Thread by @PavelASamsonov

1. The medium of design is not pixels, or paper, or post-its. The medium of design is mental models.

The successful designer transforms the mental model of the user to align with the product's capabilities, but also the business's mental model to align with the user's context.

2. One of the best sources of inspiration for helping the user's mental model evolve is video gaming: gradually escalating challenges that introduce important concepts one after another.

But what about evolving the mental model of the business? How do we do that?

3. This is a question that I come back to over and over. Design practice has evolved outwards towards the user, but done a fairly poor job of evolving inwards to control its own role in an org.

Design a semantic environment where design makes sense.

4. But the salient point that's shared between both strategies is that the mental model needs to evolve. Start by presenting something to the audience that's nearly congruent with their current understanding, and create a path to get them from their initial state to the new state

5. If you just reflect the current mental model back on the audience, then you will never be able to reconcile "what it does" with "what it's used for."

The PM's pet features that make sense for the business are a waste of dev time if they don't fit into the user's mental model.

6. Just like different user personas, different stakeholders will have different mental models. The higher up, the less detailed the model is - which means some HIPPOs hold mutually contradictory ideas about the system, and don't even realize it. They may fear & oppose clarity.