Alp Şeker
Dec 30, 2025
5 min read
How Smooth User Experience can Weaponize Cognitive Ease
The ‘Order Complete’ screen is now the most easily reachable screen in the digital landscape. Between the initial impulse and the final transaction, the modern food delivery interface has successfully scrubbed away every moment of hesitation. There is no check on delivery fees, no pause to consider menu markups, and not a single second to interrogate one’s own hunger. The user is no longer given the space to comprehend if they are truly hungry or simply reacting to the exhaustion of a long day. The interface has achieved its ultimate goal: moving the user from a push-notification to a financial transaction before their critical thinking can even engage.
The following exploration deconstructs the soft power of ‘clean’ interfaces, where over-user-friendliness strips away the decision-making elements essential for the free will of the user. By examining the mechanics of cognitive load, it becomes clear that smooth flows don’t just lower friction, they create an ethical dilemma. In this space, the effort to understand is removed, and the ability to choose is lost with it.
The Soft Power of the Interface
Over-user-friendliness is a form of soft power. When an interface makes the act of purchasing suuuuuuuper easy, the ‘critical distance’ between a fleeting desire and a permanent action is collapsed. In an environment defined by hustle culture and chronic exhaustion, the modern user is often too depleted to navigate the friction of cooking or even walking to a local shop.
In these moments of cognitive vulnerability, free will is surrendered to the app. These platforms do not merely wait for the user; they strategically intervene with high-fidelity notifications timed for peak moments of hunger and fatigue. The users are not simply choosing convenience; they are yielding to a system ensuring that our free will remains dormant while the algorithm takes the lead.
The Invisible Architecture of Submission
As designers, we often treat “reducing cognitive load” as an objective moral good. We believe that by making a product easier to use, we are helping the user. When we design to eliminate every hurdle, we aren’t just removing frustration; we are often removing the “pause” required for conscious thought. We have reached a point where we are meticulously designing the surrender of our users’ autonomy, using the science of the mind to ensure they don’t have to think at all. To understand how this surrender is engineered, we must look at the three layers of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)
Giuliano Orrù & Luca Longo, “The Evolution of Cognitive Load Theory and the Measurement of Its Intrinsic, Extraneous and Germane Loads: A Review,” 2019.
The Science: Understanding Cognitive Load
In traditional UX design, the goal is to manage the user’s limited “working memory” through cognitive load. This memory is managed by the balance of three distinct types of cognitive load.
Intrinsic Load:
The inherent difficulty of the task (e.g., deciding what to eat). Designers simplify this to prevent us from feeling overwhelmed.
Extraneous Load:
The “noise” or messy UI. We are taught to eliminate this for a seamless experience.
Germane Load:
The “good friction.” This is the mental work required for meaningful learning and free will.
The problem today is that the Superapps don’t just stop at removing the “noise”. They have started cannibalizing the Germance Load, the very part of our thinking process that allows for understanding and our free will as users. By over-optimizing for mental ease, where the user really doesn’t have to learn, evaluate or even think anymore. When this cognitive effort is removed, we are left with a fundamental question: how much of a choice truly belongs to us when we were never given the chance to consider the question, let alone the alternatives?
The Invisibility of Consequence
The smoother the UI and the user flow gets, the more invisible the ethical consequences of the purchase become. We rarely stop to question the stark price discrepancy between the digital menu and the physical one, or the layers of service and delivery fees stacked on top. The interface is designed to hide these costs; it acts as a digital veil that separates us from the economic reality of our choices.
The CTA as a Moral Shortcut
We are being conditioned to view existence through the lens of a CTA button. By reducing the cognitive load to a single click, apps ensure that our critical thinking never has a chance to engage. And I don’t believe this to be a coincidence. This is no accident. The faster we skim, the faster the delivery arrives, and the more we allow apps to take full control of our habits, our time, and eventually, our autonomy.
The Designer’s Responsibility
Stepping away from food delivery apps over the past few months has been a revelation for me as a product designer. Our influence isn’t limited to a secluded digital experience; it sets the tone for a user’s entire lifestyle and their expectations of technology. It is our duty to move beyond mere convenience and provide design solutions that are as ethical as they are functional. In this context, mastering Cognitive Load Theory, and learning which loads to reduce and which to deliberately highlight, becomes a primary responsibility for both designers and stakeholders.
To protect the user’s free will, we must begin designing for ‘conscious friction.’
For businesses, this means moving away from deceptive user-friendly flows and UI, and toward radical transparency, where costs, fees, and alternatives are not buried, but presented as essential context for a fair transaction.
For designers, it means prioritizing Germane Load: creating interfaces that encourage a moment of pause rather than a rush to the finish line. We must stop treating the ‘user’ as a metric to be optimized and start treating them as a human being whose capacity for choice is the most valuable feature we can support.
