JOURNAL OF APPLIED INFORMATICS AND COMPUTING
Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): June 2026

Reducing Cognitive Load in Micro-School Systems through Frugal Interaction Design

Muhamad Akda Fathul Barri (Indonesia University of Education)
Ayu Permata Sari (Indonesia University of Education)
Suprih Widodo (Indonesia University of Education)



Article Info

Publish Date
10 Jun 2026

Abstract

The rapid digitalization of education marginalizes peri-urban micro-schools, forcing them to adopt complex digital administration tools to maintain institutional legitimacy. However, conventional management systems impose excessive cognitive load on non-technical school stakeholders, leading to low adoption and persistent digital enclaves. This study aims to reduce the extraneous cognitive load of these stakeholders by designing and evaluating a serverless school administration portal based on frugal computing principles. A Targeted Participatory Action Research approach was employed with four core decision-makers at an Islamic micro-school, integrating a web interface directly with habitual messaging applications. Usability was evaluated using task completion metrics and heuristic assessments. The intervention resulted in a complete independent success rate for low-complexity tasks. Furthermore, administrative task completion times decreased dramatically from an average of forty-five seconds to fifteen seconds, with users praising the seamless integration into their daily communication routines. These findings suggest that frugal interaction design and cognitive offloading can effectively bridge the digital divide, providing a sustainable and highly usable administrative model for resource-constrained educational institutions.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

JAIC

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal of Applied Informatics and Computing (JAIC) Volume 2, Nomor 1, Juli 2018. Berisi tulisan yang diangkat dari hasil penelitian di bidang Teknologi Informatika dan Komputer Terapan dengan e-ISSN: 2548-9828. Terdapat 3 artikel yang telah ditelaah secara substansial oleh tim editorial dan ...