Cognitive ergonomics

Q: What's the difference between cognitive ergonomics and physical ergonomics?

Physical ergonomics focuses, to put it roughly, on the gestures and postures of humans in a work situation. Cognitive ergonomics focuses, in a complementary way, on everything that mobilises the individual's brain in carrying out their tasks.

Q: What's the difference between cognitive ergonomics and cognitive psychology?

You can sum it up by saying that what cognitive psychology describes about mental activities, cognitive ergonomics translates into the adaptation of systems to the capacities (and limitations) of users.

Q: How does cognitive ergonomics influence interface design?

Taking into account how the human brain works in a given situation makes it possible to anticipate certain problems or certain interferences during the design phase.

Q: What is cognitive load in UX?

Cognitive load, also called mental load, expresses the fact that each task to be carried out corresponds to a certain mental effort. Performance on a task depends on the user's capacity to provide the necessary effort in a given context.

Concept

Adapting the interface to how the human brain works

Cognitive ergonomics is an approach that focuses on users' mental processes such as perception, attention, decision-making, or working memory. Cognitive ergonomics aims to translate the knowledge of cognitive psychology into design principles. A move from science to design that is essential to our professions.

Along with usability, cognitive ergonomics is one of the foundations of the experience design approach.

What is cognitive ergonomics for?

understanding: how we perceive information on the screen, how we memorise a journey, how we make a decision faced with several options.
adapting the design: A form that's too long exceeds the capacity of working memory. A menu with 12 entries creates an attention load that slows down the decision (Hick's law). An interface that changes its organisation between two screens forces a relearning. Cognitive ergonomics names these problems and guides design choices by translating the theories and models of the cognitive sciences into the service of design.

Why rely on cognitive ergonomics?

reducing the cognitive load of an information-dense interface
designing forms, menus or workflows that minimise errors
justifying design choices with cognitively grounded principles

Perception

how information is captured visually. Applied to design, this draws on the size of texts, contrasts, visual hierarchy, the laws of Gestalt, and so on.

Attention

which is selective and limited. We cannot process all the information around us at once. Applied to design, this means guiding the gaze, limiting the number of elements presented on a page, and so on.

Working memory

where the human processes information. It has a limited capacity. For UX, this translates into successive steps, offering a common thread, and so on.

Reasoning and decision-making

how we make sense of the world around us. For design, this means: mental models, tree structures, navigation labels, and so on.

What's the difference between cognitive ergonomics and physical ergonomics?

What's the difference between cognitive ergonomics and cognitive psychology?

How does cognitive ergonomics influence interface design?

What is cognitive load in UX?

Related methods

Ergonomics

Ergonomics adapts tools to human capabilities. Born in factories, it now applies to interfaces through cognitive ergonomics and UX design.

Human-computer interaction

HCI (human-computer interaction) refers to the means of interaction between a human and a computer system.

Interaction design

Interaction design defines what a user can do and how a product responds to actions: flows, states, transitions, feedback.

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology studies how the brain processes information. Memory, attention, perception: the scientific foundations of UX design.

Gestalt theory

Gestalt theory explains how the eye groups the elements of an interface.

Mental model

A mental model is the representation a user builds of a system. Designing in line with those models reduces errors and friction in use.

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