[energy123]

> their interaction with your product is a tiny slice of their life

Low cognitive load should be a major goal, and that doesn't mean the app can't be feature rich. Make the app very fast, or at least hide latency from the user. No esoteric icons, instead default to plain text. If you have icons, no artificial delay between mouse-over and tooltip. No smooth scrolling. No excessive whitespace. No elements that move around while the page loads. No scrolljacking. And actually use your app so a random user like me can't find multiple bugs in it.

Chatgpt website is a good example of how to tick some of these boxes to achieve low cognitive load, despite being feature rich. It's very fast, and mousing over an icon displays the tooltip immediately. Although they have a few UI bugs that they need to fix, I would give them an 8.5/10. Gemini website is an example of how to tax cognitive load despite being feature poor and "simple". It's very slow for large contexts, it scrolljacks, and it has numerous bugs. I would give them a 2/10, partly due to the fact that it hasn't noticeably improved for over a year since I started using it, despite being one of their flagship products.

[nradov]

Low cognitive load is not a good design goal for most software. I mean it's fine for something simple that sees only occasional, casual use. But for applications that enterprise employees use for hours every day the design must be optimized to maximize productivity over a wide range of use cases. The decision makers don't care about cognitive load.