Review

For those that need it, the six minds approach provides a more structured way to build empathy with users - that’s a little more advanced than the traditional empathy map we all know and love.

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Designing for Behaviour Change

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

The core premise of The Six Minds of Experience is that customer experience does not happen on a screen or in a store; it happens entirely within the mind. To design effective products, we must simplify the complex workings of cognition into six distinct "Minds"—Vision, Wayfinding, Language, Memory, Decision Making, and Emotion. By designing for how these minds actually function, rather than how we wish they would, we can create intuitive and successful experiences.

Vision, Attention, and Automaticity: This covers the subconscious processes of perception. We process visual information near-instantly and automatically, often scanning in F-shaped patterns. Designers should harness this "free" mental processing by using contrast, shape, and colour to make key elements "pop out" and guide the eye effortlessly, rather than forcing the user to expend conscious effort finding things.

Wayfinding: which governs spatial awareness. Humans are excellent at navigating the physical world using environmental cues, but virtual spaces often strip these away. To prevent users from feeling lost, interfaces must provide "breadcrumbs" and clear navigation structures that align with the user's mental map of the space. If a user cannot intuit where they are or how to move back and forth, the experience breaks.

Language: dictates how users interpret words. A common failure in design is the "vocabulary gap," where businesses use internal jargon that confuses the customer. Since unfamiliar terms force users to switch from automatic processing to difficult conscious thought, designers must strictly adopt the user's vocabulary and level of sophistication.

Memory: involves expectations and mental models. Users rarely see what is actually there; they see what they expect to be there based on past experiences. We rely on stereotypes and schemas to save mental energy. If a product's behaviour violates these hidden expectations (for example, if a familiar icon does something new) it causes cognitive friction. Designers must identify and leverage these existing mental models rather than trying to rewrite them.

Decision Making: is conscious and deliberate by contrast. This is where problem-solving happens. However, users are often overwhelmed and will "satisfice" (choosing the first option that seems "good enough" rather than the logically optimal one). Designers need to understand the specific path, or "Yellow Brick Road," the user believes they must take to solve their problem, even if that path differs from the expert's view.

Emotion: drives deep-seated beliefs and desires. Emotion often overrides logic, leading to predictably irrational behaviours like risk aversion. Beyond immediate tasks, users have deep aspirations and fears. Understanding what "success" feels like to a user (and what they are afraid of) is crucial for building trust and loyalty.

To understand how these six minds operate in reality, you cannot rely on surveys or focus groups. You must use Contextual Inquiry (stalking with permission). This involves shadowing users in their natural environment, their actual workplace or home, to observe them performing tasks in real-time.

Contextual interviews reveal the "why" behind the "what." By observing the user's environment, you catch details that lab tests miss: the sticky notes on the monitor, the interruptions from colleagues, and the messy workarounds they use to compensate for bad software. As you observe, you should ask questions tailored to the six minds, such as "Where did your eyes go first?" (Vision), "What were you expecting to happen when you clicked that?" (Memory), or "What are you worried might go wrong here?" (Emotion). The goal is to uncover their mental models, not to validate your product features.

Turning this raw data into insight requires a structured analysis process. Instead of grouping findings by demographics, you should extract observations onto sticky notes and categorise them by the Six Minds. This helps you identify segments based on psychographics, difference in what people are trying to achieve, and they think and feel.

From this analysis, you can build a value proposition using the Appeal, Enhance, Awaken framework. Appeal focuses on short-term attraction by giving users what they say they want and using their specific keywords. Enhance focuses on medium-term retention by solving their actual underlying problems and removing friction. Awaken targets long-term loyalty by connecting the product to the user's deeper life goals and ideal self-concept.

This methodology integrates directly into the Double Diamond or Design Thinking process. In the Discovery phase (the first diamond), the Six Minds framework provides a structure for research, ensuring you capture cognitive data rather than just surface-level preferences. In the Definition phase, it helps prioritize features that align with the user's mental "Yellow Brick Road."

