and expands on the work done by the likes of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

The cognitive miser theory essentially suggests that we’re all cheap shits at heart, and if we can save mental resources, we will.

We essentially have two forms of processing the world around us.

Top-down processing is where we take the time to process things around us, and apply critical thinking and more sophisticated thought processes.

Bottom-up thinking is where we react instinctively and intuitively. Relying on these mental shortcuts.

Top-down is high effort, bottom-up is lower effort.

The cognitive miser theory suggests that, in situations where it’s safe to do so, we default to this instinctive, bottom-up thinking.

A good example of this is choosing food at a restaurant.

If you were to approach this fully top-down, you’re going to be doing a full cost-benefit analysis of the entire menu.

You might look at each menu item to find what best fits your needs.

How many calories does it have? Does it have enough protein? Enough fiber? Do you prefer the taste to other foods? Does it cost more per-calorie than other items? Does it go well with the drink you’ve ordered? Will it fill you up for long enough, but not for too long?

You might even have to ask for a pen and paper to work everything out and oh look now everyone hates you.

It’s much more likely that you’ve picked something that you like the sound of, and engaged in what is known as satisficing.

Satisficing

Satisficing is a fabulous little portmanteau of Satisfying and Sufficing.

Coined by Herbert Simon, it’s essentially the act of choosing something that’s good enough, and available enough.

We don’t really care too much about ideal.

Now the bar for good enough will vary from person to person.

If you’re vegan, you’re not going to suddenly decide to try the lamb chops.

If you’re on a high protein diet, you’re not going to go for a plate full of carbs. Even though a plate full of carbs is the best thing in the world.

But regardless of your needs, if it’s safe to do so, we will almost always prefer good enough and quickly available to perfect.

All of this makes it really dangerous to just assume that people will think deeply and rationally about the interfaces we put in front of them.

No one is going to sit down and perform a full cost-benefit analysis of every item on a screen

This is why simplification is such a huge part of design.

By implementing good information architecture, screen density, and making good use of conventions and consistency, we can streamline people’s journey through the environments we create.

But we can also limit things too much, and remove possibility and autonomy from those environments. As always, the key here is balance.

If we want people to get to ‘good enough’, then we need to give them ‘just enough’.

We’re very close to putting all of this together into something much more practical, so don’t worry if that’s been a lot of theory to take in.

Hopefully you’ve got a good understanding of how important cognitive economy is.

And maybe you’ve already got some good ideas for how you can streamline your interfaces.

Before we get stuck in though, there’s one more area we need to explore: and that’s categories.