Your brain has a budget. Good design either spends it wisely or blows it. Not all mental effort is the same — and that distinction turns out to matter enormously for how we design things people…
Your mental model of an app and the designer's rarely match — and that gap explains a lot. Every time you tap something and get a surprise, every time a feature hides somewhere you'd never look, every…
The word "affordance" is everywhere in design — and almost always wrong. Don Norman borrowed a term from ecological psychology, put it at the heart of design thinking, and then watched it get mangled…
What makes a button feel clickable — and what happens when it doesn't? A button seems like the simplest thing in design. Press it, something happens. But beneath that transaction sits a surprisingly…
Your font is already talking. The question is whether you're listening. Before you read a single word, the typeface carrying it has already made an impression — formal or casual, trustworthy or…
One in twelve men can't read your colour-coded design the way you intended. That's not a niche accessibility footnote — it's a quiet, persistent failure woven into the fabric of everyday UX. Colour is…
Your eye moves before your brain does. Visual hierarchy is why. Every screen you use has been designed — consciously or not — to pull your attention in a particular direction. The size of a heading,…
Your eyes decide what matters before your brain knows you're looking. Most of us assume we read a screen the way we read a book — left to right, top to bottom, taking it all in. But decades of…
Why does a button feel clickable? Why do some interfaces feel intuitive almost instantly? And why can cluttered apps feel exhausting to use?The answer often comes back to a set of ideas from early…
User research did not always look like Zoom calls, heatmaps, and analytics dashboards.In this episode of HCI Explained, we trace how researchers studied people and technology from the 1980s to today.…