During the Development phase (the second diamond), the Six Minds act as constraints. Instead of "failing fast" with random iterations, you can "succeed often" by rejecting ideas that violate known cognitive patterns (like confusing Wayfinding or mismatched Language) before they are even built. Finally, in Testing, you validate not just functionality, but cognitive alignment, checking if the user's expectations were met and if their emotional needs were addressed. By designing for the six minds, you move from guesswork to a strategy grounded in human psychology.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1: The Six Minds of Experience

As a thought experiment, what if we simplify and limit our cognitive processes to just six. The six minds:

• Vision, Attention and Automaticity: where your eyes are drawn to, where they scan.
• Wayfinding: Understanding where you are in space, real or virtual and how you can navigate through that space.
• Language: what the audience thinks of words.
• Memory: Expectations and concepts people have about how something will work.
• Decision Making: Questions your audience might ask before making a decision.
• Emotion: Underlying emotions and deep-seated beleifs.

The customer experience doesn’t happen on a screen, it happens in the mind.

An activity to make the six minds more real. Do a simple use journey on a product but ask the following as you go:

• Vision/Attention: Where did your eyes travel to first on the site? What were you looking for (e.g., images, colours, words)?
• Wayfinding: Did you know where you were on the site and how to navigate it? Were you ever uncertain? Why?
• Language: What words were you looking for? Did you experience terms you didn't understand, or were the categories ever too general?
• Memory: How were your expectations about how the site would work confirmed or violated?
• Decision Making: What were the microdecisions you made along the way as you sought to accomplish your goal of purchasing a book?
• Emotion: What concerns did you have? What might stop you from making a purchase (e.g., security, trust)?

Chapter 2: Vision, Attention and Automaticity

We are capable of near instant perception.

When designing products and services, we as designers are often very good at focusing on the conscious processes (e.g., decision making), but we rarely design with the intention of harnessing our fast automatic processes.

They occur quickly and automatically, and we essentially “get them for free” in terms of the mental effort our audience needs to expend as it uses them. As product designers, we should harness both these conscious and automatic processes because they are relatively independent. The latter don’t meaningfully tax the former.

Our eyes scan web pages in an F shaped pattern.

Things attract our attention more strongly when they stand out or popout. There are many ways to make something popout: shape, weight, size, orientation, position, colour etc. The unique element will draw attention no matter how many others there are. You can guess where people’s eye’s will go by reducing saturation and squinting at it.

Test all your visual elements to make sure they’re widely understood. Go with the standard icon, be unique in other ways.

Chapter 3: Wayfinding

Wayfinding is about knowing where you are and knowing how you can move around.

We have an uncanny ability to map space in the physical world - as designers we should make use of this in the virtual world. The virtual world often strips away wayfinding clues. It’s hard to navigate anywhere without clues (or breadcrumbs). Some interfaces make wayfinding harder than it needs to be.

Matched expectations can make for a great experience, and violated expectations can often destroy an experience.

Connecting our virtual worlds in a way that’s equivalent to our physical ones will help us navigate through them.

Basic virtual breadcrumbs or clues (like showing half an image at the end of the screen so you know you should scroll) are important.

Test interfaces to see if the metaphors are clear. We can never fully anticipate how customers will interact with a new product. It’s crucial to learn how people think about your virtual space, and how they think they can move around it.

Chapter 4: Memory/Semantics

For cognitive economy, we don’t store every detail of a shape or concept. We move quickly from the specific instance of a thing, to the concept of a thing.

You can use this to your advantage when designing products, you can activate an abstract concept and efficiently manage expectations to be consistent with expectations.

The main implication for product managers and designers is this: a lot of what we do and how we act is based on unseen expectations, stereotypes, and anticipations, rather than what we’re actually seeing when light hits the back of our retinas. We as product and service designers need to discover what our audience’s hidden anticipations and stereotypes might be.

Knowing and activating the right mental models can save us a huge amount of time as product / service designers.

We need to understand our users' many diverse stored concepts and automatic processes and anticipate (and counteract) confusion if and when we deviate from those mental assumptions.

Chapter 5: Language

We assume the words we use have the same meanings for other people, but word-concept associations can differ from person to person. Communication failures often stem from over-jargony language → which often originates from having a business-centric perspective. You need to understand your customers’ level of sophistication, and have your products meet them where they are.

The worlds people use when describing something can be revealing. We need to understand what words they use and what those words mean to them - and what sort of process they’re expecitng. Interviewing customers and taking transcripts is a simple but powerful tool. One you understand where your customers are, you can create products and services that work for them.

Chapter 6: Decision Making and Problem Solving

The prior chapters have largely been about automatic / sub-conscious responses. Decision making is a much more deliberate and conscious affair.

