Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products

Monthly Book Review

Designing and creating products is as much art as it is science. No matter how long you’ve been doing it, people will always surprise you because people are full of surprises and constantly changing.

That’s why, as product managers and designers, we have to be students of human psychology and the cognitive processes that drive decision making. And that’s what Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products is all about.

Overview

Design for How People Think blends cognitive science and user experience (UX) design, showing how understanding the brain's natural processes can lead to better designs and better products. The book focuses on how we process information, make decisions, and act on those decisions, offering insights into the cognitive behaviors that can drive more user-friendly designs. The book also provides practical frameworks, particularly around research techniques and user interviewing, that all of us can apply to create more intuitive and engaging experiences and products.

I always enjoy reading these types of books. This is a relatively short read. If you’ve been a practitioner for a long time, none of this information will be new. But it will be a great refresher. If you are new to user research, this will give you a great overview of tools and techniques.

So let’s explore a couple of key points.

Key Takeaways

Align Designs with Users’ Mental Models

All of us create mental models and frameworks for how things should be. Our job as designers and product managers is to uncover those mental models.

One of the book’s central ideas is the importance of designing products that align with users' mental models—their internal representations of how things work. If a design mirrors how users expect things to function, it becomes more intuitive and easier to use. Conversely, if there’s a mismatch, users become confused and frustrated.

In the book, the author uses the example of a government auction site that didn’t use the same pattern as eBay for its auctions. Its buttons were in different places, making the experience confusing for users. Since eBay was the dominant mental model, the solution was for the government auction site to change its design to be like eBay to conform to the prevailing model.