Cognitive overload in Product Design

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 The success of a product, be it a physical, digital, or even an intangible one, depends on a few key factors that influence it from behind the screens of the production process. The ability to mitigate cognitive overload to provide a smoother and more memorable user experience is one of the vital factors that determine the relationship between the user and the product, hence determining the success or failure of a product. But to know how exactly it impacts the success rate of the product, let's dig down a little deeper and start from the definition.

What is Cognitive load?

Cognitive load can be described as the amount of effort that is exerted or required while reasoning and thinking. It can be any mental process, starting from subconscious memory to perception, and understanding of the language has the potential to exert cognitive load as it requires energy and effort.

Cognitive load is real?

Smartphones slow down in terms of performance and hang often while running too many apps at a time. It is no wonder that it applies to our brains as well. Anything that requires the user to stop for a moment and think about what should be done next, adds to the pain points of the user experience. Thus, when the product requires the user to think too much, the result would be a cliffhanger product in the hands of a confused user who is on the verge of abandoning it.

Hence the role of a user experience designer is to mitigate the strain that the user undergoes while using the product. So in this article, we'll be discussing how to deal with them effectively.

Types of cognitive load:

There are three main types of cognitive load that we've got to watch out for. Let's start with how these types of cognitive loads are defined.

Intrinsic cognitive load:

This type of cognitive load is the inherent difficulty of the task that the user wants to perform with the help of the product. In simpler terms, it can be described as the energy put in by the user to absorb new information en route to accomplishing the desired task. It requires a lot of thought process and planning to mitigate an intrinsic cognitive load since it is a part of the task to be accomplished by itself and it cannot be completely eliminated.

Extraneous cognitive load:

Anything that consumes the mental resources of the user without being actually related to the task they intend to accomplish can be called an extraneous cognitive load. The damage that this type of cognitive load can do to the product can be astonishing as it is the most destructive among all other types of cognitive load. But, Luckily this is also the easiest type of error to eliminate as soon as the realization occurs.

Germane cognitive load:

Germane cognitive load can be described as the cognitive load that comes into play when the user 
tries to process the information into mental models and schemas to help them accomplish their tasks. In 
In simpler terms, these are the parts of the user experiences that are directly entwined with the Cognitive overload that the users experience, while making a remarkable contribution to usability at the same time.

Let's discuss how we can mitigate (or possibly eliminate) these types of cognitive overloads to create a smoother user experience in our next article. Happy Designing!


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