Here’s something Ulric Neisser -the father of cognitive psychology- established back in 1967: Your brain is not a camera. It doesn’t passively record what’s in front of you. It actively selects, transforms, and reconstructs information. Every moment, your mind is filtering what matters, ignoring what doesn’t, and filling in gaps with what it expects to find. You are not receiving the world. You are interpreting it. Now here’s where it gets interesting for design. Donald Norman built on exactly this idea in The Design of Everyday Things. If users don’t passively absorb your interface -if they’re actively constructing meaning from incomplete signals- then design isn’t just about how something looks. It’s about what story it tells the brain. A button that doesn’t look clickable won’t be clicked -not because the user is careless, but because their brain never selected it as relevant. A form that gives no feedback after submission leaves the mind in a loop, still searching for confirmation. A layout with no visual hierarchy forces the brain to process everything at equal weight -which is exhausting. Bad design doesn’t just look wrong. It fights how cognition actually works.

This is what Designed Minds is about. Every Friday -one concept from cognitive psychology, paired with what it actually means for the things we design.

Starting here. Starting with the most fundamental idea:

Your user’s brain is always doing the work. Your job is to make that work easier.

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