David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds: Cognitive Load and Emotional Labor – Episode 122

Content Strategy Insights

As content strategists and designers we do our best to create experiences that inform and empower our users. David Dylan Thomas Dayana Kibilds Unfortunately, we sometimes fall short of perfect, human-centered, user-focused design practice. Two of our most common failings occur when we bombard our users with excessive cognitive load and impose on them unnecessary emotional labor. David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds are having an ongoing dialog about these important topics and let me eavesdrop on their conversation. We talked about: how emotional labor and cognitive load can put up a brick wall between you and your users how Day's personal story about her college admissions experience informs her current work the implications of higher ed institutions being slow to adopt content strategy practices the disconnect between the language on admissions webpages and student reading ability and how simply paying more attention to language could help the dynamics behind emotional labor and how we might assign value to it how power dynamics in a relationship can make it difficult to push back when someone is assigned extra emotional labor the inverse correlation between wealth and privilege in the assignment of emotional labor a new metric in college admissions that looks at improvement of metrics besides academic achievement - things like grit and perseverance and commitment the importance of defining goals and purpose and articulating new incentives when you introduce new metrics how surprisingly easy it is it to make things easier for your colleagues and customers Day's bio Day is strategy director at Ologie, focusing primarily on enrollment marketing strategy for educational organizations. In her 12 years in the higher education sector, she’s led enrollment and digital innovation work at Penn State, Cornell, Western University (Canada), and supported university content strategy projects at Pickle Jar Communications. She speaks regularly about enrollment marketing, productivity, and stakeholder management at global conferences such as CASE, HighedWeb, Confab, PSE Web, Utterly Content, and ContentEd. As a lifelong immigrant who has lived in 6 different countries, equity and diversity are really important to her. She sees content as a true equalizer, and part of her motivation to do this work is so students of all backgrounds have access to the educational institutions they deserve to be a part of. Connect with Dayana online Twitter LinkedIn Dave's bio David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias, creator and host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, and a twenty-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He has presented at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, An Event Apart, LavaCon, UX Copenhagen, Artifact, IA Conference, IxDA, Design and Content Conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and the Wharton Web Conference on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice. Connect with Dave online DavidDylanThomas.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek7BmmXwdWw Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 122. As designers and content strategists, we do our best to make information accessible and usable for all of our customers. But even when we operate with the best of intentions, we can still make our users - and our colleagues - do extra work and confuse them with impenetrable walls of text. Day Kibilds and David Dylan Thomas have thought a lot about emotional labor and cognitive load and in this episode continue an ongoing conversation on these important topics.