User Friendly #2: Mental Models and Feedback

Designing for the user is easier said than done. That’s obvious. In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang points out a key element to such design:

“(It is key to understand) the ways in which humans assume their environment should work, how they learn about it, how they make sense of it.”

If the user can’t make a mental map or model of the product, he’ll struggle to use it. Put differently, the device should work the way the user expects it to work. If you don’t see the importance of the mental model, consider the Internet.

 

Those of us who are started using the Internet when it started to take off think of it as a set of sites with links between them. The browser was a way to navigate across sites. That’s our mental model of the Internet – as the World Wide Web (sites linked to one another).

 

The majority in poorer countries, though, did not get to use the Internet until the smartphone became ubiquitous. Their model of the Internet is nothing like a “web”. To most Indians, WhatsApp became the model of the Internet – a way to post messages and send photos. In Kenya, Facebook became the model of the Internet – Facebook contacts were like your phone’s contacts; and Facebook posts and messages were like SMS’s. In China, with too many characters in the language, typing wasn’t practical. Hence voice (speech) became the default way to access the phone. In turn, that led to one “super-app”, WeChat. You could ask it for anything (find information, book tickets, order groceries) and it would tap into other apps to do the needful. Voice feels natural – you talk to it. Most Chinese thus have no mental model of the Internet at all. Nor do most kids growing up with Alexa – it feels so natural.

 

Another key component of usability design is for the product to provide feedback. A switch that makes a sound when it is pressed. The sound of a fan that started rotating. A toaster making a clicking sound. Sometimes the feedback is automatic (it’s just physics); if that’s not the case, feedback has to be deliberately introduced. Why is feedback so important? Without it, the user doesn’t know if he is on the right track, if the device is doing what he wanted.

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