Towards Establishing Design Principles for Balancing Usability and Maintaining Cognitive Abilities

While technology has improved the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of work, its prolonged use also weakens users’ cognitive abilities over time. By creating usable, efficient, emotive, and engaging experiences, HCI researchers and practitioners have inadvertently led users to offload their innate capabilities onto their devices. How should technology be (re)designed so as to reduce the negative effects of on users’ cognitive abilities when used over time? In this paper, we discuss a set of design principles intended to help designers consider how long-term use of their artefacts could maintain and even improve users’ unassisted abilities and reduce negative impacts of over-reliance on technology. We illustrate the design principles by redesigning commonly-used applications, and report the findings from a workshop conducted with digital natives to obtain feedback on these redesigned applications.

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