[SonicSoul]

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory

seems like a correct usage to me.

Anytime an ATM displays weird confirmation buttons like "Sure" instead of "Yes" or bloated confirmation text instead of "transaction completed" this increases cognitive load. I agree that it is debatable what kind of code exactly causes the least strain, but at least the term doesn't seem to be especially scientific.

[reikonomusha]

It's not incorrect necessarily, just unqualified. Cognitive load is hard to meaningfully substantiate; it is person and experience dependent.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Actually, not at all. It's directly measurable http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17833905

"The pupil response not only indicates mental activity in itself but shows that mental activity is closely correlated with problem difficulty, and that the size of the pupil increases with the difficulty of the problem"

[reikonomusha]

My problem is precisely that these scientific methods are not used when "cognitive load" is being used as rationale. Wouldn't you agree that it would be a mistake for me to claim that cognitive load is an issue with something if e.g. I have not shown that pupils dilate (or some other reasonable experiment indicating correlation)? Unfortunately, doing these experiments is difficult, which justifies "hard to substantiate."

[CuriousSkeptic]

Yes I do think claims should be justified by experiments. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong fora but it seems to me that serious HCI-studies on language design should be happening a lot more than it does.