Neilson Norman Group
Paul suggested that we take a few minutes to check out the NNG article about chunking as we went over that concept briefly this week.
I am going to summarise what I read within this article, and leave some thoughts at the end.
What is chunking?
“Chunking is a concept that originates from the field of cognitive psychology. UX professionals can break their text and multimedia content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.”
According to the article, chunking is an organisational unit in memory. In UX, chunking is the act of breaking up content into smaller, more digestible units of information.
Some of the most commonly used methods of chunking text content are:
- Short paragraphs, with white space to separate them
- Short text lines of text (around 50–75 characters)
- Clear visual hierarchies with related items grouped together
- Distinct groupings in strings of letters or numbers such as passwords, license keys, credit-card or account numbers, phone numbers, and dates (for example, 14487324534 vs 1 (448) 732 4534).
This format allows for the content to be more easily scanned by the user, but you should also consider visual hierarchy alongside chunking in order to better allow the content to be scanned – and to make the main points more easily identifiable.
You can do this by including:
- Headings and subheadings that clearly contrast with the rest of the text (bolder, larger, etc.)
- Highlighted keywords (bold, italic, etc.)
- Bulleted or numbered lists
- A short summary paragraph for longer sections of text, such as articles.
As well as chunking text, you can chunk media content. Using background colours and horizontal rules can help with this.
The Mythical Number Seven
Human short-term memory is limited – so if you want users to retain information, make sure to pack information into meaningful chunks. As much as the “magical number seven” is useful for chunking and content layouts, be sure not to get hung up over the idea. Use it to your advantage, rather than letting it limit your design.
Final Thoughts
I found this article to be very interesting, and it’s taught me a lot that I never would’ve thought about much before. I always tend to focus on typographical hierarchy, and within that I do tend to chunk content as it makes the information a lot easier to digest. However, that doesn’t always make the important parts easy to pick out without the use of visual hierarchy and other features such as horizontal rules and differentiating background colours.
I will definitely be considering how well I am chunking my content going forward – especially with the use of multimedia chunking.