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Mental Models
Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Indi Young
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eBook - ePub
Mental Models
Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Indi Young
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There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.
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CHAPTER 1
What and Why? The Advantages of a Mental Model
What is a Mental Model?
Why Use Mental Models?
Confidence in Your Design
Clarity in Direction
Continuity of Strategy
You might be thinking, âWhat does she mean by âmental models?ââ Since the phrase âmental modelâ is somewhat commonly usedâat least in the realm of researchâI want to set out what I mean by the term and then outline why you would ever want to make one.
What is a Mental Model?
âThe deepest form of understanding another person is empathyâŠ[which] involves a shift fromâŠobserving how you seem on the outside, toâŠimagining what it feels like to be you on the inside.â[1]
Designing something requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. Empathy with a person is distinct from studying how a person uses something. Empathy extends to knowing what the person wants to accomplish regardless of whether she has or is aware of the thing you are designing. You need to know the personâs goals and what procedure and philosophy she follows to accomplish them. Mental models give you a deep understanding of peopleâs motivations and thought-processes, along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating.
Mental models embrace anything from looking up a part number online to asking the guy at the hardware store how to mix epoxy. A mental model consists of several sections, with groups within each section. Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behaviors made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.
For example, when you wake up in the morning you get dressed, you eat, and you get on the train. These can be considered âmental spacesâ in a diagram of your morning (Figure 1.1). On holidays you skip the âget on a trainâ mental space and instead you âeat a big breakfast with the family.â On mornings when you are tired, maybe you add a mental space about âbecome awakenedâ by perhaps drinking coffee or tea or doing some exercise.
So the full mental model about your morning has several parts. The âEatâ section would have various divisions within it depending on whether you were heading to work or joining the family for Sunday brunch.
To create a mental model, you talk to people about what theyâre doing, look for patterns, and organize those patterns from the bottom up into a model. From the field research, you will glean maybe 60 or 120 behaviors per person. Over time you see the same behaviors and you group them together. You line them up in towers; then line up the towers into groups that represent different cognitive spaces. The diagram looks a lot like a city skyline.
Once you have created the top half of the diagram, you focus on the lower half. Take the product features that you intend to create and align them beneath all the towers they support. In other words, you align the features that your business values beneath concepts that people mentioned. When you have finished, you will see areas of the mental model that are less supported than others, and you may have leftover functions that donât support anything in the mental model.
Figure 1.1. http://flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/2125040309
Mental model of a typical morning for people who commute to work or school. There are additional examples on the book site under Cases: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models
The resulting diagram tells a story about the viability of your business strategy for a particular solution. In Figure 1.2, dark green indicates a primary match for the feature. Light green indicates additional secondary matches for the feature. In other words, for every light green feature there is one dark green feature aligned beneath the best match. Excess features that do not map to the mental model appear in the lower right corner.
Figure 1.2. http://flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/2125040269
Mental model with features aligned beneath it. (Features borrowed from the product category list from Procter & Gambleâs sitehttp://www.pg.com)
Use the name âmental modelâ whether the diagram shows just the towers above the horizontal line or it shows the features aligned beneath the towers. It is this entire picture that becomes the heart of your strategy.
Taking the top and bottom half together, the resulting mental model is a diagram of how a certain segment of people tend to accomplish something, with the things you are making aligned to the depicted concepts. You use the model to understand how your current offerings do and do not support people and devise your strategy going forward. You do this through multiple workshops with team members and stakeholders in your organization, which develops understanding and innovation. The model has a long lifespan, so you can use it to direct your progress with deep awareness of user-centered design for 10 or more years.
The mental models defined in this book are models of a personâs somewhat stable behaviors, rather than ephemeral models that are temporary representations of one situation. I want to acknowledge this distinction because those in the field of cognitive research have explored mental representation in great detail in the past decade, and I want to indicate where these mental models might fall within the currently defined parameters. ââMental modelâ has become a more generic term for mental representation. Cognitive research is now so specialized that article abstracts begin with verbose strings of qualifiers to narrow down the type of mental representation they mean.â[2] Because the mental models in this book are collections of the root reasons why a person is doing something, they belong to the set of mental representations that are built over a long period of experience and are thus resilient. These mental models represent what a person is trying to accomplish in a larger context, no matter which tools are used.
Why Use Mental Models?
âWhy should I use a mental model?â This is probably one of the questions that prompted you to open this bookâindeed, itâs a good one.
Using a mental model can advance several tasks for youâboth from a tactical and a strategic standpoint. It can guide the design of the solution you are working on. It can help you, and your team, make good user and business decisions. And, it can act as a roadmap, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity as the makeup of your team evolves over the next decade.
Confidence in Your Design
How do you k...