CGA (Cognitive Gap Analysis) is a fully online, adaptable tool for measuring the cognitive gap in user-product interaction, offering actionable insights to enhance UX and serving as a competitive benchmarking tool to help businesses optimize their products and outperform competitors.

The shift from analog to digital technologies has wiped out design elements that expressed function (like object symbols), leaving a cognitive gap behind. This is the major challenge for design today – a challenge much greater than simply creating ’user-friendly’ interfaces: to convey expression through form and interaction, to repair the broken link between function and form, to explore seamless ways of integrating technology into daily life with no cognitive gap (Norman.1993).

ˈkɑɡnɪtɪv ɡæp

Cognitive Gap:

Any distance, gap, discrepancy, mismatch, or conflict in interaction process, which needs to be bridged spanned, aligned, processed or resolved for the accomplishment of a certain task through a cognitive artifact.

* Cognitive Gap: The distance between mental model and the product.
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User interacts with System Image to complete a task. Once interaction starts users develop a mental model. Conceptual model is generated by the designer. The mental model is how the user thinks it works, and the conceptual model is how it actually works. Cognitive gap exists between user’s mental model and designer’s conceptual model.The task completion is done only when users’ mental model aligns or matches to designers’ conceptual model, in other words only when the distance between users’ mental model and conceptual model is spanned or bridged. The less the distance between users’ mental model and conceptual model, the smoother would be the task completion.

Instead of assessing how well the usability principles are implemented on the appliance sample by rating predefined heuristics, it should be analyzed to what extent user’s mental model aligns with the product.
Therefore, this framework proposes a model that explores the size of the cognitive gap in multiple dimensions, by evaluating to what extent :
•the appliance can be identified(identity)
•the interaction design element can be manipulated with the planned actions (action)
•the interaction design element can trigger planned intention (intention)
•the product can trigger expected or desired emotions (affect)

The custom-designed online questionnaire is tailored specific to your product category, revealing the inherited cognitive gap between your product and your users, then comparing it to your main competitors. The insights from the results provide actionable guidance to refine your product, ensuring it better aligns with user expectations and stands out from the competition.

Get in touch to bridge the Cognitive Gap in your product!