By Lucy Collins, Web Usability Director
We all go about the world with an idea of what is normal. We have expectations about what will happen when we walk into a room, the right way to eat a chocolate digestive, how much a good bottle of wine should cost or how a website should behave when we click a button.
That idea of normal is totally unique to you. It comes from your mental model: the internal understanding you use to make sense of the world and predict how things will work.
Our mental models are shaped by all sorts of things, including our bodies and senses, previous experiences, education, the language or languages we speak, the culture we were raised in, the technology we use, our confidence, and any privilege or exclusion we’ve experienced along the way.
Psychologists have been exploring related ideas for decades. Research into schemas, for example, describes how we use existing structures of knowledge to interpret new and sometimes incomplete information. We don’t approach every situation as a blank slate. We understand it through what we already know and have experienced.
This is incredibly useful. We couldn’t function without mental models, and the problem isn’t that we have them. The problem comes when we mistake our own mental model for everybody else’s reality.
Take the above photo of my family. Every person in it has a different mental model. We’re a motley crew of different ages, genders, sensory experiences, physical capabilities, ways of processing information and life experiences. Even within one family, the ways we experience and interact with the world can be very different.
Now think about someone you’ve never met who arrives on a website you’ve helped to create. The gap between what you know and what they experience can be enormous.
That’s where exclusion can creep in. We solve a problem based on what we would do, assume that because something is obvious to us it will be obvious to everyone, or create an interaction around the technology we use and the things we can see, hear, understand and physically do.
The less experience we share with the person using our digital product or service, the more important it becomes to question those assumptions.
How do we challenge our mental models?
For me, the single best way to challenge your mental model is to observe other people in action. This is what I do every day and it is my favourite thing about my job.
As a user researcher at Web Usability, I sit with people while they use websites and digital services. I observe what they do and listen to what they say, asking questions at the right moments to dig a little deeper and understand the reasons behind their behaviour. Every research session gives me a glimpse of the world through somebody else’s lens.
Sometimes the differences are subtle. Someone interprets a piece of language differently from the way the team expected, something we thought was prominent goes completely unnoticed, or a journey that seemed perfectly logical when it was designed sends someone in the wrong direction.
Other sessions challenge much bigger assumptions, and this is especially apparent when conducting research with disabled people or people with diverse neurotypes. Watch a blind participant navigate a website using a screen reader, for example, and suddenly the visual hierarchy you’ve spent hours perfecting isn’t the hierarchy they experience at all. Watch someone navigate using only a keyboard and interactions that seemed effortless with a mouse can become difficult or impossible. Observe someone who processes information differently and a page that appeared simple to the people who created it can demand a huge amount of cognitive effort.
Experiences like these make you realise just how many decisions in digital design can be based on an assumed user who sees, hears, understands and interacts with technology in a particular way.
Creating provocations to challenge our thinking
Of course, we can’t have a research participant sitting beside us every time we make a digital decision, as much as I would love this! So I think there is also a useful role for tools and provocations that help to interrupt our assumptions between those moments of direct contact with users.
One of the simplest is to think about input and output. How might someone interact with the experience, and how might they receive information back from it? While I might use a mouse or touchpad, someone else might use a keyboard, touchscreen, switches, eye gaze or speech recognition. While I might take in information visually, someone else may rely on audio, tactile feedback or a combination of outputs.
Even thinking through these possibilities can prompt different questions. You can go further by putting your mouse away and navigating a website using only your keyboard, listening to a page with a screen reader rather than looking at it, or increasing your browser zoom and seeing what happens. The purpose isn’t to simulate someone else’s experience. It’s to expose some of the assumptions built into your own.
Personas can provide another useful provocation. They have been used in UX for decades to bring users’ goals, behaviours and circumstances into design conversations, and there is some interesting research into their role in inclusive design too. A 2025 study by researchers at Germany’s Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health explored the use of personas representing people with disabilities in the design of digital work environments. The researchers concluded that personas have potential to help identify barriers earlier and encourage greater consideration of different needs (while also stressing that they should never replace the direct involvement of people with disabilities).
Personas need to be created and used with care, though. A poorly constructed disability persona can simply reinforce the assumptions we’re trying to challenge, particularly if it reduces someone to a diagnosis, implies there is one typical disability experience or gives stereotypes the appearance of evidence. The value comes when personas are based on research and used to provoke questions rather than provide definitive answers.
That is the common thread running through all of this. Whether we’re thinking about different input and output requirements, trying a website without a mouse or using an evidence-based persona, the aim is to interrupt that automatic thought process that says, this makes sense to me, therefore it makes sense to everyone.
They might prompt us to ask: could someone complete this journey without vision? What happens if they can’t use a mouse? Are we relying on sound to communicate something important? How much cognitive effort are we asking of someone? What assumptions have we made about the person on the other side of the screen?
We won’t always know the answer and that’s really the point. A good provocation helps us recognise what we don’t know and where we need to learn more.
Ultimately, no tool can tell us exactly what another human being will experience. Trying a screen reader for five minutes doesn’t tell a sighted person what it is like to be blind, and a persona can never represent the complexity of a real person’s life and experiences.
What these tools and approaches can help us do is question our version of normal and see things through a different lens. Of course, the best way to understand people will always be to involve people: observe what they actually do, listen to what they tell you and be curious when their experience is different from the one you expected.
And in case you were wondering, I eat my chocolate digestives chocolate side up.