Mental Model

I recently involved in a conversation on Twitter. It has a correlation with the book I currently read, About Face. It explains about Mental Model which have an important role on design interaction.

Let’s dive into the conversation.

Short story, there was a twitter user, X. He complaints to one of my friend, Y, which whom working for a payment processing company about “Why the landing page is not using https?”

(this is an excerpt and has been revised to make it simple)

X: @mention “Why your company landing page is not using HTTPS?”

Y: “The rest of the site is use it, I think it’s not necessary to use it on landing page, since it’s just a static html page and the use of it will reduce the loading speed.”

X is a regular user of another payment processing companies and they have been using HTTPS on landing page for years. Y, as an engineer of the company, insisted, it was a technical decision to implement the landing without HTTPS.

This is a an interesting case. Based on thebook, there are 2 Mental Models involved when designing a product. User’s Mental Model and Implementation Mental Model. X as an (non-direct) user has User Mental Model while Y as an engineer represent Implementation Mental Model. User Mental Model tends to think about “How the product should work” while Implementation Model is about “technical implementation of the product”. Thinking about a TV remote (Closest interface to User Mental Model) and the signal processing (Implementation) invoked after you interact with it.

The closer the represented model comes to user’s mental model, the easier he will find the program to use and to understand.

“To understand” is a big one, in this case, X doesn’t understand why the landing page is not using HTTPS as the others. It might have a logical reason, but it’s hard to make sure that user knows it.

In Goal-Directed Design approach, user don’t need to know about technical detail of the interface. User only interested about how the product handle their goal and solve the problem. Determining what user’s goals is not an easy task too, because there are so many parameters have to be considered. But with the conversation above, it shows that using HTTPS on landing page, can be reflected as one. There might be a lot of users out there that think, using HTTPS is necessary because it makes them feel safe, they expect it to be there even if the other side of Mental Model sees this otherwise because a reason the user actually don’t want to know.

People don’t need to know all the details of how complex mechanism actually works in order to use it, so they create a cognitive shorthand for explaining it, one that is powerful enough to cover their interaction with it, but that doesn’t necessary reflects its actual inner mechanics" — About Face