Whenever a new product comes in the market, be it a digital or physical one, the success of it depends on many factors like how it looks, how well it works, how well it is designed and many more factors. And for the past few years, the design has been the bigger factor in the successes of modern products both in the digital world and the physical world.

Today, we are going to talk about one such factor that had been neglected at the beginning of the modern world but now has taken the utmost place in the design priorities of the products. Cognitive Load.

Cognitive Load

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the used amount of working memory resources — wiki

In a simpler way, the Cognitive load imposed by the interface is the amount of mental resources that are being used to use and understand the product.

Cognitive load has a very important role in deciding the usability of the product. And the amount of cognitive load varies as per the age and understanding of the people, like a person of the age of 20 can handle more cognitive load than the person of age 60, but while designing the product we have to consider the whole spectrum of users.

Cognitive load theory differentiates cognitive load into three types:

Intrinsic — Intrinsic cognitive load is the effort associated with a specific topic Extraneous — refers to the way information or tasks are presented to a learner Germane-refers to the work put into creating a permanent store of knowledge, or a schema.

Sometimes, because of the high cognitive load, people find some products hard to use and they blame themselves about not being able to use the product but the problem is that the product is giving too much to the users in terms of information, features, and functionalities, which sometimes users don’t need at all. And this makes the product hard to use and leave people frustrated.

The number one reason why Dieter’s Ram is one of the best designers of the world because of the product designed by him were so simpler in looks and easy to use that they put a less cognitive load on the minds of the people.

And one of his principles completely resonates with the cognitive load, which is Good design is as little as possible. He always believed in giving people products that are not just simple but easy to understand and use.

Today we all are aware that Apple’s product’s success has been completely based on the legacy of Dieter’s ram principles.