Forgettable web design

According to Jakob Nielsen...

‘The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.’

So what does he mean?

Basically the gist of his recent article “Short-Term Memory and Web Usability” is that at heart we are basic hunter gathers, designed to perform the simple task of hunting and killing our food and not performing relatively complex tasks such as navigating conceptual hyperspace. Our brains have not changed significantly since we were hunting woolly mammoths about 10,000 years ago!

So what does that mean for web design?

It means that we need to create simple intuitive navigations and page flows that are easy for us poor humans to use.

As humans we can remember 7 things for 20 seconds, before we start to forget them, so keep the site structure and contents of the pages simple.

Where there is a lot of data, develop logical and intuitive hierarchical structures that make sense to your users.

Keep pages size as small as possible to ensure they load quickly, before we forget what we are doing, or get distracted by other tasks such as checking emails.