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At a client meeting this week I ran into one of those magic Kodak moments where you can see the person you’re talking to unable to make a quantum leap into the world you’re explaining - that face is worth a photo. Not due to technical jargon in the discussion but because people wrap up objects in their worldview in overly simple boxes. We do it to protect ourselves from having to deal with the complexity of the world around us. A programming term for this is abstraction - we only create interfaces that people deal with so they can’t touch the icky bits or break them by mistake. Your car is an abstraction for a whole pile of technology run by an internal combustion engine and about 40 computers.

So back to the story. This mental model was interesting from a client perspective because it involved blogs. You have to understand that we were going to use blogging software to create a low level content management system that would then be hooked into some server side processing of an online assessment. The client enters articles, tags them appropriately, and then these are used contextually at the other end of the assessment process. If that makes any sense. So, basically, they have an information section and we’re using blogging software to get a whole bunch of stuff for free.

And back to our clients mental model. One mockup used the term Information on the global navigation while another, quickly sketched on the bus to the meeting, used the term Blog. They are in many ways exactly the same thing but for some reason the client had enough time to put information into the system but not enough to enter blog content - the exact same content. Seriously. In a show / hide experience I watched an instant smile / frown response similar to showing a small child the lollies behind my back. And this was because to my client the software and her perception of blogging were synonymous. WordPress, for example, and blogging are the same thing boxed into the one mental model.

This is interesting from not only in the worldview of the client but also of any website user. Mental models they bring with them to a web interface affect how they interact and perceive affordances.

After coming back to this about five or six times with the client it became apparent that she still couldn’t separate the two concepts. And how could she? Seriously? Because when you think of it I was asking her to believe she was wrong about the world, a much greater challenge than to insist she just enter some information. One was a mountain and the other was achievable. Show / hide.

I’m not really sure how someone can have half an hour to type in a piece of information but no time to type in a blog but that’s my worldview. A divide by zero problem. Ultimately, what we use a piece of software for might be outside the accepted paradigm of writing to tell friends what we did on the holidays. To us its just a piece of software and not a black box.