🤯 Cognitive Load:

The amount of mental effort required by a task.

Zettle

Bookends

Cloudflare

High cognitive load

Twitch

Reducing commitment

The theory is that the potential of your short-term memory is limited, and the brain cannot process an infinite number of 'things'.

Although hard to accurately measure, the cognitive load refers to the amount of strain your processing unit (brain) is under, at that moment.

Plenty of products have a high cognitive load—it doesn't necessarily make something bad.

For example, playing a fast-paced video game like Call of Duty requires a lot of concentration, and demands 'processing power' (of your brain).

You need both attention and interest to handle the cognitive load, but everyone will break eventually.

What you need to be mindful of is having a high cognitive load, on something that isn't enjoyable (or interesting).

✅ Churn

  • People will actively churn from highly stressful situations.

✅ Input quality

A high cognitive load can limit cognitive function. i.e., people will perform worse at exams if they're under a great stress.

For input forms (sign-up / onboarding), this can manifest in the user just selecting the easiest options (defaults).

✅ Productivity & efficiency
✅ Effort & motivation
✅ Discomfort & frustration

A high cognitive load can lead to frustration and stress. It's uncomfortable to be under a high cognitive load.

✅ Happiness & enjoyment

Zettle takes the long process of creating an account, and breaks it into steps.

Then, between each step, they have these 'bookend' pages, which gives the user a chance to pause, relax and reset.

i.e., without these, the form would be relentless. Every page would require you to do something.

Cloudflare (the cloud security service), understand that some of their users will be visiting in moments of high intensity.

i.e., stress, anxiety or pressure.

Because of this, they've designed their product to reduce anxiety, and offer immediate support.

The main navigation has two ways to get support: a primary CTA, and a phone number to call.

Cloudflare have accepted that their users will already be under a high cognitive load, and designed their site to accommodate it.

When viewing a channel for the first time, the main CTA is labelled 'learn more', instead of something more committing, like 'Subscribe'.

Although it does actually start the subscribing journey, it allows the user to make a low-commitment decision, thereby reducing the cognitive load in that moment.