cognitive-load-minimization
Cognitive Load Minimization
Reduce the mental effort a user must spend to perceive, understand, and act on a product surface. The goal is never "minimal" for its own sake — it is to remove extraneous load (effort caused by how something is presented) so the user's limited working memory is spent on the actual task, not on decoding the interface.
This skill is self-contained: everything it needs lives in references/. It works on any runtime that can dispatch subagents — no other skill needs to be installed.
Core mental model
Users do not read; they forage. They arrive with a goal, skim for "information scent," commit attention only when something signals relevance (the isolation / von Restorff "catch"), then engagement escalates. Every decision serves this loop: strong scent, obvious next step, exactly one thing that should catch the eye actually does, everything else quiet.
Three kinds of load (Sweller):
- Intrinsic — inherent task difficulty. Managed (chunking, sequencing), not removed.
- Extraneous — load created by presentation. This is the target. Cut it aggressively.
- Germane — productive effort that builds understanding. Preserve it; flag it; never silently cut it.
The substance — every named law, theory, and heuristic — lives in references/principles.md. The operational lens definitions live in references/lenses.md. Read them; citing principles by name makes recommendations defensible rather than opinion.