Why this matters

Every design decision you make is a bet on how people will behave. Most of the time, designers make those bets based on intuition, convention, or what seemed to work last time.

There is a better way. Decades of research in cognitive psychology, behavioural science, and human-computer interaction have produced a set of named, tested principles that explain why users behave the way they do. Why they ignore things that are clearly visible. Why adding one more option to a menu makes the whole thing harder to use. Why a beautifully designed product gets more forgiveness than an ugly one that works just as well. Why the ending of an experience carries more weight than everything that came before it.

These principles have names. They have mechanisms. And once you understand them, you stop guessing.

The course 10 days. One law at a time.

Design for the Human Brain is delivered entirely by email. One lesson per day, for 10 days. Each lesson covers a single psychological law — its origin, the cognitive mechanism behind it, and the specific design implications you can act on immediately.

No platform to log into. No video to scrub through. No cohort to keep up with. Just one well-written email each morning, and 24 hours to let the idea settle before the next one arrives.

What you'll learn The full 10-day curriculum

Day 1 — Do what everyone else does
Day 2 — Size is a usability decision
Day 3 — Every option has a cost
Day 4 — Chunk it
Day 5 — Be strict. Be forgiving.
Day 6 — The ending matters most
Day 7 — Beautiful works better
Day 8 — Different gets remembered
Day 9 — Complexity never disappears
Day 10 — Nine laws, one human

Why it's built this way One lesson a day works better than a course you binge.

The laws covered in this course are easy to read about and genuinely difficult to internalise. The difference between knowing that Hick's Law exists and actually noticing it in interfaces you encounter every day — that difference is the product of time and repeated exposure, not a single sitting.

One idea per day. Each lesson covers a single law, fully argued. Between lessons, your brain has 24 hours to encounter that law in the real world — notice the moment a dropdown with too many options slows you down, spot the ending of a user flow that wastes the goodwill built up across the whole experience, feel the disproportionate trust a well-designed interface generates before a single interaction has taken place. That encounter is where learning actually happens.

Spaced repetition, built in. Later lessons reference earlier ones. By Day 10, when you're looking at all nine laws as a system, you're also quietly revising every concept from the previous nine days — without realising you're doing it. That layering moves ideas from short-term recall into genuine understanding.

No catch-up pressure. Miss a day? The email waits in your inbox. There's no cohort, no live session, no expiry date. The structure rewards consistency, but it doesn't punish life.

Research in cognitive science consistently shows that distributed learning — small amounts spread over time — produces stronger retention than massed learning, even when total time spent is the same. Ten days of ten minutes each will leave a deeper mark than a single afternoon of two hours.