The Mental Model

The Mental Model

• A short description

Mental models have been explored for years. They appeared for first time in 1943, presented by Kenneth Craik in his book “The Nature of Explanation”. With simple words we can say that users perceive external environments and realities. This technique actually is a set of beliefs about how an application or a product should work and how people interact with that product based on their beliefs. People usually can share beliefs, which are not even remotely similar to the models of implementation used by application developers for example. But even though, the Mental Model can be very helpful and useful to improve your product for a better quality or performance.

• Usage in the UX process

I share the opinion, that the Mental Model will be most useful in the User research. The reason is, this is the moment when we talk with people, they share with us their opinions and thoughts, we gather all the information and we analyze it for the next step that should be made. Based on the collected information in the beginning of the process, the design should be created and the application should be tested afterwards.

• Advantages and Disadvantages

The biggest advantages of the Mental Model technique is it allows to understand the User’s Worlds. That means, you can understand people’s opinion about how the product should work. This is the main concept. How they imagine it in their minds. Making interviews with random people will help you to improve your customer experience. Another benefit related to the Mental Model is recognizing new opportunities for your application. Based on that, you can change the design or some functions just to improve the quality and the performance. Other possible benefits are deriving top level of navigation.

Of course, each technique contains itself some disadvantage. For example, when you are applying The Mental Model, talking with people to understand what they think about your product, how the whole system should work and so on, this can lead to incorrect mental representations for the users you are talking with, because your product is still not completed. That means that wrong decision can be taken in the future. Moreover, people’s ability to run their models are severely limited. One more thing is that these models are parsimonious. Often people do extra physical operation rather than the mental planning.

• Contribution of the technique to the group

Firstly, I did a research, applying this technique. Afterwards the Design of the application should be implemented and afterwards the whole system needs to be tested. Due to the fact the techniques are dependent each other, everything will work perfectly if they are combined in the correct way. The flow is very important and it should exist.

• The DOT framework

The Mental Model is a technique, which might be classified to the FIELD strategy of the DOT framework. In that strategy, you are searching an information and investigate in resources. To conclude, the significance of FIELD research, in combination with the Mental Model, give you a basic information about important aspects of user’s environment.