​Understand what happens in the user's head, and Design based on that understanding. It's flawless! Right?

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Cognitive Theory is a Classical, 'first wave' approach to HCI that draws heavily from Cognitive Psychology in an attempt to explain how users perceive the sensory information (in the context of computing, of course), and use information processing models to guide design. The use of Cognitive theory during the "Golden Age of HCI" resulted in a variety of frameworks, guidelines, and heuristics meant to inform the design of computer interfaces. Unfortunately, many cognitive approaches are not directly applicable to HCI, & practitioners eventually learned that a large gap between theory and practice arose when they attempted to simply take psychological theories and use them as guidelines for interface design. This gap is exacerbated by a lack of consideration for other factors, such as environment, culture, and social elements. Realization of these drawbacks eventually pushed practitioners to explore alternative approaches and led to a second wave of approaches.

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Fortunately, Cognitive Theory still has much to offer to the HCI field. Possibly the most important contribution of Cognitive Theory was the investigation of human capabilities and limitations in the context of computer systems - such as perception, attention, and decision-making. These contributions gave designers pause and pushed them to more carefully consider the implications of their designs on user performance. Many important thinkers have wrestled with Cognitive Theory in one form or another at some point in there careers, including Jonathan Grudin, Bill Buxton, & Herbert Simon.