Comments on What Is Your Mental Model?

Hernan Casakin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:05:12 GMT

Hello,
I am an architect, a teacher, and a researcher interested in design thinking, and design education. I am eager to read the book, but in the meantime I would like to ask how Mental Models can help me to gain insight in the way students design, or how to develop better teaching strategies in the design studio.
As you see, I am not as much interested in the client-architect relation, as in the design teacher – student relationship. I will be very thankful if you could give me advise in this respect.
Best, and look forward to hearing from you.

Bob Eilikins — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:26:29 GMT

While I generally feel we do the right thing wihtout a Mental Model, I lke the idea that it’s both justifying to stakeholders and a good checkscheme at the end of a project. Ideal.

I’m having trouble finding a good program to build them with. Does Indy recommend/provide a tool in the book?
Or do we resort to blue boxes in Visio?

erinn brush — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:40:38 GMT

What a great article. Mental models are a tool that I don’t use very often. I do find them very helpful to process and will be integrating them into my work more often now!

Jeremy Yuille — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:36:39 GMT

am loving the book Indi.. really great work! (especially like that I can read it *now* in a pdf too)
I’d been looking for something that’d help communicate this type of understanding with stakeholders and (more importantly, I think) internally in the team. We’d used concept models a bit in the past, but were having issues in the way they bled over into different perspectives of an experience. After reading the first couple of sections of your book today I’m pretty excited about trying this out. Thanks for sharing your insights & experiences with us!

Chris Baum — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:03:02 GMT

@Aaron

Great question about segments. The mental modeling process approaches segments based on tasks (what people do and how they think), rather than by demographics or psychographics. I’ve seen this in action, and it’s incredibly interesting.

The book goes into detail about how when you are first getting the mental model process started, you should first make hypotheses about what these segments will be. Then, once you’ve done the research, come back and see how well your hypotheses have borne out. It’s quite an interesting process and will change the way you look at your segments.

Aaron Cooper — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:08:03 GMT

I’m sure this book will be an excellent resource. I can’t wait to get into it.

I’ve often wondered how audience segmentation plays into or serves a purpose as a companion to mental modeling. Specifically, do you recommend creating different mental models for different audience segments, or do you roll the behaviors, motivations and needs of all relevant audiences into a single, all-encompassing mental model (perhaps somehow earmarking audience crossover using icons/colors within the mental model?).

Does anyone have thoughts on this question, or is this in any way addressed within this new book? Thanks.

Paul May — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:31:27 GMT

Very, very cool. Mental models aren’t a tool I’ve used before but I will definitely order the book and learn more. Thanks.

laurie kalmanson — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:04:22 GMT

great storytelling; i ordered the book

when i give seminars to people more on the client side than the practitioner side—ie, what is a user flow—i have them draw the steps for making toast

when we get to the point in the discussion where i ask how far back should we go—to the grocery store where you got the bread, to the farm where the wheat was grown, or to the multiple times and places in pre-history where agriculture was invented, the lights blink on brighter and brigther.

Dana Martinelli — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:11:33 GMT

Indi, I had been inspired by your Keynote at the Adaptive Path UX intensive in DC last year. What I took from that keynote helped me define some better approaches as a practicing IA for Thermo Fisher Scientific and now for sunKING Digital. I have added to your mental model structure by introducing the development row/needs as a compliment to your framework. What this has done, has introduced any IT limitations up front in the discovery phase. It also help define better the high-level business requirement document since it is now better rooted in realistic technology interactions. Just wanted to add to your great work. Your process has defined my process greatly. Thanks!

Richard Dalton — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 05:08:41 GMT

Indi, we’ve found this technique very valuable at Vanguard – ever since I saw you and Peter present it in workshop form at Jared’s UIE conference years ago. I’m really excited to see that it has evolved over time to include aspects of the user experience such as emotion, motivation and philosophy – can’t wait to get the book and dig deeper!

Indi Young — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:06:52 GMT

Thanks for the comments! (I’m Indi, the author of the book.) Yes, this is a way of visualizing data, and it is “a very powerful way to explain these relationships to a customer.” It also keeps the designer focused on the user, not the product. Many companies still design iteratively based on how well an existing product works, which is fine, but it doesn’t give you a wider perspective.

As far as the term “mental model,” in the past decade cognitive scientists have broadened the meaning again and again. I felt that this representation of data falls within those broader definitions.

The “fishbone” (or “spine” or “horizon”) diagram is key in that it shows alignment between the things a person is doing and the ways an organization supports it. So the alignment is the important bit. Above or below the line the representation can take any form. I’ve found that three hierarchical levels of affinity are the right amount of data to depict.

David Travis — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:52:04 GMT

I’m trying to see what’s new here. Isn’t this just a way of visualising the data from a hierarchical task analysis?

Dmitry Nekrasovski — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:48:52 GMT

Great interview – looking forward to the book.

One issue I would have liked to see discussed in the interview is terminology. Indi’s use of the term “mental model”, as a set of behaviours and goals independent of a particular system, seems to be quite different from the traditional definition derived from cognitive psychology and popularized in HCI/UX by Don Norman et al. In a field that’s already plagued by a lack of consensus on matters of terminology, this double usage seems like a less than optimal solution.

Also, it’s not clear from the interview whether Indi’s mental models are intimately tied to the “fishbone diagram” visual representation. Presumably the same information can be visually represented in other ways (e.g. as an affinity diagram). If that’s the case, does it still qualify as a mental model?