About Cognitive Load

Half of the rules in product design seem both oversimplified and wrong to me at the same time. The main one, the thing that makes me understand pretty quickly that we are probably not going to get anywhere, is cognitive load.

I have only seen it seriously discussed in articles three or four times in my life, while I am subscribed to maybe ten different design newsletters, including paid journals and aggregators with posts, news and articles, my whole YouTube feed is full of design videos, my Twitter is full of design, so in this sense I am an absolutely ridiculous nerd and I read any kind of shit.

One of my favourite genres of design content is intentionally shitty design. Reels about logos next to people’s own names, ten-dollar identities, all that. I do not watch it to make myself feel better, I just think it is interesting, because I personally know people who would choose this kind of design over mine or over the one I think is good.

It is like Russian language and mathematics in school. People ask why the fuck they need this, where it will be useful in life. It will not be useful. Apart from basic education and some minimum cultural level, it is also a way to look at and perceive the world differently.

Mathematics feels the world one way, Russian language another, literature another, physics another. It is the same here. For me it is an opportunity to have another prism for design. I want all of them, however many ways of looking at design there are.

And cognitive load is probably the most ridiculous one.

I like bright candy interfaces. I have heard from a lot of people, when they did not know who drew them and I asked for feedback, that they were too overloaded. I hear it from founders too. Not constantly, less often than I hear something good, but fairly often.

Then we run tests and it turns out to be complete bullshit. The most interesting products do not give a shit about this rule.

What I do not understand is where people get this from, where they read all this stuff about cognitive load, because I constantly read training articles and can count on one hand how many times I have seen it seriously discussed. Somehow everyone knows about this fucking cognitive load.

The issue is not whether an interface has a lot of things in it. The issue is whether somebody can understand where they are, what they are being asked to do, and what happens after they do it.

In one DeFi audit, the first important interaction was a generic “Connect Wallet” modal. The product was asking for the highest level of trust, access to somebody’s money, before it had properly explained what it was, why this person should trust it, or what they would get after connecting. Visually, it was not even a busy screen. It was just completely missing the context.

After the wallet was connected, the same product showed a dashboard full of zero balances. Zero deposited, zero earned, zero everything. No clear next action, no explanation of where the person was supposed to go, no proper onboarding. The most valuable part of the screen was used to say that somebody had nothing.

This is cognitive load.

The same audit had more than thirty investment vaults on the main dashboard, each with APY, TVL and a bunch of other numbers, all presented with equal weight. A person who came in to make one first deposit was expected to become a yield-farming expert in thirty seconds. That is actual overload, not because there were too many colours, but because there was no curation, no hierarchy and no understanding of what this person was trying to do at that particular moment.

Where can making something simpler create more problems than benefits? Almost everywhere.

This obsession with reducing the number of clicks is usually what leads to weird shit. Instead of a convenient, logical, functional transfer, where a person goes into a function hub and can use the whole range of it, everything gets scattered who knows where and becomes who knows what.

People also think too well of the people using their product. They see a crypto product aimed at crypto investors, people who put twenty dollars in, and assume these guys understand what they are doing.

Most often, they do not.

We had a case where people put real money into a token presale, and the most common question in their chat was basically: what do we do with this now, what do we do next, what button do we press. Not literally which button, there was staking and all that, but they did not understand what they were doing. They put their dollars somewhere and did not understand what was supposed to happen next.

And then there is context. This is one of the most common incorrect design patterns, when people do not take the context of their product into account. Who gets there, how they get there, with what intention, what they want from it at that exact moment, whether they came from an ad or organic search.

This can change absolutely everything!