UX Design Basics: Mental Models

the best way to explain this is with an example early 2016 Fiat Chrysler automobiles recall over 1 million vehicles due to a new shifter design called the Rockettes which gear shift and what this shifter design does is you press the presses button here and then you click click click and it shifts through the gears in that way but then the the the shifts are always returned back to the center position alright the only indicator that you have that of which gear you're in is that the PRN it will be illuminated by a light right but there's no positional feedback so I mean well I mean you're getting some indicators of that of which gear you're in so what's the problem why the recall what happened was people were getting out of their cars thinking the shifter was in park to have the car drive off without them and this led to at least 100 crash of 40 injuries possibly worse but we can't prove that Chrysler's official response to this was your selection is conveyed to the driver by multiple sets of indicator lights not gear selector position and unless due care is taken drivers may draw erroneous conclusions about the status of their vehicle which is a fancy way of saying driver error is your fault right it's not our fault that we designed this badly and it's like classic classic bad design right if you're making something and the people you're making it for don't understand how it works that's not their fault all right and but that's a classic mistake that that a lot of designers make it's hard sometimes right you make something you think it's really cool let me put it in front of people and then they just don't get it at all it's kind of its sting but at but you know over time you get these sensitized so that pain I guess and you really just start to approach it as solving problems almost like like crossword puzzles or something so anyway I'm Chrysler's fix was to implement additional warnings and to encourage people to please read their instruction manual for their car will this fix the problem of course not right because the problem is not that people aren't reading their owner's manuals the problem is that people are accustomed to positional feedback when changing gears and that's you know if this is feedback that doesn't require you to look at the gear all the time to see which position is in and which gear you're in and this is a well-established convention that's been around for more than 50 years right this has been around for so long it's like edged into the public consciousness now so you can't just change a convention like this and expect everything will be all right because people have these these sets of experiences built up and they take those experience into this new thing that you're making and that's how they expect it to work based on their previous expectations and that's what a mental model is an internal representation of an external reality based on learning and experience so this is sort of like a cognitive shorthand and you know this is just this like a fancy way of just saying that based on what you experience in your life you expect things to work in certain ways and you're always not consciously most of the time not consciously comparing your mental model with the real world and you know if the X if the way something work line works lines up with your expectation you'll understand how to use it and if it doesn't you will struggle when it comes to mental models there's two things to differentiate there is a system model and the interaction model the system model is how something works and the interaction model is how to interact with it how to use it so engineers the people that build products usually have strong system models they understand how it works very well but they typically have weak interaction models so they'll know how an engine and a drivetrain works but not how people drive their cars while the average person will know how to drive their car but not how the engine connects to the drivetrain and the gears work right so you know the engineer the average person prefers being comfortable / knowledgeable and that's something that's really hard for engineers to understand so it's the job of the designer to come in and fill that gap between system and interact between users and builders so designers need to have strong system models and strong interaction models so they're sort of like translator and that is by the way why in my opinion it's a good idea for designer to know how to code right you don't need to do it every day you probably you're never going to be as good at it as engineers are but you should at least have coded one project from start to finish right like done the whole pipeline set up the database wrote the code and not like some basic project even that's like some five page site like do something with logins do something with user profiles something with a shopping cart and code it all yourself I'll take you a couple months but after that you'll understand systems much much better and I'll make you a better designer I was a front-end engineer for two years early on in my career and before that I did write some code to like back-end code PHP setting up databases and I was never as good at it as engineers are but the knowledge that I gained from it was so valuable for me as a designer because now I understood now I understand why an engineer sometimes gets kind of frustrated when I make some suggestion to him of how to change something because the thing that took me ten minutes to change and sketch take them eight hours to change in code right so you know it can only help if you have that understanding of the system the more understanding you have the more experience you acquire you just get better and better as a designer you know this is a good system model because it does does work but but it's a bad interaction model so again it's a model of how you think something will work based on learning and experience the way to think about it is if you're creating something unfamiliar I base it in the familiar first alright this is the original iPad notes app there's no reason why there has to be simulated leather here or three torn off pages here at the top right there are no pages on the screen but when the iPad came out it was such a completely new paradigm that people can actually connect and I have your notepad real quick right so so when when it first came out it was such a paradigm shift that people that we had to take an analogy from the real world and transfer it over to this digital world right so the iPad approximately has the form factor of this right so it has about that shape and then if you could look kind of like this you're like your brain makes the connection oh oh this is a note-taking app right thank you same thing with the address book I mean there's no reason that there needs to be simulated pages here in the address book right there's there's no point for that except that it helps people make the connection from their physical address book that they've been using for many many years to this new digital address books of course you know the classic basing something in the familiar metaphor is the desktop right when computers with graphical user interface first came out it was totally new right nothing like that had ever existed before so there