Mental Models (Book Review)
Understanding the motivation and the mission of your website users can be key to turning an average service into a strategically aligned tool which they can use to meet their direct needs. This is a find or flight industry – if you don’t have what the user’s looking for, and that means with the obviousness of a brick through a plate glass window, then a thousand other companies are going to take their money in your place. This doesn’t apply only to websites, your business needs to fulfil the needs of customers and to identify where it is meeting those needs and where fresh opportunites exist. To that end Indi Young’s book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior is one methodology that you can incorporate to uncover that specific information.
Indi’s use of the term Mental Model can be a little off-kilter for what most of us believe a mental model to be – in this context it’s an affinity diagram of user behaviours on a specific topic. By conducting well thought out interview processes and pulling the real tasks from real user input we can look closer at the way we are meeting their needs. By combing out the root tasks and allocating them to meaningful groups it becomes possible to tower a cohesive structure to the information. At that point you can draw a line below these towers and place the corresponding service or product below each tower that meets that user group’s needs. As it becomes evident where you succeed and fail in meeting those needs you will identify new opportunities.
This book is really what I’d call a strategic usability book in that once you’ve completed your mental models they can be used into the coming decade as a reference to your other business processes. For this reason it’s probably a good idea to consider mental models in your organisation. But don’t mix this up with usability testing, because mental models precede that stage entirely. Mental models are conducted well before usability in the preceding ideation phase of development before you’ve ever written a line of code. There is nothing for the user to test.
While the concept of mental modeling was easily grasped early in this book there was a definate struggle on my part through the middle. I did get the sense that some things were over explained. I did find myself bogged down in the finer detail of task identification or asking myself why I was being walked through Microsoft Word and Excel instructions at a finer detail… regardless of my tool of choice in real life. So be aware from the outset this can get a little dry in the middle.
However it’s an interesting book in the methodology itself and that carries it through. No doubt some people will gorge it like lemon pie with cream. It would be interesting to see mental modeling in action, too. In larger companies prepared to slip this into their budget it would be an interesting adventure. So, while this wasn’t a book that enthralled me, it was a book that made me think.
If you’re a manager responsible for strategic decisions this book might make it to your must read list. If you’re a web designer then it’s a little lower in priority, but still quite useful.
