Discover the hidden structure behind every great UI. Master how to use conceptual models to design systems that users instantly understand and grow to trust.
Mental Models and User Experience Design
What users believe they know about a user interface impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.
What are Mental Models? — updated 2026
Harness the power of understanding and predicting user behavior with mental models. Simplify systems and enhance decision-making in your designs.
Structural Analogies of User Interfaces with Belidor
Alex Russell | Web Components and Model Driven Views | Fronteers 2011
There's a lot of tension between today's markup and the semantics we're trying to express in our apps. HTML5 adds a few new types to help describe common cases, but what about when there's no allegory in markup for what you're building? What we need now is infrastructure, not guilt about being "non-semantic". This talk explores new standards-track work in WebKit that's going to enable say-what-you-mean development in completely new ways.
Exploring Notion's Data Model: A Block-Based Architecture | Notion
Notion’s data model enables the product’s most foundational component: blocks. Through blocks, we allow users more flexibility over their information.
Introducing Model Council
Today we are launching Model Council, a multi-model research feature that brings several models together for one answer.
Software Design is Knowledge Building
The product of software development is not code but a mental model, a theory: a specific way of explaining the world.
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
Inside Design Tokens: Modeling & Communication
Design system architecture with focus on design tokens, that form the vocabulary of your visual design language, helping to streamline the communication amongst stakeholders. Modeling the system with boundaries to ensure clear purpose and predictability for design tokens and stability guarantees wit
The Great Mental Models
The Great Mental Models project is the clearest way to change the way you see the world, avoid problems before they happen, and make better decisions.
Conceptual mathematics: a first introduction to categories
Conceptual mathematics by F. W. Lawvere, 2009, Cambridge University Press edition, in English - 2nd ed.
Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution
Long ago in the 1990s when I was in high school, my chemistry+physics teacher pulled me aside. "Avery, you know how the Internet works, righ...
Foundation Models | Apple Developer Documentation
Perform tasks with models that specialize in language understanding, structured output, and tool calling.
Foundation Models | Apple Developer Documentation
Perform tasks with models that specialize in language understanding, structured output, and tool calling.