Echoes of the Real World · heuristic
Mental Models
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Users act on a compressed internal story of how your system works — built from every other system they've used. When the interface matches the model, it feels intuitive; when it fights the model, every click is a small betrayal.
Where it comes from
Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation that minds run "small-scale models" of reality to predict outcomes before acting. Don Norman carried the idea into design: his famous door studies showed people push handles that look pushable regardless of what the door actually does. The interface IS the model the user builds — design the story, not just the screen.
Origin: Craik's 1943 small-scale models; Norman's door studies
In the wild
- Files & folders
Fifty years after paper, we still organise bytes into "folders" because the model survived the medium.
- Shopping carts
Add, review, checkout — e-commerce works because it borrowed a model every human already had.
- EV dashboards
Electric cars kept "fuel gauge" metaphors; range anxiety is a mental-model gap, not a battery gap.
Further reading
Don't just read it — feel it.
Play the 3-minute game and let your own reactions prove the law.
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