Designing for the mental model
Imagine if you were given a cell phone today for the first time. Even as a first time user, you would have some assumptions, impressions, hypotheses, or beliefs about the product, a fair amount of knowledge as to what all things you can do with a cell phone and how to perform them.
This first-hand understanding of the cell phone here is your mental model. Now, you don’t necessarily need to know the complex mechanism that goes inside of a cell phone. But having enough understanding to cover your interactions with it wouldn’t hurt.
This article talks about the Conceptual model, Mental Model, and bridging the gap between the two.
Conceptual Model
A Conceptual model is an explanation or a conceptual understanding of how a product is designed to work. It’s the model that the designers want the end-users to understand.
Mental Model
A mental model is a perception or representation that users have in mind of the product they are interacting with. Any user’s mental model is a function of many factors and events, i.e; their first time experience with the application, conversations with other users, experience with similar products, etc.
Mental models are usually based on beliefs or assumptions, not facts. It’s about what users know (or they think they know) about a product. Each user would have a different mental model which will gradually change and adjust to reflect their further experience with the product or website.
How to design for the mental model of users
One of the major reasons why products fail is because there is a wide gap between the mental model of the designer (often termed as a conceptual model) and that of the end-user. It’s one of the greatest dilemmas of usability. To overcome this, it’s essential that designers understand the users’ model to design something that works in the real world. Some of the ways that can help us lessen the gap are :
1. Jakob’s Law
Jakob’s law offers one of the solutions to overcome this. It says,
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.
By designing for patterns that users are accustomed to, you prevent their chances of getting lost and eventually giving-up on your website or app.
2. Natural User Interfaces
The goal here is to reduce abstractions that come with the GUIs. Apple mostly uses Natural User Interface in its products — using gestures and manipulations like how we would in real life.
As early beginners, we learn how our inputs or actions are responded to, and expect the same while using a product. For example : While reading a book, we turn the page using just a finger. Early GUIs used to have scroll-bars to do the same task, where the interaction used to happen between the user and the scroll-bar and not the user and content. Apple’s iPad provided a very natural way of doing the same by implementing touch that enabled turning the page with just a finger, just like how we would expect to do it in real life. It’s natural and intuitive.
3. Card-sorting exercise
Card sorting exercise is a very important technique to determine how your users want to categorize the information that’ll appear on your Website or App. It’s cheap, quick, and provides more insights into your user-group than most of the conventional user-research methods.
Sorting of the cards can be done in two ways:
(i) Open card sorting- Participants are given a deck of cards and asked to group them in a way that makes sense to them and then name each group they created. They are then asked to explain why they chose the groups they chose. This is quite beneficial when designers don’t have any rigid structure in hand and are trying to know how to categorize the information.
(ii) Closed card sorting-In closed card sorting, groups are already made and participants are just asked to arrange the cards under the pre-established groups. It is good to go for a closed card sorting exercise when you’re dealing with pre-defined information architecture.
In a nutshell
Understanding the mental models of our users help us shape our design decisions better. And though it’s important to follow the set rules of usability and experience design, It’s also essential to reduce the gap between your business goals and the way your users think, to finally land on an intuitive design.