When problem solving or decision making, there’s a few steps you need to go through:

• Identifying the problem you’re trying to solve
• Identifying where you are now (the current state)
• Identifying where you want to get to (the end state)

You may need to create subgoals to help you reach your ultimate goal. If you’re a novice you may find yourself in a situation where you don’t define the problem well (the one you really need to solve), because you might not be aware of the all of the complexities.

Redefining the problem space: Sometimes we need to understand how our customers define the problem they’re solving and meet them there. We then need to redirect them slowly toward the actual problem (which is sometimes more complex) that they need to crack.

First, it’s really important that as product or service designers, we make no assumptions about what the problem space looks like for our customers. As experts in the problem space, we know all the possible moves around that space that can be taken, and it often seems obvious what decisions need to be made and what jobs need to be done. That same problem may look very different to our (less expert) customers.

We need to learn what our audiences see as their “yellow brick road” (the path they think they need to take from their current state to their goal state). What do they see as the critical decisions to make? They may see it differently to an expert. But once you understand their perspective, you can create a product that serves their mental model and help them make better decisions.

Subgoals help remove blockers to getting toward the goal end state. We aim to address all of these potential subgoals and subquestions for our users - so they feel prepared for what they’re going to get from us. We need to understand:

• The actual steps to solve a problem or make a decision
• What your audience thinks the problem or decision is and how to solve it
• The subgoals your audience might create to get around “blockers”
• How to help the target audience shift their thinking from that of a novice to that of an expert in the field.

Chapter 7: Emotion

Logical decision making meets its match with emotion. In optimal conditions we’re capable of making rational decisions. But, when our attention is often overwhelmed, so often we end up ‘satisfycing’, we accept the easily available option that’s satisfactory given the limited headspace and time we have.

We often deviate from the logical best choice. We’re predictably irrational. E.g. risk aversion.

Part 2: Exposing Secrets

Chapter 8: Contextual Interviews

The author recommends combining watching and interviewing people in their typical work or play, and interviewing them.

A contextual interview is essentially looking over someone's shoulder, observing them doing their job and asking questions in their workplace (or play in their ‘play-space’ etc). It’s stalking with permission.

Knowing what your customers' needs are is imperative - a mismatch between user needs and functionality can cripple a product.

Interviews alone aren’t enough because:

1. Customers might not be able to envision or articulate what they need, that’s our job.
2. We can see some of the problems with an experience or identify things that don't make sense-that customers compensate for without realising it. You might be surprised at how much pain your users have to go through to get your product to work. Get out of the building - to see the context in which your users are living.
3. Customers often forget important details if you aren’t there to capture them in the moment. I never could have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. ... If we're smart, we'll look at [these innovations] that are going on, and we'll figure out a way to enable them to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design.

Leave your assumptions at the door and embrace their reality.

Focus on observing, but also stop to ask questions like:

• What would I need to know to be successful at your job?
• Where would I get started?
• What would I have to keep in mind?
• What could go wrong?
• What drives you crazy sometimes?

Consider observing and documenting the following:

• Artifacts: What's on the desk? What papers, files, spreadsheets, etc. does this person use to keep track of every-thing? What else is nearby in the environment?
• Communication: How is work communicated or reviewed? How many other people are working with the customer?
• Interruptions: What are the interruptions in the customer's job? How often are these? Do they frequently need to move around? Noise level. Mobile phone interruptions
• Related factors: What other jobs does this person do in addition to the one you are officially observing? How many programs do they have to use on their computer? Are they always on the computer? Are they using their mobile phone?

Surveys and usability tests etc tend to tell you what’s happening but not why.

Recommended Approach for Contextual Interviews and Their Analysis Shadow people in the context of their actual work so you can observe explicit behaviours as well as implicit nuances that your interviewees may not even be aware of. Get them to show you their processes step by step. The Six Minds of Experience help you capture different types of mental representations within your customer's mind:

• Vision/Attention: What are they paying attention to? What are they searching for? Why?
• Wayfinding: How are they navigating their existing products and services? How do they believe they should interact with them?
• Language: What words do they use? What does that suggest about their level of expertise?
• Memory: What assumptions are they making about how things should work? When are they surprised and confused?
• Decision Making: What do they say they are trying to accomplish? What does that say about how they are framing the problem? What decisions are they making? What "blockers" are getting in the way?
• Emotion: What are their goals? What are they worried about? How might future products or services be better suited to their needs, expectations, desires, and goals?

