In Chapter 3, our book discussed many important cognitive processes that happen during a human’s every day life. Rogers gave examples of and listed many examples of cognitive processes including attention, perception, recognition, memory, learning, reading, speaking, listening, problem-solving, planning, reasoning, and decision making. I think that all of these processes are important to take into consideration in regard to creating lasting, engaging experiences with our users when we design systems, programs, or websites for them to use. In my opinion, however, I believe attention is the most important for us to take into consideration in regard to HCI. If I understand correctly, Rogers infers that no matter which of the above cognitive processes are occurring, one has to be attending to (paying attention to) or other processes cannot occur. Rogers also went on to explain and give examples of how there are varying levels of the amount of attention one may devote to any given thing and how (while she gave no empirical evidence or examples to support it) the amount of information retained (in regard to the memory cognitive process) depends on the level of attention that is devoted to the thing.
With all of this in mind, Rogers explained that the amount of information processed by our brains is dependent on our goals and how the information is presented. (Basically what she means is higher levels of attention are given depending on what information we want to process and how logically organized and easy to understand that information is.) Rogers has given us good examples of how we can organize information logically in order to make information easier to understand thus increasing the amount of attention given to such information. (The example of this is on page 96, figure 3.2.) The thing I am curious about, however, is how might we go about engaging users goals in order to engage the user’s attention? Every user presumably has different goals, and many times, because users chose to use what we created have similar goals to what we created’s purpose is. However, time has shown that even if the purpose of what we create is similar to what our user’s goals are, users’ goals do not always completely coincide with the goals we have in mind when we make our systems, programs, or websites. There is usually at least one more thing a user would have liked added to a program, and many users have different preferences. How might we go about and what ways have been used for finding out what goals users have so that we may give users a better eXPerience?
Zachary Schall-Zimmerman
