Stop saying “cognitive load” if you can’t say which one

I can still remember when I didn’t have the words for it. I hadn’t heard the term “cognitive overload,” but I had certainly felt it.

It’s a feeling we all know: a conversation that wanders beyond your bandwidth, a presentation that crams in too much, a topic you just can’t wrap your head around.

As a content designer, it’s my job to fight that struggle, and I find the challenge validating. But I’ve noticed that the conversation around cognitive load is thin. Ashallow puddle, if you will. So, I decided to dive in and relearn it.

Here’s where I landed: if we want to keep building intuitive design, we need to stop using cognitive load as a buzzword.

Where the buzzword shows up

Picture a design review. Someone points at a new screen and says, “This reduces cognitive load.” Everyone nods, and the meeting continues on.

But what actually got reduced? The word count? The number of choices? The mental math of comparing two options? Without an answer, “reduces cognitive load” is just a way of saying “this feels cleaner,” and we have no way to tell whether the change made a real difference.

What even is it?

Cognitive load is the demand a task places on working memory, the small mental workspace we use to hold and manipulate information in the moment. Cognitive load theory, developed by educational psychologist John Sweller, starts from a simple constraint: working memory can only handle a few pieces of information at once. When demand exceeds that capacity, understanding and decision-making suffer.

The theory traditionally describes three types of load:

• Intrinsic: the natural difficulty of the material itself

• Extraneous: the effort imposed by how the information is presented

• Germane: the effort spent building lasting understanding

One caveat: germane load is the most debated of the three, and researchers have since reframed or folded it into the others. That debate is itself a good reminder that these ideas are more nuanced than the buzzword suggests.

Why the distinction matters

The types matter because we can’t treat them all the same way. As designers, we usually can’t change how hard the underlying topic is (intrinsic), but we can break it into steps. We can cut out effort that adds nothing (extraneous). And once that’s done, we free up capacity for the effort that actually helps people learn (germane).

Saying we “reduced cognitive load” hides which of those things we did.

So what does this look like in practice?

Say I’m working on a benefits enrollment flow. Users abandon it at the plan comparison step. Instead of declaring that we’ll “reduce cognitive load,” I focus on getting specific:

• The type: extraneous. The plan names are inconsistent across screens, so people spend effort figuring out whether “Basic” and “Standard Care” are the same thing.

• The fix: consistent naming, plus plain-language summaries of what’s different between plans.

• The measure: completion rate at that step, time on task, and how many people backtrack to earlier screens.

Now the claim is testable, and I can say whether it worked.

So, what’s my point anyway?

Next time you’re tempted to say a design reduces cognitive load, ask yourself:

• What kind of cognitive load are we treating?

• What are we doing to limit extraneous load?

• How are we making room for germane load?

• How do we know we’ve been successful?

If you can’t answer, you haven’t described the work yet.