psych-cognitive-load

psych-cognitive-load is a skill for Claude Code from volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin. It costs 66 tokens per session (1,994 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A UX analysis guide based on ten principles about how interfaces use people’s attention and mental effort. It covers topics such as information grouping, choice design, cognitive load, and making features easy to find.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review Figma screens, screenshots, live products, or written interface descriptions against cognitive-interaction principles.
Why use it?
It helps identify interface decisions that make users think too hard or miss important options. It also provides examples for judging whether a screen is easy to understand.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the design-engineer plugin — 57 skills, 11 commands, 10 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to review Figma screens, screenshots, live products, or written interface descriptions against cognitive-interaction principles.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin --skill psych-cognitive-load
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-engineer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills, 11 commands, 10 agents, 6 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for psych-cognitive-load

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for psych-cognitive-load

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin/psych-cognitive-load.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,994 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00066 $0.01994
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.00997
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00399
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00199

Measured 9d ago against content hash 6c50e46cca3a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

psych-cognitive-load scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/psych-cognitive-load/SKILL.md · 192 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 192 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Interaction (Laws 1-10)

How to simplify information, reduce brain load, and make interaction intuitive.

Reference Files

Workflow

Step 1: Understand What to Analyze

Ask the user what they want to evaluate against cognitive interaction principles.

Ask the user:

What would you like me to analyze against cognitive interaction principles?

  1. Figma frames – I will examine specific screens from your Figma file
  2. Screenshots – share screenshots of the interface to review
  3. Design description – describe the interface, flow, or feature in text
  4. Live product – provide a URL and I will review the current state

Wait for the user's response before proceeding.

Step 2: Load Section Principles

Read the full principles reference file: section-1-principles.md

This file contains all 10 principles of cognitive interaction:

# Principle Core Question
1 Cognitive Load Is the interface showing too much information at once?
2 Hick's Law Are there too many choices slowing down decisions?
3 Fitts's Law Are important targets large enough and close enough?
4 Miller's Law Are groups of items kept within the 7 plus/minus 2 range?
5 Recognition Over Recall Does the interface show options instead of requiring memory?
6 Progressive Disclosure Is information revealed gradually based on need?
7 Chunking Is content grouped into logical blocks of 3-5 items?
8 Visual Hierarchy Do important elements stand out through size, color, or contrast?
9 Law of Proximity Are related elements placed close together?
10 Discoverability Can users easily find and understand available actions?

Read the full file on GitHub · 192 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 192 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A 6c50e46cca3a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

psych-cognitive-load is a skill published in the GitHub repository volomydyr/design-engineer-plugin (19 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 1,994 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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