The last thing you want your user to feel is frustration and stress from your design. People’s lives are already stressful enough, the products we use shouldn’t be designed to add to that stress, they should be designed to reduce it.

Stress and frustration could potentially cause a user to completely abandon a product which in turn could cost your company millions of dollars. Consider that the Apple’s iTunes App Store is home to over 1.5 million apps, and that 1 in 4 people abandon mobile apps after only one use, the race to engage and retain a user is ever present. Pressure from Stakeholders may point that the visuals of the app need improvement, or worse, that there aren’t enough of the correct features. Meanwhile, the core of user frustration and app abandonment could boil down to one design principle, cognitive load.

Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort being used by the working memory. The working memory is where information is processed and storage is limited. Your brain begins to slow down or even abandon a task at hand when it receives more information than it can handle. Although cognitive load isn’t entirely avoidable, designers must strive to manage and accommodate these limits. Ultimately, a user will ditch your app if it wastes their time, causes stress, or is frankly difficult to use.

Use these 6 steps below to reduce cognitive load and aid your user’s in achieving their goals:

Add Elements That Only Help

Any element that isn’t helping the user achieve their goal is working against them because they must process it and store it in working memory. Avoiding excessive colors, imagery, or layouts that don’t add value is crucial. Don’t overdue simplicity though for the sake of simplicity, branding guidelines and experiences that evoke feeling are still important.

Stay Familiar, use Common Design Patterns

Like a good friend you haven’t seen in years, or your childhood home, the best feeling is familiarity. By leveraging common design patterns, when it makes sense, you are giving the user familiar elements which they already understand. The whole point is to reduce the amount of learning they need to do, thus enabling them to move right along and get closer to achieving their goal. An example could be the Add to bag button, or the Deliver Now/Schedule toggle on the right image, as seen below:

http://www.mobile-patterns.com/

Make it Readable

Always be clear, we need to make our content readable. This means our typography must be aesthetically pleasing, appropriate for the content and easy to read. With mobile dominating how we view our content we must also design with mobile reading in mind, cut to the chase, define the purpose quickly, and allow the content to lead a user along their journey. By doing this, we can ensure there are as little distractions as possible for the user, which results in a better understanding of the content by the user.

If The Task is Unnecessary, Eliminate it

Take the time to perform UX research so you can properly anticipate what your user needs. Sometimes adding features may seem like the best idea to increase product satisfaction, yet in reality more features may mean more tasks and increases in cognitive load. Design which tasks your research deems necessary, then test your product over and over in a Lean cycle in order to create the best flow.

Less is More, Minimize Choices

As we know, our working memory is limited. When presented with too many choices, our cognitive load will increase due to decision paralysis. It is important that we minimize the choices the user must make at any given moment, especially in places such as navigation, forms, and drop-downs.

Use Iconography Wisely

Is that a filter button or a list button? What exactly is inside that hamburger menu (The great hamburger menu) and why do I need to know? “Iconography can potentially be hard to memorize and, contrary to intuition, can increase cognitive load by requiring mental processing to infer meaning or recognize. While universally understood icons work well (ie. print, close, play/pause, reply, tweet, share on Facebook), most are subject to the user’s understanding based on previous experience (in which there is no standard).”- Jon Yablonski Pair the power of iconography with text so a user can identify what a mysterious icon may mean.

With 1 in 4 people abandoning mobile apps after one use, the pressure to gain and retain users is ever present. Stake holders realize that a loss in engagement is money lost, and as designers, we are faced with the reality of creating an experience that people want to dive into day after day, every time. While creating the next best app is a full challenge, designers can focus on the steps mentioned above to reduce cognitive load and potentially increase engagement. Ultimately, design with the user’s goals in mind, test these designs, and test again. Help people win!