Mental models in design

Mental model is a representation of how something works based individual's existing knowledge and previous experience.

It's really a set of concepts we associate with something: e.g. seeing a glass and knowing we can pour water in it and drink from it, because we've learned that's how it's used. (Associations between concepts is thinking)

Different people can have very different mental models about the same thing.

Mentals models aren't usually an accurate representation. Accuracy isn't the goal, understanding is. (e.g. consider a mental model of a "lock")

Because Thinking is mostly unconscious, so are mental models. People are not necessarily aware of the models they hold about stuff. However, these models might be revealed via Placing objects in space reflects our understanding of a given concept.

In digital design, we usually leverage widespread mental models (often taking them even for granted) – e.g. the understanding how a text field works.

Other times, new things can be hard to understand for most people since they haven't developed the necessary mental models yet. This holds for complex things as well: Trying to achieve immediately intuitive UI is problematic in complex products

Mental models are important for the concept of intuitive UIs: UI is intuitive when its design matches user's mental model.

The term "mental model" is often used very differently: second, heavily misused, meaning is "thinking frameworks or a general subject-related concept".

Tags: design psychology intuitive UIs user research

ID: 2021-0217-0831

References:

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