The Cognitive Friction Research In Designing Website And Methods To Explore

We always encounter some difficulties which hinder us to achieve a purpose in the physical world. Similarly, in network world, we also encounter a variety of resistance preventing us to find the target information. Based on the situation, this article will study the resistance in the process of visiting websites, and refer "cognitive friction" to define this resistance.The concept of "Cognitive Friction" is firstly put forward by Alan cooper in the book of 《The Inmates are Running the Asylum:Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity》, and his definition is:The resistance encountered when human intellectual meet with the problem that changes as the rules of complex system changes. Migrate this concept to website design to describe the similar situation that when users visit a website, they encountered cognitive or operational uncertainties, such as information level is not clear. Navigation or feedback is vague, which generate errors or failures in the operation, including the resulting emotional experience.Beginning of the paper, it describes the research background and current research situation of cognitive friction, then clarify the research purposes and innovations of this paper. Secondly, it elaborates the concept of cognitive friction on websites, and points out that cognitive friction causes the loss of a large number of user resources, highlighting the importance and necessity of overcoming cognitive friction. Then it puts forward the quantitative indicators of cognitive friction--The user traffic, conversion rate and returning rate. Then, this article focuses on the reasons for cognitive friction on websites. The changing role of labors and tools as the development of social division is the social cause of cognitive friction. Cognitive friction is mainly generated in design phase. Specifically, the unclear awareness of the target users as well as their needs, and inappropriate design expression are the two main reasons for cognitive friction. Finally, according to the causes of cognitive friction, it put forwards the corresponding solutions. The method of cognizing users’ demand——the user needs decomposition method, and a series of specific operational in design express——such as for scanning to design, level type design, for navigation to design and personalized design method, and combined with the author’s work project, it uses the actual design case to demonstrate the effectiveness of the above-mentioned methods overcoming friction cognitive on websites.