Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11 The Mental Model

The people who use your products are not neutral or unbiased. They have ideas about how your product should work before they’ve ever used it. And yet, most products don’t work the way people expect them to; people have to learn how to use things.

Instead of forcing people to learn how to use your product, wouldn’t it be better if you created products that work the way people already expect them to work? Joel Spolsky notes in User Interface Design for Programmers [Spo01], “A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

Of course, different people have different ideas ...