Which mental models should a designer think with?

Their wordsthe AI models they want to add. They want to add or patch as a form of making better. But I I I think the design process is really about editing away.

Their wordsLess, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Their wordsYour sensibilities about simplicity being equal to ease of use are wrong. They're just simply wrong. Right? We saw the definitions of simple and easy. They're completely different things. Right? So, easy is not simple.

Their wordsThe simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.

Their wordsEverything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Their wordsSimplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Their wordsVigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Their wordsWe as designers, our job now with limitless UI out there, is how do we take it and make a restrained version of this where form follows function and we're avoiding decoration for decoration's sake.

Their wordsIn some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.

Their wordsDesign is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.

Their wordsThe aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Their wordsI don't really do user research in a traditional sense because I don't think users know what they want. Your job is to figure it out. So, you should just give people opportunities to tell you things without telling you things.

Their wordsAnd the trick here is not to act too much on the feedback that the very disappointed people are giving you because they already love your product. Also, not to act at all really on the feedback that the not disappointed people are giving you because they're so far from loving your product that they are essentially a lost cause. but to focus on the segment of the somewhat disappointed people.

Their wordsIf you cannot get a group of people for whom your product is designed for to generally agree that your design is good, it’s not good.

Their wordsHuman error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error.

Their wordsTesting always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site.

Their wordsBut in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Their wordsSometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.

Their wordsObviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.

Their wordsBut given the already complicated premise of long exposure photography, the best possible thing we could do — and as a designer this is hard to admit — was to stick to a fairly conventional design and let the actual features surprise and delight.

Their wordsUsers spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Their wordsOn the contrary, a first-time visitor to a site will be able to use expert features without having to learn the site because he or she can transfer learning from other sites.

Their wordsBig flat toggle buttons under satisfying tension. Clear affordances. You push them down, not in. One click catches, one doesn't. You can use them with bare hands, oven mitts, fingers coated in slippery whatever. Doesn't matter. Plenty of surface area. Outstanding design. It's all been downhill from there.

Their wordsGUIs have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.

Their wordsHopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.

Their wordsWe consider interface copy to be an affordance, too. Reading it is an act that gives the user information for subsequent actions.

Their wordsWhere UX tries to provide a likely false but useful mental model of the interior workings to the user, game design tries to guide the player towards a fairly accurate mental model.

Their wordsAffordances control what actions are possible. For designers, signifiers are far more important. Signifiers are how communication takes place, how one signals the appropriate controls and operations.

Their wordsTwo of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.

Their wordsAffordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.

Their wordsThe most important principle for taming complexity is to provide a good conceptual model, which has already been well covered in this book.

Their wordsSo, I thought it would be useful to remind everyone that the easiest and cheapest strategy for dealing with complexity is not to invent something to manage it, but to avoid the complexity altogether with a more clever plan.

Their wordsUX is about clarity that hides complexity, and game design is about clarity that teaches complexity.

Their wordsIt clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Their wordsAnd recognize that when you simplify things, you often end up with more things. Right? Simplicity is not about counting.

Their wordsEvery application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?

Their wordssometimes you want a whiteboard, sometimes you want a a paper sketch, sometimes you want a wireframe, sometimes you want Figma, and sometimes you want these live prototypes. And I think that the best designers I think will understand and intuit when to go to to which one

Their wordsI think it's so important to really be aligned at a conceptual level before we even start moving into like visual experiments and prototypes because I think one trap that we can fall into as designers is coming up with like a bunch of options and then picking one too early.

Their wordsthat's a good example, I think, of so much of design is just iteration and discovery. I might have an intent, but stumbling upon something like this is is just sticking with it, right? And just going like one more iteration.

Their wordsThere’s just no way we could have shipped this if we started with static mocks and Figma or if we started with a PRD.

Their wordsat least my product reviews and uh product conversations, I feel like prototypes beat static mocks and static mocks beat lots of words.

Their wordsit's, I think, critical that ideas don't die on the vine because you've got, um, a visual expression that doesn't match what everyone else expects. Sometimes people will just filter them out because they don't look right.

Their wordsSay goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.

Their wordsFast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow.

Their wordsSpeed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality. If an application slows down on simple tasks, then it can mean the engineers aren’t obsessive detail sticklers.

Their wordsThe bandwidth capacity of your users' connections might improve noticeably, as it steadily has, but the latency needle won't move much at all. This means that minimizing the number of roundtrips you make to display information on page is essential to great user experience and responsiveness.

Their wordsWhen forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.

Their wordsThere is no shortcut to having taste or developing like a high craft high velocity practice. I think that with AI, we have shortcuts to creating a lot of things. But at the end of the day, it comes back to discovering and learning the language of visual design.

Their wordsThe baseline of user expectation quality and craft keeps rising.

Their wordsEasing is the most important part of any animation. It can make a bad animation feel great and a great animation feel bad. That’s why you have to know which easing to choose in a specific situation.

Their wordsNothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.

Their wordswhen people talk online about taste, taste, taste, taste, taste. All taste is, I think, is editing from with a point of view.

Their wordsIt's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?

Their wordsI think that's what defines taste you're exposed to these underlying configurations of how things look and we always search for symmetry you always search for things that are in order accidentally the nature is is perfect right everything is in order it's mathematically perfect but at the same time you know they change they move they're colors they're light so exposing yourself to those things and and understanding how these things make everything look is how you practice taste

Their wordsUltimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.