As I was scrolling Instagram, I was recommended this website on a reel, so here I am reading and writing notes from it.

The Designer’s Mind

How your own psychology shapes what you design

01. Introduction

Whether you use a progress bar is a claim about how people experience effort. You make these claims everyday. The only question is whether you make them with understanding of how people actually think and work, or just with a gut feeling and a deadline.
Most people assume that if they explained the new design well enough, users would come around. None of that is how people work.

There are 4 problems that come in the following order

Before a user sees anything you made, your brain has already been distorting the work. You design for yourself without knowing it.
Defaults steer choices silently. Layouts communicate before a word is read. Complexity exhausts people who never complain, they just leave…
Then arrive users. They are carriers of habits, emotions and cultural assumptions you did not design for. They react before they think.
Finally comes the organization. The system you work inside shapes what ships as much as any decision you make at your desk.

02. Nobody Thinks Like You

False consensus makes you think users think like you. They do not. Your preferences feels like evidence because your brain keeps using itself as the sample size.

An interesting example:

Most people who watch others contest a decision feel that the person must love conflict or is paranoid about authority or has something to prove. The same logic runs in reverse. The people who contest decisions think you are soft for not fighting back.

In design reviews, someone builds a navigation system that makes perfect sense to them and then describes users who cannot find their way around as “not the target user” or “low tech literacy”.
Your own preferences, habits and reactions are the nearest data you have. You have lived them, so they feel solid. When your brain tries to estimate what is normal, it reaches for the nearest example it can find and starts there.
One test worth running after any design choice is to run it by someone who has never seen the product before and ask them to navigate / user it. If you are not doing this then you are leaning on your own experience again.
Your instincts are not worthless. Pattern recognition built from real observation matters. But pattern recognition built from your own preferences, dressed up over years as expertise, is still assumption.

The most dangerous thing in design is not getting it wrong. It is getting it wrong while feeling dead certain you got it right.

03. You Ruin Your Own Designs

A lot of time you start giving excuses. You hide behind constraints and not double down on a bolder vision. You justify it by saying that the simpler router is more realistic or hide behind the constraints. You stop making the best call and start making the call that’s the hardest to attack.

Don’t design like someone who’s trying not to get questioned.
It may look responsible. You keep the familiar patterns because it feels safe. You soften the stronger label because it may seem overconfident. The entire thing gets smaller and more defensive, one decision at a time.
Researchers call it self-handicapping. People with a fixed view of their own abilities were more afraid of failing, and that fear pushed them towards one specific goal: avoiding showing inability. Not make great work. Just avoid looking bad.
Fear should be questioned just like anything else that shapes the work. Most of the time, nobody questions it at all.

The user never sees the personal struggle. They see the decision that came out of it.

04. Design for Your Ego

Cognitive dissonance makes criticism feel personal. Once your identity gets tied up in the work, feedback stops being useful input and starts feeling like something you should defend against.

Feedback regarding your work is often not a proof of whether you are good at doing your job. It is often scoped to your current task. Taking it to heart and allowing it to penetrate your identity makes it unproductive.
Cutting out work from your solution feels too close to admitting that you were not as smart as you projected to be. The threat feels personal before the defense starts sounding intellectual.
Instead of phrasing things as “this might go wrong”, rephrase it as “it already failed” and then ask why. If you are not trying to protect a LIVE idea anymore. You are looking back at something that already fell over, which makes it easier to be honest about where it was weak.

05. Your Mind Lies to You

The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response is going to be.

This is not truth or clarity. It is just ease.

In design or code, as you keep opening the same file, the same screens, the same flows; you stop needing to work to understand it because your brain knows the route. The work appears to be better because you got faster at reading your own intentions.

Familiarity can masquerade as simplicity.

The way to address this is to step away from the file and then come back to it. The places where you start filling in meaning from memory instead of from the screen, that is where the trouble is beginning.
Try to loudly narrate the screen as if you are seeing it for the first time. The first place where the narration gets muddy is usually not a speaking problem. It points to a design problem.
This is why outside eyes matter. Not because your judgement is useless, but it is no longer fresh. Other people hit spots your own brain has been smoothening over.

06. Taste Isn’t Talent

07. Creativity Isn’t Magic

08. Deadlines Make Your Dumb

09. Love at First Sketch

10. Your Knowledge Is The Problem

11. You Are Not Listening

Minding the Design

How interface mechanics shape perception and behavior

12. Pass the Vibe Check First

13. Your Design Is Rigged

14. Stop Hiding What’s Clickable

15. Intuitive Design Is a Lie

16. Your UI is Exhausting

17. Stop Breaking the Pattern

18. Nobody Remembers Your UI

19. Design the Last Moment First

20. Fake Progress is Real Motivation

21. Layout Speaks Before You Do

The User’s Mind

What users bring psychologically before they ever touch your product

22. Users Don’t Think in Tasks

23. Users Want Now, Not Later

24. Your Users Are Lying to You

25. Users React, Then Rationalize

26. Users Will Hate Your New Design

27. Your Design Doesn’t Translate

28. Old Habits Beat Better Products

29. More Options Make Users Quit

30. Users Will Ignore You

31. Your Design Made Them Quit

The Organization’s Mind

How the system you work inside, shapes what gets shipped