When UX Meets Cognitive Conundrums: Why Our Intuition Cheats Us Sometimes

The 4 Conundrums That Shape How We Interact

These are universal “limits” (not glitches) we all run into. Biases, heuristics, and fail-safe mental shortcuts are ways our brains try to cope. In UX, these conundrums are the soil from which confusion, poor usability, and bad expectations grow.

1. There’s Too Much Information

   The world around us is overflowing, screens, apps, messages, choices, visual signals. Our senses and attention can’t process all of it. So we filter. We simplify. We ignore things that might matter because we simply can’t hold them. As a designer, I see this when someone misses a button because it blends in, or when menus get so full you stop opening them.

   
   

2. We Can Be Misled by what’s Not There

   Absences are powerful. If something is missing, feedback, instructions, affordances; our mind fills the blank with assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions are wildly wrong. Think: placeholder text that disappears, icons without labels, modes or states that change but give no signal. Our mental model fractures.
   
   

3. Past Shapes Our Present

   Habits, patterns, learned expectation, all of these anchor us. We depend on what we’ve seen before. That’s both useful (people recognize icons, understand layout norms) and dangerous (people expect things that aren’t there, resist new paradigms). In UX, this shows up when your “innovative new nav” gets confusing, because people carry old menus in their head.
   
   

4. Everything is Noisy, Even Noise

   There’s signal, but then there’s static. Not just literal visual or auditory noise, but interface clutter, irrelevant choices, visual decoration masquerading as function. Our brain works to reject noise, but sometimes it rejects what’s meaningful by mistake. Or it gets tired. Or overwhelmed.

Why Knowing These Conundrums Changes How I Design

Here are a few ways I try to use this awareness in my daily work. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

• I consider what’s not being shown as much as what is. Every invisibility is an assumption being made. If feedback is missing (user clicks, modes shift, state changes), I try to build in visible cues.

• I remove choices. If too many options confuse, reduce them. If you must show everything, group or hide secondary ones. Let core tasks have center stage.

• I lean into patterns people already know, so that relearning cost is lower. But I also test assumptions: “What do people expect here?” through prototypes or sketches.

• I respect quiet spaces: empty states, margins, pauses, waiting screens. These aren’t wastes—they are breathing rooms where users recalibrate, orient, and understand context.

Reflection: Designing With the Unseen

I don’t think we’ll ever escape these conundrums. They are baked into how brains, perception, and environments work. What we can do is design with them in mind, notice when they tug, twist, or betray our expectations.

So next time you build a flow, prototype a screen, or sketch a dashboard, pause and ask:

• What information might be overwhelming here?

• What’s missing, that users might quietly expect?

• What past experience might people be bringing in here?

• Is there noise masquerading as signal, or signal being lost because of noise?

If you catch one of those, you’ve done more than eliminate frustration, you’ve opened space for clarity.