the diagram shows just the towers above the horizontal line or it shows the features aligned beneath the towers. It is this entire picture that becomes the heart of your strategy.
Taking the top and bottom half together, the resulting mental model is a diagram of how a certain segment of people tend to accomplish something, with the things you are making aligned to the depicted concepts. You use the model to understand how your current offerings do and do not support people and devise your strategy going forward. You do this through multiple workshops with team members and stakeholders in your organization, which develops understanding and innovation. The model has a long lifespan, so you can use it to direct your progress with deep awareness of user-centered design for 10 or more years.
The Mental Model Process
First, reach out to actual users and have a conversation with them, collecting their perspective and vocabulary. Analyze all of those conversations and composite them into a diagram called “the mental model diagram.” Then compare all of the things your solution is supposed to do with the different parts of that mental model diagram. Align them with the concepts that they support. You can do this with functionality just as it exists, or functionality being planned, or you can play around with brainstorming new ideas. When you step back and look at the whole picture with teammates and stakeholders in the organization, you can develop a design strategy—a vision—to follow over the next decade. Then you can start devising tactical solutions for high priority areas of the mental model.
The mental models defined in this book are models of a person’s somewhat stable behaviors, rather than ephemeral models that are temporary representations of one situation. I want to acknowledge this distinction because those in the field of cognitive research have explored mental representation in great detail in the past decade, and I want to indicate where these mental models might fall within the currently defined parameters. “‘Mental model’ has become a more generic term for mental representation. Cognitive research is now so specialized that article abstracts begin with verbose strings of qualifiers to narrow down the type of mental representation they mean.”[2] Because the mental models in this book are collections of the root reasons why a person is doing something, they belong to the set of mental representations that are built over a long period of experience and are thus resilient. These mental models represent what a person is trying to accomplish in a larger context, no matter which tools are used.
Why Use Mental Models?
“Why should I use a mental model?” This is probably one of the questions that prompted you to open this book—indeed, it’s a good one.
Using a mental model can advance several tasks for you—both from a tactical and a strategic standpoint. It can guide the design of the solution you are working on. It can help you, and your team, make good user and business decisions. And, it can act as a roadmap, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity as the makeup of your team evolves over the next decade.
The Three C’s
You might notice that the three main reasons I use to describe the advantages of mental models all begin with the letter “C”:
Confidence in Your Design—guide the design of the solution
Clarity in Direction—make good user and business decisions
Continuity of Strategy—ensure longevity of vision and opportunity
I thought this was a neat way to remember the reasons, especially if you have to persuade your CEO in the elevator why you want to create some mental models of your customers.
Confidence in Your Design
How do you know if you’ve got it right? You’re looking for something that will ensure that you’ve hit the mark. A mental model will give your team members confidence in their design because it is based on a solid foundation of research. It will assure management that success is likely. Likewise, your users will have confidence in using the design because it matches what they already have in mind. They will not hesitate while using your solution. It will make sense to them, embody some of their philosophies, and respect the emotional component of what they are doing.
Leverage Luck + Intent
As you might suspect, any number of variables combine to make success—not the least of which is luck. “Being in the right place at the right time,” experiencing “a freakish alignment of the stars,” “having things just go right”…no matter the phrase, luck plays a larger part in the process than any organization wants to face. Michael Bierut, a respected visual designer, said this about luck during an interview[3] with Adaptive Path founder Peter Merholz: “It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of ‘strategy’ but of common sense, taste, and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this and create gargantuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.”
You’re fortunate if you work in an environment where the “luck component” is acknowledged. Most people have to justify their decisions with cold, hard facts. What I like to bring to the picture is a tool that can free you to recognize possibilities[4] while at the same time provide solid data. In other words, you can “embrace the ambiguity”[5] of the design process because you have a mental model to steer you.
Scientific versus Intuitive Methods
The mental model method is a qualitative approach based on interpretation of data that looks like a scientific method. It is a hybrid produced by science and intuition; it’s a little of both. It is a very successful method in environments where people are looking to support decisions with real data. It is also enormously useful in environments where teams can define and communicate product/information design with more intuitive techniques such as storyboards, comics, or videos.*
* See the work of Kevin Cheng and Tom Wailes at Yahoo!, as presented in “Finding Innovation in the Five Hundred Pound Gorilla” at IA Summit 2007. www.tinyurl.com/38wdbn. Also see Jared Spool’s June 2007 UIE article “Knowledge Navigator Deconstructed: Building an Envisionment” http://www.tinyurl.com/ywsx7m
So how does a mental model give you the evidence you need to support your design, in addition to the leeway to create luck? A mental model is a visual language. Its text is the data. Its grammar is the vertical and horizontal alignments of concepts. With a language you can convey anything you can think of. Frank Gehry, the well-known architect of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, explains[6] it this way, “For Disney Hall, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to listen. I worked closely with the acoustician, who said sometimes the sound has to be big, and then sometimes it has to be like candlelight. I got a sense of what a conductor thinks about when he gets up on stage, and what the musicians need in their relationship to the room. Once I had all of that, I could free-associate, because I was programmed like a computer. I couldn’t go wrong because I’d learned the language so completely. It’s what I try to explain to my students—the more you know, the freer you are in the end.”
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