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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.”

People have had similar experiences with the language of a mental model. Jeff Veen, User Experience Manager at Google and founding partner of Adaptive Path, created a mental model diagram for his redesign of Google Analytics in 2006. He says he used the mental model as a way to gain empathy with the people who were trying to understand their web traffic. Talking to users “bought me time to absorb the difficulty of the problem we were facing and time to start pondering solutions to that [problem].” Although he did not use the diagram to specifically derive the design, he says, “Most of what made it into the design was based on my own …empathy [which] was certainly developed while going through this research and analysis.”

Distinguish Among Solutions

A mental model represents the entirety of each audience segment’s environment. Thus, the diagram depicts where one segment’s experience ends and where the next one begins. You certainly wouldn’t want to combine the experience of truck drivers with that of dispatchers—that much is obvious, and the separate mental models will show it. More subtle is the experience differences among people of a similar segment but, say, in a different country. Do the differences merit separate solutions or not? Compare the mental models. If they have a lot in common, a common solution is dictated. If not, then different solutions are needed, each with its own architecture matching the mental model. As another example, corporate intranets should be specific to each workgroup type. Software engineers need a different set of tools on their intranet than corporate lawyers. Understanding the differences among the mental spaces of your audience segments will bring clarity to your design.

Assemble Original Ideas

Use the mental model diagrams to derive design decisions. For example, if a tower in the diagram shows that people “Collect Pictures of Renovated Kitchens to Mull Over,” perhaps you can create a scrapbook of renovated kitchens for a showroom, or point people to “kitchen renovation” as a tag word on Del.icio.us. Use the person’s real world as inspiration. What if there is a tower called “Distrust Sales Reps”? What can you possibly do to help customers who believe that talking to a sales representative is a waste of time? Connect them directly with the technical representative? Get rid of sales representatives entirely, and change the way your organization approaches potential customers? Deriving ideas from the diagram will simplify the work of deciding which features support which behaviors. Prioritizing these feature ideas according to business goals and resources will simplify discussions about what the customer intends to do and how the business will serve them.

Validate That Ideas Match Needs

You can use the mental model to double-check design decisions, just as you use personas to do a mental double-check: “What would Meredith do?” Say someone powerful in your organization decides he really wants a stock ticker to appear on a particular web site. You can validate that request by matching it to a tower in the mental model that shows “track market stock prices.” If no behavior of this description appears in the mental model, you can respectfully point out this absence and possibly talk the person out of an unnecessary feature.

How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?

“The mental model provided us a global, durable definition of tasks, processes, terminology, and guiding principles to design our intranet HR portal and quickly course-correct whenever teams propose new programs with obscure names, hidden in odd parts of the architecture, whose value would not be obvious to our employees.” —Jacqueline De Muro, e-HR Channel Manager, Global HR Services, Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Avoid Politics

Who among us has not worked in a situation where other people wanted to second-guess your design decisions? Sometimes these people can comprise whole departments. Battles ensue among groups as to who makes the final design decision, or who gets preferential placement in a particular solution (e.g., placement in primary navigation of a web site). That’s office politics. A mental model can act as a third-party mediator. It is essentially a collection of data placed in relationship to other data based on your interpretation. The data is concrete—your interpretation is circumstantial. Suddenly the conversation isn’t about the design you’ve created; it’s about your analysis of the data. Conversations with your erstwhile foes center on phrases like, “My understanding of what this customer means is x; what is your interpretation?” People from different disciplines can come to a common understanding of the customer’s situation. You both end up on the same side of the table, both looking at the neutral data. This fortuitous arrangement produces more effective design discussions and faster decision-making.

How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?

“Developing a design using mental models (and displaying the results) is a durable reminder to the team and the organisation that you did not just ‘make something up.’ It’s the IA equivalent of calculus from first principles. Once you have done it, it’s hard to imagine justifying design any other way.”

—Craig Duncan, Head of the Information Management Unit of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction

Derive Architecture

If you are designing for software, you can use the complete diagram to derive the top-level organization of the application, such as navigation or toolbars. Additionally, you can use the mental model as a starting point for interaction design and as a guide for feature definition.

How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?

“The framework provided by a user mental model takes the guesswork out of IA, or at least makes your guesses more likely to be on target.”

—Camille Sobalvarro, Senior Manager of Web Marketing, Sybase

Stop Spending All Your Time Re-Architecting

I see a lot of companies who are still stuck in a cycle of redesign—re-architecting what they have created over and over. They define something to fix, change it, and then realize the initial definition was a little off. I’ve seen many five-year roadmaps that look like the one in Figure 1.3, but all these important items keep getting pushed off because the architecture still isn’t right or the strategy keeps changing.

Five-Year Plan

 Improve functionality of tools

 Add better tools to empower the customer

 Serve dynamic news, events, announcements based on region and role

 Fine-tune messaging (marketing) opportunities (internal ads, external ads, contests and giveaways, special sales, landing pages for brand-specific islands)

Figure 1.3. http://flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/2158700329

Five-year roadmap for one web property belonging to a multi-national semiconductor corporation.

Don’t stay stuck in this cycle of re-inventing your solution or re-addressing your information architecture. You need an overhaul of your regular development process. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path refers to this as “punctuation in product development.”[7] Use a mental model as a guide to get the definition right the first time, then focus your energy on

fulfilling business goals instead of focusing on iterative changes within a single medium.