Unit 5: How people focus their attention

A quote my speech and debate teacher in high school was fond of saying was " The brain can only learn what the ass can endure." Meaning, you can only reach someone as long as they are comfortable and the information you are giving them is interesting. For the purposes of speech and debate we were told that every speech we gave needed to be under the 10 minute mark or we were gonna lose our audience. Dr. Weinschenk upped that anti a bit saying that at most you get 7 minutes to get your message across before your audience loses interest.

This is key when you sit down to design something that may go passed the 10 minute mark. In that instance the secret is to gather similar information together and parse it out in sections. Between the sections give the brain places to relax. Through imagery, stories whatever.

Along with that comes the realization that the ability to multi-task is a complete falicy.

Unit 4

This unit breaks down how we think and process information. These mental loads include cognitive, visual and motor. Anything we can do to reduce or ease the burden of these loads will help our user comprehend our work much easier. Therefor as designers we should always be looking to reduce mental loads by supplementing the visual and motor loads. 

The other point is something that has stuck with me since I was a kid but was never better demonstrated then throughout the Kevin Smith movie "Dogma." What I'm referring to is the difference between beliefs and ideas, and how steadfast people are in their beliefs. Dr. Weinschenk hits on this as well in this unit. While trying to change someone's beliefs can lead to confrontation, if you can find a way to condition your message to go along with elements of their beliefs you may be able to sway their current way of thinking. 

The last thing I wanted to call out was the understanding of the mental model. The basic notion is that every user comes into an experience with certain expectations and understanding based on their past experiences how your design should work. They know where to look for the on button, they understand the function of the enter key, a headline is at the top of the page etc. Designing with this in mind will allow for a lot easier load on your users as it is part of what their are pre conditioned to understand and accept.

Unit 3 How we Remember

Unit 3 was a breakdown of how memory works. The chapter covered various types of memory and how we make use of both our short and long-term memories. The biggest thing I took away from the chapter was the notion that, no matter how hard we try, we will always only remember a small portion of what we try ti input into our long term memory. That's where being a good designer is crucial, since it is our job to manipulate the process of memory in order to make sure a consumer takes away what we need them to from out work.