“Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,’ she said to herself. Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.” – Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
There I was, sitting on the train, on my way to work, listening to Alice in Wonderland when this lovely story about mental models popped up. I love a good story.
It has everything, a problem solving situation, a mental model, and importantly the back story to how it came about i.e. from not very much.
We use mental models to help us work things out. Sometimes our previous experience – on which the mental model is based – helps enormously and sometimes it just doesn’t. Alice did get out of the pool of tears but the railway and seaside town thing didn’t really do much to get her out of her general predicament.
When designing any kind of interaction it can pay dividends to be aware of what the audience might be basing their mental models on; sometimes these can even provide inspiration for how the interaction should work, what language should be used etc. Let’s face it, that thing on your favourite stock photo site isn’t really a ‘light box’ and you don’t physically ‘fast forward’ an mp3. The mental model works though and that is what matters.
Tapping into how the audience will approach the ‘problem’ of interacting with your site or device can make transitions from offline to online significantly easier.
The tapping in is easy. Watch people. Ask them. Simple.
by mental models do you mean naomi campbell?