What is a Mental Model? Leveraging Better User Experience

How we navigate the world and derive meaning from it is directly tied to our ability to break down complex concepts and situations into simpler ones. This briefly describes what a mental model is. Additionally, mental models also influence how we reason and structure information.

In the decision-making process, the more mental models you have at your disposal, the higher the likelihood of making less biased and better-quality decisions.

Mental Model as a Lever for Improving User Experience

Although mental models are imperfect, they are useful. They create a framework that helps people understand life, guides perception and behavior, and serves as a thinking tool to help us solve problems. 

People use apps and websites daily and have come to expect that certain apps and websites behave in a certain way. Users come to your site with a preconceived notion of how it should work and function, and it is crucial that you plan for the expected user experience (UX). If your users get confused, find your site or app difficult to use, they will go elsewhere and never return.   

Whether you are developing a new app or redesigning a site, UX and usability must be at the forefront of your design. It is the emotional outcome after using your site or app. UX is also the result of the user interface (UI) and overall usability. You can learn more about the differences between UX, UI, and usability here. 

While tempting, don't reinvent the wheel. According to Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience, "users spend most of their time on other sites." This means users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design patterns that users are accustomed to. 

In other words, your users already have expectations — mental models — about how a site or app should work. UX designers can use these biases as shortcuts when creating the user interface. When designers don't have to work out solutions from scratch, they can focus on optimizing details to deliver a smoother UX.

To get into the user's mind and understand how they think and behave when interacting with a new product, you'll need to use various tools. 

The challenge is that mental models can create an incomplete picture, may lack facts, or be based on intuitive perception rather than data.

Identifying Existing User Mental Models

Designers can use mental models to design apps and websites to convey function through form. But before doing so, designers and researchers must understand the user's existing mental models. The designer's mental model may not match the user's mental model. This means designers must find ways to understand the user's mental model, which can be done in several ways:

Jakob's Law

As we already mentioned, Jakob's Law is the concept that because users spend most of their time on other sites, they will expect your site to function similarly to those they have already visited. For your app or website to achieve this goal, designers should design patterns, or mental models, that users are already familiar with.

Card Sorting

Card sorting exercises can be useful for determining how users categorize information in your site or app design. UX designers and researchers can also ask questions about category grouping to better understand the user's mental model. Card sorting options include:

• Closed - users are given categories that were defined before the exercise began.
• Open - users are tasked with distributing items into groups that seem most appropriate; they can create their own categories and names.  
• Hybrid - users work with pre-created categories but can add additional categories if they feel they are necessary. 

Assessing What Needs to Be Optimized

• One Level Higher

It is important that the entire UX design process is highly flexible, starting from the sprint level or low-level UX design, where the focus is on minimal usability testing or customer validation, to the engineering level (where engineers are also involved in UX work), and then to feature-level UX, where lead designers connect with other departments to develop a product based on user research and product observations. Building relationships with other departments, for example, will move your design from low-level to functional. 

• Constraint Theory

Alongside technical and business constraints, UX design constraints can either hinder or foster innovation in a product or service. 

From a UX perspective, these constraints help users avoid actions that were not originally intended by designers. Thus, users are left with one or two options, which helps simplify their choices when navigating the app or interacting with the product.  

• First Principle

Instead of