Mental Models in Design: Creating Good Usability.

We live in a world of systems. A system is anything that consists of parts that interact and depend on each other. It could be as simple as brushing your teeth or as complex as taking a life long decision. The only difference between these two systems is the mental effort you exert.

A mental model of a system is reducing the effort taken to figure it out. By removing the noise and highlighting the core components of that system. Mental models prevent us from figuring everything in our life, from scratch. They help us infer and come to a conclusion rather quickly.

What is a Mental Model?

Mental models are our perception of how the world works. It does not depend on facts but rather our values and beliefs. We cannot keep all the details of everything in our brain, so we use models to simplify and organize it into chunks.

As an example: if I gave you a smartphone right now, you would probably start by unlocking it, then swiping across the screen, opening applications and going around. This is your mental model of how a smartphone should work. If the smartphone I gave you did not work the way you expect it to, you would be stumped. You simply would not be able to use it. This is the case in bad usability.

Why design with mental models

When using a new platform, users have certain expectations of how it should work. If it does not meet their expectations, there will be a mismatch between what the users think it does and what it actually does. This can cause all sorts of problems that will all lead to users frustration. As a rule of thumb, people do not like to be frustrated so their first instinct would be to abandon this platform.

Applying this to web interfaces, there are a set of standards that all web users are used to:

• Links are presented in different colors and, when clicked, they redirect to a different page
• A solid box with a call to action in it is a button
• Search boxes are usually at the top of the page
• Website logo can be found at the top of the page and leads to main page of the website upon clicking

If you break any of these standards in your design, your users will be confused. They will think your website is broken and their confidence in the design will decrease. This will make your users want to use this website less, if not abandon it all together.

Mental models in design process

Each person's mental model is unique. It is formed by their education, background, age and experience. The more experience you have, the more access you have to different models, which means that normal people do not have the same experience designers have. Therefore, their mental models are different.

That is why designers need to empathize with users and learn about their mental models. We need to break  from the bias of our own mental models and aligning our designs with our users expectations. User research is the key to understanding users needs, paint points and expectations.

User research must be conducted early on in the design process. Methods like card sorting, user interviews and surveys are a great way to understand how users expect your product to perform. User research also helps in learning about users expectations and their existing mental models.

In conjunction with user research, another method that can be used to understand the existing experiences that users are used to is competitive analysis (benchmarking). Benchmarking enables you to see the product from the users lens. By analyzing several interfaces, you can identify patterns that users are used to and feel comfortable interacting with.

Where Innovation lies

So far, it might sound like there is no place to innovate if all designs are sticking to the same mental model. However, that is not true due to the fact that mental models are continuously evolving. We do not stick to the same model all our lives. We grow, learn and adapt, and so do our mental models. This is where innovation comes in the picture.

Going back to the smartphone example, if I asked you to use today' smartphone 20 years ago, you would not be able to. There was no such thing as a smartphone back then. Our existing mental model of what a phone is was disrupted. I remember the first time I used a smartphone, it was rather exciting but also challenging. I had to figure it out and once it integrated itself in my life, I got used to it. The next smartphone I got was much easier to use. Building knowledge is the key to creating and changing mental models.

Mental models take a lot of time and effort to change. In turn, users will transfer their expectations from other platforms to yours. According to Jakob's law: 'Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know'. It is always useful to ask users what are the platforms they are using in their daily life, in user research, and analyze those platforms.

This also applies to rolling out design revamps of existing platforms. Some users will resist and hate the new design. To avoid this, allow users to use the old design for a limited time till they trust and get used to the new one. Big players implement this technique like when Google completely changed the interface and experience of Google calendar. A design that did not change much in many years became drastically different. However, users were warned and were allowed to use the old design for several months, empowering them to decide when to change their mental model and also take enough time to actually change it.

The Takeaway

Designers should always be aware of the gap between their way of thinking and the users' mental models. In order to reduce this gap, user research in the early stages of design is a must. Meeting users expectations will not only reduce frustration but also increase their trust in using the design. Once their expectations are met, you can start introducing innovation bit by bit, as their mental model starts to evolve. Learning about users' mental models and designing with them in mind is a powerful tool that every designer should use to create good usability.

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This article is published to this blog where I write about different design topics.