Name: Designing with the Mind in Mind
ISBN: 9780124079144

Designing with the Mind in Mind

User interface (UI) design rules and guidelines, developed by early HCI gurus and recognized throughout the field, were based on cognitive psychology (study of mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language), and early practitioners were well informed of its tenets. But today practitioners with backgrounds in cognitive psychology are a minority, as user interface designers and developers enter the field from a wide array of disciplines. HCI practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to UI design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychological basis behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, best-selling author Jeff Johnson provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow. - Provides an essential source for user interface design rules and how, when, and why to apply them - Arms designers with the science behind each design rule, allowing them to make informed decisions in projects, and to explain those decisions to others - Equips readers with the knowledge to make educated tradeoffs between competing rules, project deadlines, and budget pressures - Completely updated and revised, including additional coverage in such areas as persuasion, cognitive economics and decision making, emotions, trust, habit formation, and speech UIs

What Hacker News says

rishi_rtSep 2025

Such checklist/rule based approaches do not help anyone. Trying to understand why the said rules work from the standpoint of visual perception is much more beneficial in the long run. Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson (of Xerox PARC) is an introductory book on the why behind UI design guidelines that I often recommend to entry level designers.

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teleforceApr 2024

Very cool, clever and intuitive data presentation, this probably the way forward of effectively publishing research findings and help empower those who are not keen on reading research data (e.g policy makers). I will be very interested to see their workflow on how the data transformation from papers to what we see here, and this can be a game changer in publishing research results and findings.

Those who are designing computer based GUI, graphics, dashboard can learn a lot from this animation and interactive with timeline/frequency approach (soon someone will coin a this a special term e.g gamification, etc) because this is how we can optimize the brain to process its data for optimum users' usability. Deep learning AI has shown impressive results values in mimicking the brain functionality based on the human cognition and brain neurology and it is about time the user interface aspect get the same treatment. Excellent books like Designing with the Mind in Mind can be a good guiding principle based on human cognition for effective and intuitive user interface [1].

For the research presented by data it is kind of plain obvious that your childhood upbringing and experiences shape and affect your adult world significantly and considerably. Imagine children from war torned countries that experienced extreme adversity at some point of their life like Vietnam and the latest Ukraine people who witnessed not only gun violences but also all out war (e.g bombs, war machinery, jet fighter) with extreme insecurity food depreciation, malnutrition, etc will be several more times badly affected compared to these children reported in the study that are primarily based on developed and stable countries. Then imagine people who are residing in a continously intermittent conflicts/wars and oppressed regions (without a valid country) for example Palestine people that experienced the injustices and atrocities happening over several generations not years, badly affecting the childrens with family member's and friends got killed prematurely, and some with no parents or worst dependents left.

To think that how the people of the world ever allow, tolerate and even sponsoring the prepetrators of the oppression and injustice is beyond me. I think the only solace for these people in the region is that hopefully there will be easiness after hardship, and there will be justice sooner or later, here in this world or hereafter [2]. These are the sentences that really caught my attention, they say they are the peacemakers, but in rwality they are the real troublemakers or the root cause of the very problems and atrocities [3].

[1]Designing with the Mind in Mind:

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/designing-with-the-mind-in-m...

[2] https://quran.com/ash-sharh/5-6:

5 - So, surely with hardship comes ease.

6 - Surely with that hardship comes more ease

[3]https://quran.com/ms/al-baqarah/11-12:

11 - When they are told, “Do not spread corruption in the land,” they reply, “We are only peace-makers!”

12 - Indeed, it is they who are the corruptors, but they fail to perceive it.

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ShankSep 2017

> I was heavily inspired by the book “Designing with the Mind in Mind” by Jeff Johnson.

Are there any other good resources for learning design principles like this? There are a lot of frameworks like Bootstrap & Foundation that don't provide the tools, but not the insight into how to make effective design. I would love to hear if there are related or better books that read like this article.

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vickychijwaniOct 2016

"Designing with the Mind in Mind" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8564020-designing-with-t...) is an excellent book that approaches design from a fundamental psychology perspective.

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currysausageMay 2015

Great book indeed. Not quite as easily-digestible, but also very relevant and still well-readable: Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind [1], unemotionally explaining the psychological principles behind common HCI guidelines.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0124079148

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derp42Jan 2013

I would also recommend "Designing with the Mind in mind" by Jeff Johnson.

Less generic that what has been listed in this article since it focuses more on user interfaces, it's a great overview of basic design principles, with clever illustrated examples.

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding-In...

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