As digital products become more powerful, their complexity grows. But power must not be had at the expense of usability.
In today’s fast-evolving digital landscape, people are facing a number of platforms, multitasking, and making decisions at breakneck speeds.
This puts pressure on product teams to reduce mental effort and design systems that think with the user, not against them.
Elizabeth Ndefo, an outstanding product designer with years of experience building interfaces for fintech and enterprise tools has seen first-hand how reducing cognitive load is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Her work focuses on how interface design can guide users through complexity with ease, using tools like progressive disclosure, chunking, and intentional visual hierarchy to make even the most advanced systems feel intuitive.
“People don’t wake up wanting to ‘learn your dashboard,’” she notes. “Our role as designers is to eliminate friction, not to create more”.
Progressive disclosure, a design principle of showing things only when necessary, is one of the main principles of her work.
It allows people to progress from basic to more advanced in their own time. Coupled with good visual hierarchy and smart use of defaults, users can make their own choices better without getting bogged down.
In sectors like finance, healthcare or logistics where users are interacting with numbers, timelines, or live systems, the burden of comprehension often falls on design.
“If your user is confused, your interface has failed”, Elizabeth says. “The mental load they carry should be our problem.”
Decreasing cognitive load also means rethinking onboarding, microcopy, and even button placement. Everything in the product must work together to answer one question: What’s the next best action for the user?
As platforms evolve and functionality grows, the need for cognitive simplicity only increases.
“The best designs aren’t just pretty, they’re calming. They give people confidence in unfamiliar situations,” Elizabeth adds.
Her approach is reshaping how design teams think about complexity. Not as something to eliminate entirely, but as something to frame, guide, and simplify.
The products that win in 2025 and beyond will be the ones that remove guesswork and give users the clarity to act.
