Case Study: Cognitive Load & Protein Bars
The protein bar recipe serves up the perfect metaphor for cognitive load. With a compact size and limited capacity, much like our working memory, bars include 5-7 key ingredients to sustain our energy. Recipes are also short term in scope, meant for working memory use. With clear learning objectives and familiar schema (format), they are easy-to-learn daily digestible learning for everyone.
As a time-challenged aspirational blogger and rookie soccer coach, I was drawn to protein bar recipes for a good cognitive load assessment. I was fortunate to come upon a well-established blog, Gluten-free on a Shoestring.
Eaten to recharge and optimize performance in sports and academics, protein bars are often packed with dried fruit, nuts, and chocolate for calories, stimulation, and easy digestion. This 5-7 ingredients list parallels the number of schema we can store at a time, according to Mayer's Limited-Capacity Assumption.
Overview
As the blog suggests, saving money and making homemade gluten-free food is are two overlapping key niches that this blogger captures an audience. With clear objectives and a popularity metric of 5 stars at the top, the blogger draws you in. Unlike a higher education lesson, or subscriber based online courses, the blogger needs keywords, search engine optimization, and popularity cues to keep the online researchers drawn to their site.
The blogger shares her own learning journey in coming up with the recipe. The impetus behind this protein bar recipe is instantly relatable: providing protein bars for her family. Sprinkled along the way are motivational messages to make these bars! The blogger also makes the recipe customizable by considering replacements to lower sweetness or remove oats, or use gluten for those who prefer it.
Cognitive load dos
The blog post begins with immediate useful metrics for the potential learner, using the Signaling Principle of highlighting the organization of essential information. Key metrics for recipes are listed at the top in a familiar recipe user interface:
4.99 stars out of 343 number of votes
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 0 minutes
Motivational message with image of protein bar.
Jump to recipe
The blogger employs the user's prior knowledge of recipe expectations making this information at the top. This plays with Mayer's Active-Processing Asumption where the learner is selecting relevant material to integrate to an existing knowlege base about recipes.
The listings are easily eye scannable and determines whether or not the recipe is doable or appealing, or can guarantee a wanted learning objective. From the outset, the learner is encouraged to actively engage in learning the recipe through these motivational lines. Further, the blogger employs the Personalization Principle in using approachable colloquial language rather than still academic language.
Cognitive load don'ts
No recipe blog is perfect and unfortunately this blog post follows similar issues as others I've encountered. Though the visual appealing close ups of the protein bar motivates and provides key information about what's in the bar prior to reading the written ingredients, there are a lot of photographic redundancies. When using a mobile device with a smaller screen, these images take up a lot of real estate. Mixed with advertisements, it becomes frustrating to find the words in between.
The blogger presents information in a stream of consciousness sort of way where sometimes you don't know where the author is going with her story. So chunking of information by providing a topic header with a more substantial textblock of information instead of rivulets of lines between images would be more helpful.
Overall, the protein bar recipe provides personalization with a satisfying learning objective and key points of information are accessible. Once I try this recipe, I will take a picture and post it here!