Leveraging Mental Models in UX Design

Learn how to actually use mental models

Hi there 👋 I'm Michelle and welcome to Edition 75 of Design Insight. A weekly newsletter for creatives with a focus on design.

✨ Enjoying Design Insight? Please share it with a friend.

I’m back from my vacation this week and can feel the creative batteries are almost back to full power!

One of the best things to come back to was the release of Obsidian v1.0. The UI has been overhauled, the new default theme is beautiful, and you can now use tabs to manage your writing/note-taking workflow. I highly recommend you check Obsidian out, there’s never been a better time!

Let's get started.

---

📃 2 Articles

Leveraging Mental Models in UX Design

The article in 3 ideas:

1. Users will always approach new apps based on what they've used before (they already have developed mental models). It's important for designers to design with this in mind.

2. A designer bubble can happen when you design something that makes sense to other designers but confuses the average user.

3. Usability testing etc. helps designers to understand the mental models of users.

Read The Full Article ➜

How To Make Smarter Design Tradeoffs

The article in 3 ideas:

1. The reality of designing something is that there will be tradeoffs with the design in favor of constraints or business goals.

2. Every product should have a high-level goal or overarching vision that should guide the decision-making day to day.

3. Clarity > Consistency

Read The Full Article ➜

---

🔨 2 Tools/Resources

Paper Wireframe Kit ➜

• A Lo-Fi wireframing kit

Palette - Colorize Photos ➜

• A vibrant AI colorizer app

---

🎨 1 Design Tip

Design Tip

Adham Dannaway @AdhamDannaway

⚡️ UI design tip - Use steppers for numeric fields instead of dropdowns ✅ Steppers make it easier and faster for people to make small numeric changes with a single button press or by typing More quick tips 👇 #uxdesign #uidesign #design #designtips #uiux

---

Last week's most popular links:

1. How I Reframed My Digital Life After Reading Building a Second Brain ➜

2. How real people process notes ➜

---

I want to support Design Insight

I want access to all the tools and resources mentioned in Design Insight

You’ve reached the end of this week’s edition of Design Insight. Thank you for reading, I truly hope you found value in the design insights I shared today.

Til next week 👋

Michelle

---

How can I improve Design Insight?

I'd love to hear from you about how you think I can improve Design Insight. After all, I created this newsletter to help you on your design journey!

---