How UX Designers Can Use Neurodesign to Boost Focus and Productivity

By Andrés Zapata, D.Sc. \ September 10, 2025

Multitasking is the biggest con the modern world has ever sold us, right up there with fad diets that promise you can eat nothing but cheddar cheese and still lose ten pounds.

Dr. Steve Robbins, the 2024 keynote speaker at the American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, reminded us that people are not wired to process multiple high-level tasks simultaneously.

Multicost of Multitasking, a 2019 article published by the NIH (originally from Cerebrum), makes it pretty darn clear that multitasking is a misnomer because the human brain lacks the architecture to process multiple cognitive tasks simultaneously.

Instead, our brain is an expert task “switchster” which undermines productivity and efficiency. Thanks, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the brain’s executive, including attention coordination, applying rules, and inhibiting distractions).

This makes it central to deciding which task rules are active at any moment. Think of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (in the vicinity of your forehead) as a sweaty stage manager, orchestrating all the mental spotlights, while the anterior cingulate cortex (below the prefrontal cortex) steps in as the director, calling for a scene change when one task is done and the next clamors for attention.

The result? Every time you hop from an urgent email to your social feed or from one spreadsheet to another, you pay the “switch tax” — a hidden time and energy toll that can tally up to hours per day and exhaustion.

A waste of time… and energy

Researchers from the University of Michigan suggest that constantly shifting tasks can consume as much as 40% of your productive time. Another study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that even brief switches lead to tiny but significant delays (tenths of a second and almost up to a whole second) each time you let your mind dance around like a caffeinated pinball. And it all adds up. Before you know it, your day has vanished, and you have little to show for it aside from a mind swirling with half-finished thoughts and a to-do list that’s grown more heads than a hydra. Oh, the anxiety.

Enter neurodesign principles, an approach that considers how our brains work rather than how we might wish they did. The neurodesign model insists on designing user interfaces and experiences that free people from the tyranny and pitfalls of multitasking. As a designer, what wouldn’t we do to respect users’ time and energy? Instead of forcing people to pay switching taxes every few seconds, neurodesign calls for clarity, focus, and “moderate minimalism,” as designs shouldn’t be so minimal that they look desolate or unfinished (or broken, yikes).

When a site or app floods the screen with auto-playing videos, spinning pop-ups, and confetti-cannon alerts, it sends the prefrontal cortex a frantic to-do list: filter this out, attend to that, what will happen if click on that, read this, skim that. So the moment the user tries to concentrate on one task — check out their shopping cart — another confetti avalanche hijacks their attention.

Clearly, it’s a circus up there, and the brain desperately tries to step out of the ring, attempts a mid-air mental pivot, and then stumbles in sensory and emotional exhaustion.

Designing for the “multitasker”

Designs that follow neurodesign channel the user toward a single goal, one step at a time, making it less likely they’ll have to slam the brakes, spin around, and reorient themselves with every click. There are a few simple and elegant ways to boost task persistence, such as subtle color cues to indicate the most relevant information, well-labeled navigation so you’re never lost, and tidy, meaningful notifications rather than an endless barrage of technical instructions that mean little even to the engineers that put them there.

It’s not about ignoring the chaos of the modern world; it’s about refusing to add to it. The more friction we remove from the user’s journey, the fewer mental gymnastics they must do.

Simple, clear, elegant, effective, and functional design example that uses hue, white space, and luminosity to guide the eye.

Of course, real life is still a shouting match of demands. Our phones buzz like needy toddlers, Slack pings pop up like hyper gophers, and the cat shoots us a judgmental glare until we feed it. I am hungry, it’s cold, this chair is cozy, I gotta pee, I can’t forget to pick up the kids after school today, or my wife will kill me. Our attention is continuously under a barrage of competing external and internal stimuli.

Designers can’t exactly hush all that external noise, but we can make sure our products don’t pile on. With a little neuro-this-and-that, we can help users do what their brains are wired to do: focus on one big thing at a time. After all, the more we consider how the mind naturally processes information, the less likely we’ll force people to bounce between tasks.

So yes, multitasking is about as real as a rainbow unicorn ordering a latte at Starbucks. But by recognizing the hidden costs of switching and applying some thoughtful neurodesign know-how, our work can be a bright spot in a cesspool of distraction.

Focus, clarity, and simplicity might not turn the user’s entire world into a Zen garden, but we’ll at least spare their prefrontal cortex from the daily carnival. And hey, that might be the best gift a designer can offer the people using their interfaces.

Let me know what you think of all this. Push back. Applaud.