Mental Models (Book Review)
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
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.
