Cognitive overload

If you're tired or have a headache, trying to do anything can be a little more difficult.

If you have a migraine or you are looking after small children, doing things can be significantly more difficult.

If you have a cognitive impairment everything is difficult.

Cognitive overload is when you have just had enough, and can't take any more. It's vital that we create a Local Offer that is as light as possible on cognitive strain.

Home page

Here's a nice clean home page of a Local Offer. It has

• a big search bar
• a heading and description
• 9 colour block links to different areas
• 5 white circles to some other areas
• a header
• a menu bar
• a footer

Everything is more or less where you would expect it to be. There's not too much on the page. Lots of white space so it's clean and easy to look at.

But what you see on my laptop is this:

And on my mobile:

Of course, I can scroll down. First swipe take me to:

And the second swipe to:

From a parent's or young person's perspective, it's not clear what some of these links are about. Why do I care what a Wiki-Me is? I don't need childcare, so that's not relevant to me. I'm just trying to find out .... oh... my head hurts.

Another Local Offer home page:

• a nice hero image
• some info about the Local Offer
• icon links to lots of different sections
• an age based tab selector for the sections pages
• Local Offer pathway
• services by specific need
• search bar
• header
• SEND champions
• footer

It's difficult to know where to start. So many options.

Here's what I see on my laptop:

A big hero image, a header, a menu and a search bar.

Great. What am I looking for? I'll type that in straight away.

What else do we really need on the homepage?

I am not advocating removing everything from the home page except for the search bar.

But you have to wonder, how do people get there? It's certainly not from typing in the address in the browser window.

Here are the addresses from the Local Offers above.

https://www.wisherefordshire.org/local-offer-special-educational-needs-and-disabilities-send/

https://directory.luton.gov.uk/kb5/luton/directory/localoffer.page?localofferchannel=0

The shortest, most meaningful URL I've found is

https://www.harrowlocaloffer.co.uk/

The fact is, people use Google to find things. Type in the name of the local authority with words "Local Offer" and you'll get there.

Home button

Every web site needs a home button. It reassures the user that they will be able to "go back to the beginning", even if that's not where they started.

Often the home button is the company logo. Does your Local Offer have a logo? Make it the link to the home page.

Wakefield have branded their Local Offer as Ask Ollie:

Newcastle have a flying penguin:

Breadcrumbs

As well as finding your way back to the home page, it's important to know where you are. Here you can see Somerset's Local Offer. It's branded as Choices for ages 0 to 25. It's easy to see where we are in relation to the home page. And it's easy to get back to where we were along our journey. This really does help people feel more confident about what they are looking at.

home  > Our Local Offer > Education, Health and Care Plans > Tribunals - single route of redress

Banner

Many Local Offers are part of the Local Authority website. This is often a huge problem for navigation as it is very easy to get lost. I often find myself in the general transport pages of the council website after following link from the Local Offer. And then there is no direct link back to the Local Offer.

I could use the back button. What if I go down a path about transport, and get to the Blue Badge scheme? I now realise that is not right for me and I want to start again. I don't want to click the back button many times, I just want to go to the Local Offer home page.

Some Local Offer websites help by putting a banner on the Local Offer pages:

That's great, but it would be better if there was a clear Local Offer homepage link too.

📝 Cognitive overload is very difficult to assess. Take a look at a few pages and think about how easy it is to know where you are, what you are looking at, and how to find the answer to that one question you have. Share some thoughts in the discussion.

Note

Most of the lessons in this course are very short. I've made this one longer on purpose. Maybe it shows you how by breaking up content, you can make it easier to understand.