cognitive load – Dee VUI

Why it’s interesting

When you click that button, it asks you if your personal information has been exposed. If you choose the option Not Sure, rather suddenly the bot sends a series of messages in rapid succession, 7 in all, ending with asking if it’s answered your question.

FTC Chatbot asking "Did I answer Your Question?" with Yes and No buttons to reply

The thing is, even for a very fast reader, it would be physically impossible to have read the responses given, not to mention the 9 links to outside sites it recommends visiting in the text. The experience is much like watching a vending machine dispensing a candy bar.

Why we care

The actual experience of identity theft is anxiety-inducing for many people, not least of which is the exposure to a great deal of information that is of entirely no interest or value unless you are taking it in under duress.

It stands to reason that if anything an experience that intends to simplify the experience of accessing information about what to do about the theft of one’s identify ought to be gentle as well.

Do you read new periodicals as they come in, and when you don’t have time before a new one comes in, put them in a pile somewhere? Me too.

Occasionally I find myself reading something from years ago and not realizing it at all, as happened yesterday, when I got to the end of the April 2019 issue of Harper’s that was sitting on my kitchen table. That’s where this comes from, the very last line of that month’s Findings column:

People have better working memory if, in their native language, meanings remain, until the end of the sentence, unclear.

(For those unfamilar, Findings reduces complex papers and research to a single line, context free, for a bewildering comic effect.)

Why it’s interesting

When we shared this sentence with a colleague who’s a VUI designer, she balked. “Just reading it was driving me mad,” she said.

Why it matters

Just the other day, talking with a colleague, we discussed the state of so-called “multimodal” design for voice, and our cognitive load threshold. In terms of the pandemic, it made it easy to argue that critical elements in the design that might seem obvious can be missed entirely.

We had experienced this personally, not with voice experiences on devices with screens, but in everyday life. Losing track of time and not joining a meeting back-to-back with the current one. No longer seeing reminders for any app. Emailing not the next day, but the next week.

If you miss something entirely and don’t know it, there’s no recovery.

Personally, our style in both writing and cogitating is digressive, and we’re more than comfortable with collapsing many threads into one, like a braid, or a perhaps a bird’s nest. Perhaps it’s time to consider that might require more resources than can be easily spared right now.

Links

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/letters-april-2019/

Let’s have a conversation

Let us know what you think! Write us at:

sixtyseconds@deevui.com