Decent article. Terrific visual design. Love the animations. Yes and: > What is our mental model? ... by using increasingly complex technologies with ever sim

Decent article. Terrific visual design. Love the animations. Yes and: > What is our mental model? ... by using increasingly complex technologies with ever simpler interfaces. Yup. The difference between mental models and abstractions. My personal working definitions: - Useful mental models reveal how something truly works. - Abstractions attempt to hide complexity. I've struggled for decades to articulate my own personal philosophy of design. I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense. It's so clear in my head. Better mental models are at the root of all my design break throughs. One example: Late 90s I worked on print production manufacturing software (ScenicSoft's Preps, TrapWise, Color Central, etc). Every other image positioning (aka imposition) app looked like CADD meets Illustrator tailored for putting ink on paper. So they digitized the creation of artifacts. It took noob me years to finally understood the problem domain for bookwork; how everything is determined by the folding and binding, done at the very end of the mfg process. Information flows BACKWARD thru the system. Eureka. I was finally able to model the process. Think origami for bookwork. So then it was trivial to create a simple form-based app to create impositions as needed. Every other app solution tried to manage the complexity, hide the excruciating details. Abstraction. My solution revealed how the system works. Simplifying the problem so any one could do bookwork. Mental model.