Every time you sit down in front of an unfamiliar app, you are not starting from zero. You bring prior knowledge: general world knowledge, knowledge of similar software, knowledge of conventions (a trash can deletes, an underlined blue word links), and procedural habits built from years of clicking, tapping, and swiping. From this knowledge you assemble a mental model — an internal, often incomplete and sometimes wrong, account of what the system contains and how it behaves. That model is what you use to predict what a button will do before you press it.
Designers cannot hand users a mental model directly. What they can do is express a conceptual model through the interface: the objects, actions, relationships, and metaphors the design makes visible. Interface metaphors (desktops, folders, carts, feeds) act as cognitive bridges, letting users borrow structure from something familiar. When the conceptual model communicated by the interface matches the system's real behavior, users form accurate mental models quickly; when it does not, they form confident but wrong models and make systematic, repeatable errors.
As you watch these videos, look for three things. First, what cues in the interface are doing the model-building work — spatial arrangement, direct manipulation of visible objects, labels, animation, explanations. Second, how mental models change over time as users accumulate experience with a system. Third, how early impressions can distort a model in ways that persist, which is a direct design concern rather than just a psychological curiosity.
A short Nielsen Norman Group explainer on direct manipulation, the interaction style in which users act on visible depictions of objects rather than issuing commands about them. Expect a definition, examples from graphical interfaces such as dragging, resizing, and moving on-screen objects, and discussion of why acting directly on a representation feels natural. The video is likely to touch on the trade-offs and limits of the approach as well.
Direct manipulation is the clearest practical case of an interface metaphor working as a cognitive bridge: the screen objects stand in for real objects, so users can reuse everyday physical knowledge. NN/g is a long-established usability research and training organization, and the presentation is concise and example-driven, making it a good anchor for the metaphor and conceptual-model subtopics.
A SIGCHI research presentation on how anchoring bias — being overly influenced by information encountered first — shapes the mental models users form of an AI system and how much they then rely on it. The talk reports on a study of explainable AI, examining how the order and nature of early examples affect users' understanding and trust. Expect study design, findings, and implications for designing explanations.
This video shows mental models forming and evolving through interaction, and shows how a distorted model leads to miscalibrated reliance and systematic error. It extends the topic into a current, high-stakes design context where the gap between a user's model and a system's actual behavior has clear consequences.
These videos focus most directly on MO2: the SIGCHI talks show how mental models are formed, how they can be skewed by early information or by interface form, and how a mismatch between a user's model and the system's real behavior leads to predictable errors and misplaced reliance. The direct manipulation video supplies the design-side counterpart, illustrating how a well-chosen metaphor and visible conceptual model reduce the memory and reasoning burden on users, which connects to the memory and capacity constraints discussed in MO1. The design implications raised across all three — making structure visible, sequencing what users see first, matching form to expectation — also feed into the later module outcomes on task decomposition (MO3), evaluation (MO4), and prototyping (MO5), where you will need to justify design choices in terms of the understanding they produce in users.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.