Jared Spool on Mental Models
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.
Why would that be? We all know the experience of slow moving time when things are difficult to achieve and fast moving time while we’re having fun or immersed in pleasant environments. The relativity of time to our internal process is nothing new. So what can we do? Jared suggests we look to magic for some clues.
By understanding that each of us brings to a website a different mental model - including the designer, the information architect and the person who developed that interactive element that got included at the last minute - we can appreciate that a design is never really just a design. If done well, the designer should create an experience that is different than what’s actually going on in reality. This is the essence of a magician’s illusion.
Most designs, he points out, are about getting the designer’s mental model and the user’s mental model to align as closely as possible. Whereas the magician is about getting the user to think something different is going on - the magician’s mental model of the illusion versus the audience’s mental model of the same illusion may differ significantly.
While I could go on about the content of Jared Spool’s talk I’ve probably only covered the first few minutes so download it and see what you think. I’ve actually listened to it more than twice all the way through, he’s an entertaining guy. Interesting photo, an almost toonish voice, and a larger than life personality and authority on the user experience. If there is one area of web design that interests me it’s the user experience.
