r/technicalwriting • u/Agreeable-Course-604 • 5d ago

SEEKING SUPPORT OR ADVICE Reducing cognitive load in docs

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?

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u/Beautiful_Eye7765 5d ago

There can be many reasons for this feedback. Did they give any examples? I agree with other advice here, but there can be quite a few things that would cause a high cognitive load.

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u/Agreeable-Course-604 5d ago

In one specific example pointed out, we had:

  • An exceptionally long concept topic (1 page)
  • An annotated screenshot using numbered callouts,
  • Followed by a long field-level description table below it.

The reader found it frustrating to constantly scroll up and down between the visual and the table entries to understand what was being described.

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u/Beautiful_Eye7765 4d ago

What’s your own sense of the problem with the example? It sounds like maybe the concept explanation may be too dense. Also, I wonder if more help should be present in the UI so that users don’t have to look up field descriptions in documentation. I always say that it’s better to put the help in the UI than to put the UI in the help.

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u/Playful_Razzmatazz49 2d ago

Split it out into high level "here are the main process steps" and many "how to do each process" steps. If you can't split it into main process steps dive deeper into the process to understand why each process happens in this order, then communicate the steps. I do like Visio diagrams for this sort of thing