Universal Principles of UX

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Make expectations work in your favor.

In 1943 Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed that people carry in their minds a small-scale model of how the world works, which they use to anticipate events and form explanations. These models of reality are constructed on personal life experiences, perceptions, and understandings of the world, and they allow us to filter and store new information to predict similar future events. He called these expectations “mental models,” and this cognitive representation of reality is extremely important in the fields of UX and HCI.

Why? Because people tap into their existing mental models to interact with an interface. And those mental models are not only based on their previous experiences in the real ...