was a real challenge there to explain to people how to use this and the analogy that they came up with is well let's use office metaphors this is the top of your desk these are files these are folders here's a trash can that you can put stuff in that you don't need right so that that that metaphor served us well for a long time there's there some debate in the industry now about whether it still makes sense to do it that way but but it served its purpose of taking people make helping people make that cognitive leap or of course you know an even more classic example of mental models this is one of the first cars what does it look like looks like a carriage without a horse right because if if they if someone had rolled in with a with a brand new s-class or something that would have just broken that would have broken the frame of people would have been too far ahead of its time instead they bring out this and then people can make the connection oh this is like a carriage but it doesn't have horses and it also has like oh I get that and then after that you can start evolving that paradigm right so mental models can evolve over time like once you take once you've done some work to take people into a new paradigm you know once people have understood that this is a screen and you can tap something and something happens right once people have understood that you can then evolve that paradigm right you don't need the leather anymore you don't need the pages after the the there is a sufficient level of knowledge in the public consciousness and and that's how you get flat design right what's what people have been talking about for the last couple of years because the knowledge base of the general population has gotten to a point now where you where people just know that they can interact with certain things on a screen so it doesn't need to look like like a physical object anymore and after a while those metaphors actually start holding you back because even though it looks like a book it is still not a book right so some of those physical metaphors actually you know start why not take advantage of some of the benefits that a digital interface brings you right but first you need to build up that knowledge speaking of the gear shift example coming back to that [Music] another is another way of evolving the gear shift I saw this a couple of months ago when I rented a Dodge Ram and it was really interesting because a couple of reasons I actually think that this is a great example of evolving a paradigm and not sticking with something just because we've always been done that way because back in the day like when cars originally made the gear shift was literally connected to the drivetrain and you shifted the gear manually but these days everything is done with electronics and sensors so there's really no reason to before the gear shift to take up all that space in the middle right you can just have a nice bench here or some more storage space but of course because that mental model is so strong most people still do it the old way what I like about this one is when when I sat in that car it was like it's so different from what you're used to that that you know the first thing you do is like huh like your brain is like forced to be like but if you're like understand what's going on here and but then at the same time it's so easy to understand - right it's just a big knob that you can twist and has an indicator and just four settings it's like so clear then after about a thirty second learning curve you're like oh okay that makes sense and then you and the rest is still the same so that like changing the entire car just changing this one specific thing so so that is something that works really well and is a great example of focusing on goals versus just the steps of doing something and sort of brings us to this idea that you know you won't always be in a situation where you're creating an entirely new paradigm very rarely but when you are you got to make sure that you teach people well and you got to make sure that it's much better than what they're used to right a gear shift that looks just like a regular gear shift but doesn't move positions that's not much better right and what I love about this example is this was the original ad for the original iPhone and the iPhone was a completely new thing when it came out and this ad is literally teaching people how to use an iPhone right because it had never been done before it's so good okay so takeaway is if a mental model matches the behavior of an interface right so if it works the way that you think is going to work you're going to understand how it works right and so so when you're designing for this you know if you're if you understand people's mental models you can make better design choices and which enables people to understand what you're designing more quickly and make better decisions question going back to the mental model with the car and the drive knob yeah what makes that those interactions more useful than other driving without the positional feedback is those issue for the other one too yeah so the reason that I think is more I mean from an actual interaction standpoint that's like a quantum leap like the iPhone was but when you think about space allocation in a car right like why does their needs if the drivetrain doesn't really isn't connected to anything physically ship isn't connected to anything physically that's like right beneath the car there's no real reason for it to be there and take up like a square foot of space and you've seen you've seen a lot of carmakers trying to solve that problem in different ways right like the Prius has like a little tiny gear shift at the top so I think the benefit of this particular design is that it frees up space in the middle and you know when you're when as cars are getting more and more high-tech and are adding more and more functionality space as a premium so turning the gear shift from something that's this big into something that's this big while still retaining the essential usability of it I think that's a big win how do you notice that people's mental models may differ depending on their culture their country even demographics like gender and if so how does a designer even be to figure that out yeah well yeah a mental model is always based on an individual's experiences so you know if you've never seen a gear shift before you're not going to know how to interact with it probably so it's totally true that is dependent on people's experiences and the way you go about finding out about this stuff is research so user research which is coincidentally a segment that work something that we're covering in segment three about how to do good research because it's all about understanding who you're designing for as you're going deeper into understanding how these people that you're trying to solve problems for you'll automatically uncover their expectations and their mental models of things and that's how you design for it so so the the cornerstone of every effective design is followed research

Channel: Jamal Nichols

Views: 81,058

Rating: 4.9398026 out of 5

Keywords: UX Design, UX, Product design, interaction design, User experience, User interface, usability, psychology

Id: 9gM8K4ooavY

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2017