Chunking
Chunking is a process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.
Chunking
Chunking helps users to easily scan and identify information that aligns with their goals and process that information to complete their task more quickly.
Grouping
Structuring content into visually distinct groups with a clear hierarchy enables designers to align information with how people evaluate and process content.
Content relationships
Chunking can be used to help users understand underlying relationships by grouping content into distinctive modules, applying rules to separate content, and providing hierarchy.
Origin
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.