Cognitive Psychology in UX ​​VOLUME 001 - Cognitive Barrier ​​ ​​ ​​There's a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. ​​Understand the following principles associated with these two areas: Cognitive barrier and Cognitive load, will bring your UX design to the next level. ​​I’ll be focusing on Cognitive Barrier in this post. ​​ ​​Cognitive Barrier ​​Barrier #1: Number of steps ​​Avoid unnecessary steps. Eliminate all redundancies that could be cluttering up working memory. However, it’s also important to strike the right balance between number, length, and difficulty of the steps. ​​ ​​ ​​Barrier #2: Length of steps ​​ Just like the number of steps, we can not adopt a blanket rule that shorter steps make better experiences when in some cases, getting a large portion of a task done upfront might provide a better experience overall. ​​ ​​ ​​Barrier #3: Difficulty of steps ​​The perceived difficulty of a step is subjective. ​​Generally speaking, easy steps are better; however, users do tend to develop a greater sense of loyalty toward experiences they’ve invested time into as opposed to experiences that are seen as too easy. ​​Remember, users will be more likely to complete difficult steps if they understand why the step needs to be so difficult. ​​ ​​Check the principles to reduce Cognitive Barriers next time when you’re making the design decisions :) ​​ ​​​😉​ ​​I hope enjoy this post! The next post I will share about some rules related to Cognitive load!