The best contextual interviews are nosy and curios.

Contextual Interview Tips:

• Dress to match their context and avoid drawing attention
• Don’t leave with assumptions ask open-ended questions
• Use their words and terminology, not yours
• Ask "why" to uncover how they think about problems
• Let them work naturally without showing them "better" ways
• Meet them where they actually work, not in meeting rooms
• Keep your team small (1-3 people) so they act naturally
• Use unobtrusive recording equipment they can forget about
• Have a notebook ready to capture insights immediately
• Start with easy questions, then go deeper to understand motivations
• Aim for 8-12 participants per user group (but some data beats none)
• Plan for 90-minute sessions, adjusting as needed
• Use professional recruiters to handle scheduling logistics
• Prepare questions but follow their natural conversational flow

Three-Step Process: From Data to Insights

1. Review and Write Down Observations: Review notes and recordings, then extract bite-sized quotes and insights onto Post-it notes (or virtual stickies). Capture anything relevant to the Six Minds framework: Vision/Attention, Wayfinding, Memory, Language, Decision Making, and Emotion.
2. Organise Each Participant's Findings into the Six Minds: Place all sticky notes on a wall, organised by participant. Align them into six columns—one for each Mind. Categorise each insight by its most important component (e.g., "Can't find feature" → Vision/Attention; "Wants to know payment options" → Decision Making).
3. Look for Trends Across Participants: Identify patterns and commonalities across participants to create audience segmentation. Use these trends to inform product direction and assign specific feedback to relevant team members (UI experts, graphic designers, etc.).

Chapter 9: Vision: Are You Looking at Me?

Eye tracking can tell us where people are looking (via a heatmap overlay) when they’re interacting with an interface.

Pair this with an understanding of what each customer is looking for. When observing someone interacting with a site, ask “What problem are you trying to solve?” and “What are you seeing right now?” To get what’s most interesting to them, at that moment, and understand their goals.

Chapter 10: Did They Just Say That?

Record interviews and transcribe with an automated tool.

Measuring the frequency of word use and sophistication of vocabulary - helps you get an idea of how sophisticated the customers’ understanding of the issue is.

Pay attention to the words people use and the order in which they speak them.

Chapter 11: Wayfinding: How do I get there?

Ask the following questions throughout the interview to get an understand of how customers are wayfinding.

• Where do customers think they are?
• How do they think they can get from Place A to Place B?
• What do they think will happen next?
• What are their expectations, and what are those expectations based on?
• How do their expectations differ from how this interface actually works?
• What interaction design challenges did they encounter as a result of their assumptions?

Chapter 12: Memory: Expectations and Filling in Gaps

Ask the following questions throughout the interview to get an understanding of what semantic associations our customers have.

Some of the questions we'll ask around include:

• What are the frames of reference our audience is using?
• What were they expecting to find?
• How were they expecting this whole system to work? What are you basing your expectations on? What else have you used that works like this?
• What are the stereotypes, mental models, or schemas influencing those expectations?
• How do the customers' stereotypes differ from our expert schemas or stereotypes?
• What changes can we make to ensure that we're meeting customers' expectations?

For each persona build a set of assumptions that persona holds regarding word usage, how things should work according to their expectations, and how they are framing the problem.

Document visual attention biases and the words/actions users look for, word usage and the meanings associated with those words, the syntax of their sentence construction, the answers they are expecting from the system, and the flow that users expect to have.

Chapter 13: Decision Making: Following Bread

What problems customers are really trying to solve? What decisions do they have to make along the way?

Ask questions like:

What is the user trying to accomplish? Capture goals and subgoals.

What does their overall decision-making process look like? Make sure you’re supporting it.

What facts do they need to make their decision and solve their problem? Make sure you’re providing the right information at the right time.

What do they need at each stage of problem solving?

When do they seem to be overwhelmed and "satisfice"?

What middle-of-the-road, "sensible" option do they default to?

Chapter 14: Emotion:

What are your customers trying to accomplish on a deeper level? What emotions do those goals or fears of failure illicit?

• What immediate emotions are our users experiencing as they interact with our products or services?
• Which comments pertain to who this person is (i.e., their self-concept)?
• What are they trying to accomplish in life?
• What are they most afraid of having go wrong? Why?
• Who are our customers on a deeper level?
• What will make them feel accomplished?

Make sure you’re asking meaningful questions and understanding what success means to the customer at a deeper level. Capture major fears.

