This week the term “Mental Models” has come up a lot. Although I have a basic understanding that they are ideas ****that we consciously or unconsciously form based on our experiences almost like muscle memory and that they guide our thoughts and behaviours. I wanted to learn more about them and how we can design for a users mental models.

Jakob Nielsen describes a mental model as “What the user believes about the system” which essentially means it is what a user thinks they know about how to use a website, mobile phone or other digital product. Mental models are built in a user’s brain and people reference them to make their lives easier. As UX designers we can refer to what they already know from past interactions and incorporate into a new one as long as it follows the same interaction patterns and information architecture.

The most valuable thing when using mental models in UX design is knowing what a user refers to in their existing mental model as well as understanding it to help get a better idea of what the users will expect from your system. If you don’t follow a users existing mental model, there will be a mismatch between the user’s idea of how a product will work and the way it actually works. This mismatch can cause all sorts of problems because it will lead to user frustration and at times users will abandon your app or website due to it being too difficult for them to use and losing patience. Despite everyone's mental models being slightly different due to everyone having slightly different experiences, the majority of the time peoples user experiences will overlap and the majority of people develop similar mental models for common user experiences.

For example if a person is going to a new website to buy a product, they will have a mental model of how the check out experience on the new website will work based on their past experiences with online shopping. If the new sequence is consistent with their mental model, the experience will run smoothly and the user will be satisfied. As well as the sequence, users will also look for familiarity in UX conventions such as links will be underlined or be written in a different colour text, search boxes will appear in the upper right hand corner of a website and a logos will normally appear in the upper left hand corner of a website. Users get frustrated and problems arise when we don’t follow these normal UX conventions and do not follow a normal users mental model such as moving the placing of the search bar. While it’s a relatively small frustration, it will still make your user experience less enjoyable and will serve as a potential barrier to your user completing their purchase.

However despite everyone having an overlapping mental model, we should not design based on our own mental model but instead the mental model of our target user as people pay attention to different things and have varied requirements and technical abilities when it comes to the digital tools they use. This means certain users may not understand something that is easily understood by someone else. An example is that a teenagers skills to copy and paste on a laptop is a lot more advanced than the elderly; a younger people simply uses ctrl C to copy and ctrl V to paste wherever the older user would have to use several clicks and a slightly lengthier process to complete the task.

As a result, UX designers should design to users’ existing mental models to ensure their expectations are met and their experiences with your latest design are as smooth as possible. That’s why understanding users’ existing mental models is essential when designing a new UI. We can get a deeper understanding of their mental model needs through the use of user interviews, surveys and further down the line with user testing prototypes. In the instance that we do not have access to interview the user we can use competitor analysis or research as it enables you to see the way competitors’ systems are designed and infer what users are comfortable with as a result.

<aside> 💭 Reflection

This research has really helped me understand what mental models are and how we can use mental models to help enhance our design and improve the user experience of the products and services we create. After all a mental model is built in a user’s brain and are based on what they know from past interactions with websites, mobile phones and other interactive products so it is important we develop our designs based on what will make sense to users rather than introducing a brand new UI as this tends to result in mismatching and user frustration. If a mismatch between users’ mental models and a new UI does happen, change the system to conform to users’ mental models or if that’s not possible or desired, include instructions, tutorials and demos to educate users about how the system works.

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