# Chunking

A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.

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.

  Source

### Further Reading

###
    How Chunking Helps Content Processing

  Kate Moran | Nielsen Norman Group

###
    Chunking

  Interaction Design Foundation

###
    Why Chunking Content is Important [Video]

  Kate Moran | Nielsen Norman Group

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Source: https://lawsofux.com/chunking/
Category: Psychology
Tags: psychology, cognitive load, attention, memory