Every interface you design is used by a person with a limited and predictable set of cognitive abilities. We perceive only part of what is in front of us, we attend to even less, and we can hold only a handful of items in mind at once before they decay or get overwritten. Theories of human information processing — perception, attention, working memory, long-term memory, and the time course of feedback — give us a vocabulary for explaining why some interfaces feel effortless and others feel exhausting.
In this course, these ideas are the justification behind many design rules you will otherwise have to memorize. Recognition over recall, chunking, consistent placement, visible system status, and short feedback latencies are not style preferences; they are responses to documented limits in human cognition. Understanding the underlying mechanism lets you reason about novel design situations instead of guessing.
The videos below come from the Nielsen Norman Group, a long-established usability research and consulting firm. As you watch, note two things: first, the specific claim about human capability being made (how much, for how long, under what conditions), and second, the concrete interface implication drawn from it. Also notice how the third video shifts from describing cognition to using a cognitive model as an evaluation tool — that bridge from theory to method is exactly what we are after.
A short explainer on short-term memory: how little information people can hold at one time and how quickly it fades when attention shifts. The video connects these limits to common interface decisions, such as not forcing users to carry information from one screen or step to the next. Expect practical examples of designs that respect — or violate — these constraints.
It directly addresses the memory subtopic with concrete capacity and duration claims, and the Nielsen Norman Group is a credible source for research-grounded usability guidance stated in plain language.
This video distinguishes working memory — the limited mental workspace used while performing a task — from external memory, meaning information the interface itself displays or stores on the user's behalf. It argues that interfaces should offload remembering onto the screen rather than onto the user. Likely examples include keeping instructions, entered values, or prior selections visible during multi-step tasks.
It extends the memory subtopic beyond raw capacity into a design strategy, which is the key move for this course: treating the interface as an extension of the user's cognitive system.
An introduction to the cognitive walkthrough, a task-based usability inspection method in which evaluators step through a task as a first-time user would and ask whether the user would know what to do and whether they would recognize that their action was correct. The video explains the purpose of the technique, its focus on learnability, and how it differs from other evaluation approaches. Expect a walkthrough of the questions evaluators ask at each step.
It shows cognition applied as an analytical lens — the method is built directly on assumptions about perception, attention, and feedback — and it connects this topic to the evaluation methods covered later in the module.
The first two videos support MO1 by distinguishing short-term and working memory, naming their practical capacity limits, and translating those limits into interface constraints such as minimizing recall and externalizing information on screen. The cognitive walkthrough video supports MO2, since the method's core questions surface exactly where a user's expectation diverges from what the system actually does, and it supports MO4 by illustrating a structured, expert-driven inspection technique you can later compare against empirical user testing. Together they supply the cognitive rationale you will draw on when decomposing tasks (MO3) and when justifying the layout, labeling, and feedback choices in your prototype (MO5).
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.