Why chunk information

Occurrences of chunking as a memory device can be seen in the way information is grouped in our daily life. Chunking can also work for processes. For example, painting a room may be divided into three groups;.

Types of thinking. Critical thinking. In the former case, each unrelated letter counts as a chunk, whereas in the latter case, each word is a chunk. As a consequence, confused designers will sometimes misuse this finding to justify unnecessary design limitations. For example, a designer may refuse to add more than seven options in a global navigation bar for fear of violating the magical number seven.

So there are no usability gains to be made by limiting the number of menu items to seven. Menus can still be easy to use with more than seven choices, as long as the options are structured in a meaningful way.

Whatever the average capacity of short-term memory may be, the specific capacity for individual humans will vary it's one of the many causes for the huge variability in user performance. No, it's not that programming computers makes your brain grow until it strains against your skull.

Rather, it's only people born with high-capacity brains who are attracted to a career that requires them to retain a lot of items in memory.

Chunking is critical for presenting content that users can comprehend and remember easily. Use chunking for text and multimedia content alike to help users understand underlying relationships and information hierarchy. Learn more about the relationship between cognition and UX design in our full-day course The Human Mind and Usability. George A. Miller, Psychological Review 63 2 : 81— She conducts research and leads training seminars to help digital product teams expand and improve their UX practice.

The voice in your head is called subvocalization. It is present as a consequence of the way most people were first taught to read, but it has absolutely nothing to do with understanding or comprehension. There are even Braille teachers who do not expect speed and accuracy of their blind students. As a result, the students learn Braille as a chore and a drudgery. Experienced Braille readers, however, read Braille at speeds comparable to print readers to words a minute.

Imagine reading 3. Imagine the time saved and the amount of knowledge you could accumulate at this reading speed. Speed reading is a skill that lets you drastically increase your words-per-minute rate and improve or maintain your comprehension level, something that will help you manage your work and your time. An average reader goes through a word text passage in one minute. A person who reads slowly may also have problems with reading comprehension, which is the ability to understand and remember the material read.

A slow reader generally reads words a minute or less. A fast reader can usually read words per minute. This all happens fast: a skilled reader can read about to words per minute. Speeding up this process while retaining accuracy is almost impossible, she said. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. The next time you are trying to remember items from a list, start by forming them into groups. If you are working with a list of vocabulary words, for example, you might create small groups of words that are similar or related to one another.

A shopping list might be broken down into smaller grouping based on whether the items on the list are vegetables, fruits, dairy, or grains. Chunking can be used as an everyday memory enhancer, but researchers have also found that you can improve your ability to effectively chunk information. Bor relates the story of one participant in a memory experiment who challenged himself to improve the number of items he could remember.

While he was initially able to remember seven items, he increased this to 80 units of information over the course of 20 months. He devoted an hour a day, approximately four days a week to this task. While you might not be able to devote such intense concentration to improving your memory , there are things that you can do to make the most of your brain's natural tendency to seek patterns and group information. As you become better at remembering larger chunks of information, challenge yourself to remember even more.

As you are creating groupings, look for ways to relate units to each other in meaningful ways. What do the items share in common? You might group items together because they are each spelled with four letters, because they start with the same letter, or because they share a similar purpose.

Linking groups of items to things from your memory can also help make them more memorable. You might be more likely to remember that you need eggs, baking soda, and chocolate chips if you associate the items with the delicious cookies that your mother used to make. For example, you might use mnemonics as a way to chunk different units of information. If you are going to the grocery store and need bananas, eggs, nectarines, and tea, you can create a word out of the first letters of each item you need: BENT.

Once you remember the keyword, you will then be better able to recall the items represented by each letter of the acronym.