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Mental models for designers

Ideas designers keep coming back to, each held in the words of the people who state it. Our one-line explanations are our reading; the claims under them are theirs.

Ideas from design

Less, but better
Find the essence and cut the rest; simplicity is hard work, not the absence of effort.
- Focus and simplicity are worth the work: simple can be harder than complex, because the thinking has to be got clean, but once there one can move mountains. Steve Jobs
- Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essentials. Dieter Rams
From 60 people See all 81 claims
Design is how it works
Judge a design by what it does for the person using it, not only by how it looks.
- Design is not how a product looks; it is how it works, and all builders are designers. Julie Zhuo
- The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness, but only well-executed objects can be beautiful. Dieter Rams
From 27 people See all 35 claims
You are not the user
Watch real people use the real thing; your own sense of what is obvious does not count as evidence.
- Even the worst usability test with the wrong user shows important things to improve Steve Krug
- A static artboard makes edge cases hard to think of, so you end up designing only the happy path, because you are not testing with real data or real components. Pablo Stanley
From 16 people See all 20 claims
Curse of knowledge
Once you know something, you cannot remember not knowing it. Fresh eyes see what you no longer can: a newcomer's, or your own after time away.
- What is obvious to you is often not obvious to anyone else, so show early drafts to a representative reader. Steven Pinker
- Design that looks good at the end of the day often does not look good the next morning. Jason Fried
From 7 people See all 10 claims
Conventions (Jakob's law)
People bring what they learned on every other product, so familiar patterns usually win over novel ones.
- Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they prefer yours to work the same way as the sites they already know. Jakob Nielsen
- Widely shared interface conventions amount to a form of mass education nobody enrolled in. Kenneth Reitz
From 6 people See all 8 claims
Affordances and signifiers
An interface should show what can be done and where, and give people a model of how it works.
- Affordances determine what actions are possible and signifiers communicate where to act, and design needs both Don Norman
- Graphical interfaces have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want. Jakob Nielsen
From 12 people See all 18 claims
Conservation of complexity
Some complexity cannot be removed, only moved; the question is who carries it, the user or the maker.
- Every application has an irreducible amount of complexity; the only question is who has to deal with it: the user, the application developer or the platform developer. Larry Tesler
- Good interface design uses clarity to hide complexity; good game design uses clarity to teach it. Raph Koster
From 12 people See all 12 claims
Make it real
Making a cheap, real version settles questions a description cannot.
- In a product review a prototype beats a static mock, and a static mock beats a lot of words. Dylan Field
- Mocks and docs are dying: AI-native teams prototype and prune with code-first prototypes instead of static mocks and product requirement documents. Julie Zhuo
From 26 people See all 28 claims
Speed is a feature
Fast software feels simple, and waiting makes everything feel complicated.
- Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. Craig Mod
- Savings in time feel like simplicity: when forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. John Maeda
From 7 people See all 12 claims
Craft in the details
Care about the parts nobody sees; quality shows in the details.
- You are not a craftsperson unless you care about the parts of a product that other people do not see. Tobias Lütke
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail: nothing must be arbitrary, and care in the design process shows respect towards the user. Dieter Rams
From 21 people See all 21 claims

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The question

Which mental models should a designer think with?
53 people · 11 views