A year later, I went home with a friend of mine whose family was much wealthier than mine. I walked into his living room and saw that he had a PlayStation and a Playstation 2 with just about every game that had ever come out for both. I couldn’t believe it!
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I asked every question I could, quizzing my friend on every detail of the many objects I didn’t have. “Wow how cool is that Spyro game? Don’t you love how that ended?”
“I never got to the end.
The new one came out and I just played that.”
“Woah, what new powers do you get in that one?” I shot back like I’d missed so much. “I don’t know, my brother stepped on the disc after a few days,” he responded. “And anyway, I’ve moved on the the PlayStation 2. Do they make Spyro for that?”
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Broke the disc!? Not using the Playstation!? Not knowing all the possible games you could buy!? Something inside me snapped. How could you treat something so valuable and amazing with such little care?
In my world, each game disc was so precious and more valuable than the last. Not only did I play each game to its full extent, but I also cleaned and cared for the discs because I knew I wouldn’t have the money to buy another.
I was jealous of him. But I’d come to learn he owned so many things that he couldn’t see a single game for everything it was. He could only see his library.
The more things you have to think about, the less you can care about each individually.
Just as Dunbar’s number proposes that there’s a limit to the amount of stable social relationships a person can have, there exists a similar limit on the amount of items one person can keep in consideration at one time. It is called Cognitive Load Theory.
As a designer, this affects me every day. How complicated the project is, the more meetings I have to take part in, the more projects on my plate at once, or even concerns I have in my personal life, the less I can think about in my designs.
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(Difficulty - Experience) × (Tasks + Extraneous Info)
=
Total Cognitive Load
I’ve written about how successful social products have initially been simple. Social products and human nature in general are complicated moving targets. By keeping concepts simple, you lower the difficulty and extraneous information for yourself and your users. This benefit allows for faster experimentation and fine-tuning on core ideas before a larger scope makes your cognitive load higher.
This of course applies to more than design, it applies to everything you do. If you ever want to do something well, removing all other cognitive tasks from your way allows you more memory to think about the task at hand.