Link immediate goals to larger life goals. Work out what’s at stake.

Part 3: Putting the Six Minds to Work

Chapter 15: Sense-Making

Look for commonalities among the data you captured on the six minds.

Look for similarities between participants and how they’re thinking. Common language etc. Look for differences also. Where there are clear differences in types of customers split them into different segments based on their needs and other relevant dimensions from the 6 minds. Build a psychographic profile for each segment.

When you’re building the segments, emphasise the differences you see in the 6 minds framework. What's different about their attention, wayfinding, language, memory, decision making and emotion.

Don’t use the See, Feel, Say, Do Empathy framework. The six minds are better ( decision making and memory are missing) and the emphasis on the other words is different too.

Chapter 16: Putting the Six Minds to Work:

The Appeal, Enhance, Awaken framework is a three-tiered approach for applying the Six Minds research data to product and service design:

Appeal addresses what people say they want: the initial attraction that brings users to your product. You must start where people are, even if their stated needs differ from what would actually benefit them.

Enhance focuses on what people actually need: longer-term solutions that solve real problems and keep users engaged.

Awaken targets users' deeper life goals and aspirations: helping them realise their loftiest ambitions, which builds lasting loyalty.

For Appeal (Immediate Attraction)

• Vision/Attention: Observe what users are visually looking for — specific images, words, charts, or features they expect to see.
• Language: Use the exact words and terms your users employ, not industry jargon. Meet them in their vocabulary.
• Decision Making: Identify the problem users believe they're solving and their perceived solution, even if the root cause is different.

For Enhance (Medium-Term Value)

• Decision Making: Identify users' true challenges and pain points. Determine if problems stem from the system itself or lack of knowledge about how to use it.
• Memory: Assess whether users' frame of reference is outdated. Look for opportunities to introduce modern tools that replace paper-based or traditional digital workflows.
• Emotion: Understand the pain drivers causing dissatisfaction. Identify the underlying source of negative feelings and design solutions that address those specific concerns.

For Awaken (Long-Term Goals)

• Emotion: Discover what "making it" means to your users. Understand their ultimate life goals and show how your solution helps them reach that destination.
• Memory: Understand how users' past experiences shape their definition of success and what they're striving to become.
• Decision Making: Map out the steps users believe are required to achieve their long-term goals and how they navigate their problem space.

Think beyond what attracts users initially, consider what keeps them engaged medium-term and what makes them loyal enough to promote your product.

Create positive feedback loops by demonstrating immediate benefits, longer-term value, and ultimately showing how you're helping with big-picture goals. This builds brand ambassadors.

Be prepared to attract users with what they think they want, then educate them about better solutions once engaged.

Chapter 17: Succeed Fast, Succeed Often

The Six Minds approach complements the Double Diamond and Design Thinking by adding cognitive depth to each phase, helping you move from empathy to execution more efficiently.

During Discovery & Definition (First Diamond). The Six Minds framework enhances the discovery process by systematically capturing how customers think:

• Vision/Attention: Identify what language users employ and what draws their attention
• Wayfinding: Understand how they expect to navigate spaces and interfaces
• Memory: Discover what past experiences shape their expectations
• Problem-solving: Learn what users believe the problem to be versus what it actually is
• Emotion: Uncover their short-term goals and big-picture aspirations

Use the appeal/enhance/awaken triad to identify specific opportunity areas before moving to ideation.

During Development & Delivery (Second Diamond)

Rather than exploring infinite solution paths, Six Minds insights constrain possibilities in productive ways:

• Design interactions that match user expectations for navigation and interface patterns
• Use language at the appropriate expertise level
• Align solutions with both immediate needs and larger goals

The author challenges "fail fast, fail often" because Six Minds research reduces iteration cycles by informing better initial designs.

During Prototyping / Testing:

Apply Six Minds observations throughout testing:

• Use low-fidelity prototypes (black and white, sketched images) so users feel their input still matters
• Test in-situ at the user's actual workplace to capture real-world thinking
• Observe where eyes go, what words are used, and what expectations are confirmed or contradicted

Practical tip: Quick sketches (7-10 solution variations in 10 minutes) help identify design directions worth exploring further.

Test with competitor products if you can too.

Six Minds provides "clues about the direction your designs should take" rather than a "wide-open, sky's-the-limit field of ideas". This frees you to focus on higher-level concepts instead of debating basic interactions.