A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
Chunking is a psychology concept closely related to Miller’s Law.
Takeaways
- Chunking enables users to easily scan content. It allows them to easily identify the information that aligns with their goals and process that information to achieve their goals more quickly.
- Structuring content into visually distinct groups with a clear hierarchy enables designers to align information with how people evaluate and process digital content.
- Chunking can be used to help users understand underlying relationships by grouping content into distinctive modules, applying rules to separate content, and providing hierarchy.
Origins
The word chunking comes from a famous 1956 paper by George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a “channel capacity” characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, but short-term memory did not.