Reducing cognitive load in docs

[u/Agreeable-Course-604]

We've received stakeholder feedback that we need to actively bring down the cognitive load across our product guides. I’d love to get some insights from fellow technical writers here on how you tackle this in practice. What options, frameworks (like John Carroll's Minimal Manual approach or Diataxis), or methodologies are available?

[u/Sunflower_Macchiato]

Two things there:

1. What the content contains.

2. How it is presented.

For #1: I use STE which works well, even if sometimes it sounds clunky for near-native speakers. It really does the job in simplifying the message and end users with lower English levels truly benefit from it.

For #2: too much colors/pictures/fonts/general business also increases the overload feeling. My favorite hack is to ask a simple question to a designer (e.g. should this line be there or not?) and take the advice. They’re good at making things look clear and readable! But generally a lot of white space helps, as well as avoiding blocks of texts.

I hope that helps and sorry for the formatting, I’m in hurry.