Chapter 9The Mental Model

images/idea.jpg

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 [Spo11], “A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

Of course, different people have different ideas ...

Get Designed for Use now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.