UI Design
Cognitive Load Theory: Why Less is Usually More
Jan 9, 2026
Your user has a battery life for their attention span. If you drain it with useless buttons and flashing lights, they will make mistakes. Here is how to avoid overloading your players and why giving them "all the power" often results in them having "no idea what to do."
Imagine your brain is a bucket. You can only pour so much water (information) into it before it spills over. That spillover is what we call "Cognitive Overload."
Ideally, you want users to focus on the task at hand, not the tool they are using to do it. But it's tempting to add features. Imagine building a dashboard or an inventory screen and thinking, "I want the user to have power! Let's put every single filter, button, and sorting option on the main screen!" It feels like a genius move for efficiency.
But when users actually sit down in front of it, they don't feel efficient. They feel paralyzed. They stare at the screen for ten seconds just figuring out where to look, spending all their brainpower on the interface rather than the game or the job.
This applies heavily to games. If a game introduces a crafting system, a skill tree, and a complex combat tutorial all in the first five minutes, the player is going to skip the text and just start button-mashing.
There are two types of load to worry about. Intrinsic load is how hard the task actually is (like solving a puzzle). You want this in a game; it's the fun part. Extraneous load is the bad stuff—like a confusing menu font or a button layout that makes no sense. Your job as a designer is to kill the extraneous load so the user has enough energy for the intrinsic load.
The Bucket: Humans have limited working memory (about 5-7 items at once).
Intrinsic Load: The difficulty of the task itself. Keep this for gameplay challenges.
Extraneous Load: The difficulty of using the interface. Kill this with fire.
Do the "Squint Test." Squint your eyes at your design until it gets blurry. If you can't tell what the most important element on the screen is within two seconds, you have too much clutter. Remove one element and try again.