Product Sense & Empathy
What is Cognitive Load?
The total mental effort a screen demands; the more a user must hold in their head at once, the heavier and more tiring the product feels.
Go deeper
Read the full deep-dive that explains Cognitive Load in context - with examples, mechanics, and where it breaks.
Related terms
- Product Sense The skill of judging what to build and why it matters to a real person - choosing the right thing to make, not just making things well.
- User Empathy The ability to see and feel a product from the user's point of view - their goal, their confusion, their fear - instead of your own expert perspective.
- Jobs To Be Done The idea that people "hire" a product to make progress in their lives; nobody wants a drill, they want the hole - so design for the goal, not the feature.
- Mental Model The picture in a user's head of how something works; software feels obvious when it matches that picture and confusing when it fights it.
- Affordance What an object lets you do - a button affords pressing, a slider affords dragging. It is the action the thing makes possible.
- Signifier The visible cue that tells you an affordance exists - the underline that says "link," the raised edge that says "press me." Without it, a feature is effectively hidden.