The spirit of this piece is excellent, and introduces some useful terms from psychology to help codify - and more importantly, explain - how to make tasks less unnecessarily demanding.
However, as someone who spends their days teaching and writing about cognitive psychology, worth clarifying that this isn’t quite correct:
Intrinsic - caused by the inherent difficulty of a task. It can't be reduced, it's at the very heart of software development.
Intrinsic load is a function of the element interactivity that results within a task (the degree to which different elements, or items, that you need to think about interact and rely upon one another), and prior knowledge.
You can’t really reduce element interactivity if you want to keep the task itself intact. However if it’s possible to break a task down into sub tasks then you can often reduce this somewhat, at the expense of efficiency.
However, you can absolutely affect the prior knowledge factor that influences intrinsic load. The author speaks of the finding from Cowan (2001) that working memory can process 4+—1 items simultaneously, but what most people neglect here is that what constitutes an “item” is wholly depending upon the schemas that a given person has embedded in their long-term memory. Example: someone with no scientific knowledge may look at O2 + C6H12O6 -> CO2 + H2O as potentially up to 18 items of information to handle (then individual characters), whereas someone with some experience of biology may instead handle this entire expression as a single unit - using their knowledge in long-term memory to “chunk” this string as a single unit - ‘the unbalanced symbol equation for respiration’.
However, as someone who spends their days teaching and writing about cognitive psychology, worth clarifying that this isn’t quite correct:
Intrinsic - caused by the inherent difficulty of a task. It can't be reduced, it's at the very heart of software development.
Intrinsic load is a function of the element interactivity that results within a task (the degree to which different elements, or items, that you need to think about interact and rely upon one another), and prior knowledge.
You can’t really reduce element interactivity if you want to keep the task itself intact. However if it’s possible to break a task down into sub tasks then you can often reduce this somewhat, at the expense of efficiency.
However, you can absolutely affect the prior knowledge factor that influences intrinsic load. The author speaks of the finding from Cowan (2001) that working memory can process 4+—1 items simultaneously, but what most people neglect here is that what constitutes an “item” is wholly depending upon the schemas that a given person has embedded in their long-term memory. Example: someone with no scientific knowledge may look at O2 + C6H12O6 -> CO2 + H2O as potentially up to 18 items of information to handle (then individual characters), whereas someone with some experience of biology may instead handle this entire expression as a single unit - using their knowledge in long-term memory to “chunk” this string as a single unit - ‘the unbalanced symbol equation for respiration’.