Cognitive load is the amount of effort a visitor has to expend to understand a page and make a decision. It is increased by specialist terminology the customer does not know, a lot of information at once without hierarchy, unfamiliar button labels, having to calculate or compare figures in one's head, and decisions we ask a person to make before they have the information they need. It is reduced by breaking content down into steps, converting parameters into an understandable benefit, pre-filling and default values, a summary before confirmation, and removing everything that is not needed at that particular step. A practical test is to ask someone outside the company to complete a task on the page and comment out loud on what they are thinking – the places where they hesitate are the places of load.
See also: Friction in the conversion process, Usability testing, Microcopy.
