But don’t let the simplicity of the process detract from the power of the change it can enable. Talking to users in a structured way, analyzing in a collaborative way, and diagramming with clarity can transform the way you approach the Web.
And it might just ignite your creativity!
Jeffrey Veen, San Francisco, August, 2007
CHAPTER 1
What and Why? The Advantages of a Mental Model
You might be thinking, “What does she mean by ‘mental models?’” Since the phrase “mental model” is somewhat commonly used—at least in the realm of research—I want to set out what I mean by the term and then outline why you would ever want to make one.
What is a Mental Model?
“The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy…[which] involves a shift from…observing how you seem on the outside, to…imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside.”[1]
Designing something requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. Empathy with a person is distinct from studying how a person uses something. Empathy extends to knowing what the person wants to accomplish regardless of whether she has or is aware of the thing you are designing. You need to know the person’s goals and what procedure and philosophy she follows to accomplish them. Mental models give you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought-processes, along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating.
Mental models embrace anything from looking up a part number online to asking the guy at the hardware store how to mix epoxy. A mental model consists of several sections, with groups within each section. Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behaviors made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.
For example, when you wake up in the morning you get dressed, you eat, and you get on the train. These can be considered “mental spaces” in a diagram of your morning (Figure 1.1). On holidays you skip the “get on a train” mental space and instead you “eat a big breakfast with the family.” On mornings when you are tired, maybe you add a mental space about “become awakened” by perhaps drinking coffee or tea or doing some exercise.
What is an Affinity Diagram?
Affinity diagrams, in the simplest interpretation, show groups of related things. You can make an affinity diagram out of your grocery list. Some items, like milk and eggs, might be found near each other in your store. Other items, like pasta sauce and spaghetti, are elements of a single meal you’re planning. The diagram below shows an example.
A mental model for a particular topic is, in essence, an affinity diagram of user behaviors. The towers in the diagrams represent group names for the behaviors within. The sets of towers represent a higher-level group of the behaviors.
So the full mental model about your morning has several parts. The “Eat” section would have various divisions within it depending on whether you were heading to work or joining the family for Sunday brunch.
To create a mental model, you talk to people about what they’re doing, look for patterns, and organize those patterns from the bottom up into a model. From the field research, you will glean maybe 60 or 120 behaviors per person. Over time you see the same behaviors and you group them together. You line them up in towers; then line up the towers into groups that represent different cognitive spaces. The diagram looks a lot like a city skyline.
Once you have created the top half of the diagram, you focus on the lower half. Take the product features that you intend to create and align them beneath all the towers they support. In other words, you align the features that your business values beneath concepts that people mentioned. When you have finished, you will see areas of the mental model that are less supported than others, and you may have leftover functions that don’t support anything in the mental model.
Figure 1.1.
Mental model of a typical morning for people who commute to work or school. There are additional examples on the book site under Cases:
The resulting diagram tells a story about the viability of your business strategy for a particular solution. In Figure 1.2, dark green indicates a primary match for the feature. Light green indicates additional secondary matches for the feature. In other words, for every light green feature there is one dark green feature aligned beneath the best match. Excess features that do not map to the mental model appear in the lower right corner.
Figure 1.2.
Mental model with features aligned beneath it. (Features borrowed from the product category list from Procter & Gamble’s sitehttp://www.pg.com)
