Jared Spool on Mental Models
May 10th, 2008
Listening to the podcasts made available on the SXSW (South By South West) website has been occupying my background attention recently. One of the standout presentations was from Jared Spool, Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering, titled Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs which discusses the correlation between misdirection in magic and the user experience of a web design. He looks at the difference between perceived speed and actual speed of a website and how design can influence the user experience to make the fast seem slow or the slow appear faster.
Taking one of Jared’s examples, when users were asked to rate the speed of Amazon.com against that of About.com they consistently rated Amazon as a faster website. When, in reality, the speed of About.com is about three times the actual speed faster than Amazon. Another example was made with our computer file system mental model that works well because we believe it to be true on some level. The reality is there are no files, just non-contigious ones and zeros on a hard disk. We’ve been misdirected for our own benefit. In programming terms it’s the creation of an abstraction.
