Reduce load before adding polish
Identify intrinsic, extraneous, and germane load in a learning experience and reduce the load that does not support learning.
The move: protect working memory for the learning task. Cognitive load theory helps designers distinguish useful challenge from needless friction. Complex work has intrinsic load. Learners need to hold rules, cases, screens, steps, and exceptions in mind. Good design does not pretend that complexity is gone; it sequences it. Extraneous load is the tax your design charges. Common taxes include separated instructions, redundant text and narration, decorative animations, crowded diagrams, vague button labels, and practice prompts that require learners to infer the real task. Germane load is the effort that builds durable understanding: compare examples, explain a decision, retrieve a…
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