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Comment by arocks | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure if every product benefits from reducing Cognitive Overhead. Some of the areas where it would work are novel technologies (like Shazam or Wii) or mass market products.

Similarly, many niche products have power users who would be unhappy if the interface is too "dumbed down". The classic case of an IDE and UNIX text editors come to mind. An IDE is quite obvious to use, but many would not find it as efficient.

Cognitive overhead is a good guideline but we need to understand our target market first.

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What I get from the article, the author doesn't actually suggest less buttons or less control over the product - quite the opposite actually.

Also, music players are quite a bad example of something to disrupt - the iPod has pretty much shown 12 years ago what's the easiest possible interface that still does what 99% of users need. I think he's rather talking about cloud services that automate some of of your task where he proposes to actually add more steps / buttons / messages in the middle that help the user understand what's going on. To quote the article:

> Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully. (Bump puts the user in the middle of the flow quite physically. While there were other ways to build a scalable solution without the physical bump, it’s very effective for helping people internalize exactly what’s going on.)

How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Why would this seem as an inconvenience? If the product is already familiar, then it would be better to improve on the already familiar interface. When it is a completely new technology, you get an opportunity to make a fresh start. Similarly, many niche products have power users who would be unhappy if the interface is too "dumbed down". The classic case of an IDE and UNIX text editors come to mind. An IDE is quite obvious to use, but many would not find it as efficient.

Erm... This is the point of the article to some extent ;)

I think you're misunderstanding cognitive load/overhead. It's not about dumbing down. It's not about reducing the amount of information or interface. It's not about "less stuff".

Dealing with the human limits on what people can process often involves doing exactly the opposite. You add more information or use familiar interfaces so that folk don't have to remember/learn new things.

See http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Cognitive_load for some info.

>How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons?

Two words: iPod Shuffle. Or, if you want a slightly more complicated example, Pandora. Pandora literally started out with three buttons: "I like it", "I don't like it" and "Stop". Recently, they added a fourth, "Skip".

http://www.apple.com/support/ipodshuffle/reference/

The 3rd generation shuffle has no controls apart from a switch between loop, shuffle, and off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#Third_generation

No: if you double-click, triple-click, and (potentially in combination) hold that button you can do all of the normal things you can do with a media player. Go read the user manual. People who believe otherwise (and I've seen many) simply assume user interfaces don't exist if they aren't obvious.

Define "recently". I can't remember not having a skip button and I've been using pandora for a couple years at least.

I don't think this conflicts with the author's post at all.

The post is quite specific about targeting the mass market.

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