Cognitive Load as a Design Rationale, Not a Product Result
· Mykhailo Boichuk
What cognitive-load research can support about interface design, and what it cannot establish about Flowo or ADHD outcomes.
A limited design inference
Cognitive Load Theory treats working memory as limited, but a laboratory estimate such as roughly four chunks is not a universal daily capacity. The theory provides a rationale for making constraints and next actions visible. It does not show that Flowo improves cognition, ADHD symptoms, initiation, or completion.
Three Types of Cognitive Load
- Intrinsic load: Difficulty inherent to the material or task; Flowo does not claim to change it.
- Extraneous load: Effort attributable to how information or a process is presented; Flowo is designed to reduce repeated manual arrangement.
- Germane load: Effort involved in building useful knowledge structures; no Flowo study has measured it.
How the rationale appears in the product
Three implementation choices are relevant:
- Schedule Templates make daily boundaries explicit before task placement.
- The deterministic scheduler evaluates conflicts and candidate slots from structured inputs.
- Braindump stores an item before the user classifies it.
What has not been demonstrated
Flowo has not run a controlled study of decision fatigue. Observational findings from unrelated professional settings cannot establish a causal effect for a mobile planner, so this article makes no reduction claim.
The correct public claim is narrower: Flowo presents a schedule and placement context generated from supplied constraints. Read the Methodology page for the evidence boundary and proposed research questions.