A Chunk of Sevens
In the field of cognitive psychology, there’s a concept that has much to do with the design community. Professionals in UX have the ability to separate text boxes and multiple media files into smaller pieces in order to help viewers, readers, etc., remember, understand and process the information in a better way.
By definition, in general usage, “chunk” is stated to be a singular piece that can be assumed to be a part of something bigger. In contrast, in the cognitive psychology field, it’s defined as an organizational unit in memory. UX professionals refer to “chunking” as breaking content up into small, specific units of information, instead of presenting a visual mess of information items.
Displaying content in chunks makes fast viewing easier for readers and can improve their ability to understand the material. When using it, chunking includes making meaningful, aesthetically different content that makes sense in the context of the information itself.
People may recognize seeing chunking used in these specific methods, such as short paragraphs, with white space separating them, short lines of text (around 100 letters/symbols or less), visual hierarchies with similar items put together, and groups of letters/numbers, for example, passwords, license plates, credit cards or account numbers, phone numbers, and dates. Keep in mind that just chucking your text/information up will not do it.
Support for simple scanning must be considered and implemented to help users view the most relevant content in the chunks. This can be accomplished by using headings and subheadings that are radically different from the rest of the text (bolder, larger, etc.), highlighted keywords (bold, italic, etc.), bulleted and/or numbered lists, or a short summary paragraph for longer sections of text.
To place media content of different mediums in the piece successfully, the related parts must be kept relatively close in proximately to each other by including background colors, horizontal lines, and empty space to help viewers to tell the difference between what’s related and what isn’t on a visual level. Visual items such as videos and graphics can also be chunked.
Cognitive psychologist George Miller made the ‘magical number seven,’ famous in 1956 when he discovered that the majority of people can retain about seven chunks of information in their memory for short periods of time. He also uncovered the fact that the size of the chunks didn’t appear to matter, and people could remember seven letters individually, or 28 letters if they were grouped into 7 four-letter words.
A human’s short-term memory is limited, so, if users need to retain more information, it necessary to pack information into meaningful chunks. Don’t ask the readers to hold more than a few pieces of information in their short-term memory at once because it is beyond the realm of possibility for their brainpower.
Whatever the average capacity of short-term memory may be, the specific capacity for the individual human will obviously vary from person to person and generationally depending on how they were raised and how their brain is wired, if at all different.