Mental Models: A Tool to Design for Fluidity

In a typical design research process, we designers can get very excited after we have created personas and journey maps respectively. Then we tend to get questions from other business counterparts asking what if people changed their behaviors, how do you make sure all the possible scenarios and expectations are being represented by these fictional artifacts.

Well, these are really good questions and the answer is: we can’t.

There is no way we could predict every behaviors in every single scenarios of every user. However, what we can do is to exact the unchanged part of the problem and create the fundamental guidelines to help us make informed design/business decisions. This fundamental guideline is a mental model.

A mental model is one’s unique thought process and understanding of how things work in the external world.

They are formed by individuals based on their life experiences, perceptions, cultures, beliefs and understandings of the surroundings. Mental models are the basis of individual behavior which suggest patterns among groups people.

A better understanding of how mental models represent complex and dynamic systems and how these models change over time, across different segments, will allow us to develop mechanisms to improve the current state of the problem.

Mental models can be very useful as they provide different levels of user expectations which help us understand the problem space from various levels of abstraction. This also gives the framework the capability to be both flexible and scalable. We can layer different stories from different segments on top of the basic structure; we can add multiple visual coding systems allowing different stakeholders zoom in and out based on their unique research needs.

As the mental models are grounded purely on the facts not the creator’s assumptions, they can be a more powerful evaluation tool to decide system delighter against indifferent add-ons.

This also gives the mental model the advantage of being durable over time. Having the underlying human needs and beliefs as the basis, we can keep adding new knowledge and develop new insights when comparing on the new axis of time.

What’s more, it can also be paired with other models such as Jobs-To-Be-Done, Kano Models to build more well-rounded understanding of the subjects that we are designing for.

Overall, I think the mental model is a great tool to design in a fluid world.