What is Mental Model in UX design?
All of us are different, all of us pursue things in the world in our own way. It is mostly based on our exposure to knowledge about things.
Similarly, all of us have some particular mindset fixated for all the websites and products we use.
Our mind is used or trained to do certain things in a defined manner. In other terms, we call it a Mental Model.
What is Mental Model?
Mental models are how we understand the world, it is our thought process of how things work in the real world. It is something a user thinks they know about how to use a product.
The mental model is that we develop in our minds due to the repetitiveness of things and use them for reference in our day to day tasks.
Generally cars have the functioning of vipers in the left side and functioning of lights on the right side of the steering wheel but in Ford Figo, we can see that these functionalities are opposite.
Now people who are used to other cars will find it difficult to use as it will be different from their mental model.
Let’s see how the Mental Model is useful in enhancing the User Experience in Digital products
A mental model is a key attribute while designing any application or website, if a designer can understand the user’s mental model it will lead to a more usable design.
In general, every individual has a different mental model but in terms of user experience, people mostly have the same mental models which makes the designers work a little bit easier.
Like if a user is going through some new e-commerce site for buying stuff then he will already have a mental model from his previous experiences for the checkout process.
If the user can easily checkout on this new website then he will feel satisfied with the experience.
Designers and users both have very different mental models.
The user mostly has their mental models on the basis of their past experiences with any product whereas a designer knows the inside of the product.
A designer can not always create a product on the basis of their own mental model, they have to tap into the mental model of the user to create a more precise and usable product.
But this doesn’t mean that designer should not go for innovative solutions, instead of changing a whole interface, the designer can always make small changes which do not have a major impact on the user’s mental model.
If the designer has planned an interface change then it’s smart to either role out the changes slowly or alerts the user of the upcoming changes. This will prepare the user for any changes happening in the coming future.
Like Facebook recently changed its interface, people have the option to keep the old interface till September 2020 but now these changes are permanent, earlier it used to look like this
but now it looks like more of a mobile application on desktop
To conclude it is very important for a designer to conduct proper research to understand the user’s mental model so that they can create a more usable and satisfying product.