I am a developer, I had been coding for last 6 years, building android apps and web apps. I had always faced problem with design thinking and did not even attempt to fix the design of my apps. But recently I started reading “The design of everyday things by Don Norman and worked on an app. I would like to list down my 7 extremely important lessons from last 6 months.

1. Users make mistakes all the time even with the simplest things. It's your job to minimize those errors and make them feel good about using your product not blaming themselves.
2. Make at least 3 user personas and keep them in front of your eyes all the time.
3. Assume that user can store maximum 3 things in their short term memory. Design the flow such as it does not exhaust the user's brain power, no matter how trivial those things sound, just 3 things.
4. Read about mental models.
5. The navigation and actions should match the target user's mental models.
6. Feedback is important for each action user performs, user should always get the affirmation of their actions and know the outcome of their actions instantly. Good feedback removes the cognitive load (e.g. What happened to the action that I performed?), bad or no feedback does the opposite.
7. When in doubt, talk to the users.

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