Interview with Donald Norman on Mental Models

“Intuition is a name that we give to knowledge structures that are so well ‘routinized’ that they occur subconsciously ó but intuition is something that requires a tremendous amount of learning. But give me any new phenomenon ó ask me about some topic on which I am not an expert and I will take whatever knowledge I have and derive a conceptual model to predict the behavior. That conceptual model is in my head ó it is mental ó hence the name, mental model. Basically, we take whatever we know and we expand it.”