Although it is estimated that people handle 40 million pieces of information each second, only 40 of those make it to your conscious brain. Therefore it is more efficient to give only the information people need at a specific moment. This is known as progressive disclosure. By giving little information at a time you can avoid overwhelming the audience.
Some types of mental processing are more challenging than others. There are three types of loads: cognitive, visual, and motor. Cognitive is when you have to think about something, visual is when you have to look at something, and motor is when you have to do something. These loads require different amounts of resources. Cognitive uses the most resources, then visual, and then motor uses the least. For example, calculating something in your head would use more resources than have to look at something on your screen, which would use more resources than having to move or click your mouse. This is important in design, because at times you have to make trade-offs. If you're designing a website and you have to make the user click several times more but in return they don't have to think as much, then that would be a good trade-off since motor uses a lot less resources than cognitive.
People's minds wander 30 percent of the time, and at times even 70 percent. Mind wandering can be a good thing, because it is the closest thing people have to multitasking. While they are doing one thing such as driving home from work, they can think about what to make for dinner once they get home. However, mind wandering can also be a bad thing since most of the time people are unaware their minds are wandering and they could lose important information.
According to research, when people are forced to defend an opinion they did not believe in they tend to change their beliefs to the new idea. When people are not forced then they tend to deny the new information instead of changing their beliefs to it. If people are uncertain they would dig in and argue harder.
Mental models are when people have an idea of how something will work from a prior experience. Conceptual models are the actual interfaces. The reason these two are important in design is because if the product's conceptual model is very different from a person's mental model then it would be a lot harder for the person to learn and use the product.
People learn best from examples. Instead of having lists of directions, it would be far more efficient if you included screenshots to explain what the text was describing. Examples can include screenshots, pictures and videos.
People naturally create categories. If you don't provide categories then people will just create their own. If there is a lot of information that are not categorized, then people will feel overwhelmed and try to organize the information themselves.
Creativity can be either emotionally or cognitively based while also being spontaneous or deliberate. Deliberate and cognitive creativity comes from sustained work in a discipline (i.e. Thomas Edison). Deliberate and emotional creativity is that a-ha moment when you get an idea all of a sudden. Spontaneous and cognitive creativity is when you are trying to figure something out but can't, and then all of a sudden while doing something else you think of an idea on how to solve that problem. Spontaneous and emotional creativity is the kind that great artists and musicians possess.
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