Avoid Politics
Who among us has not worked in a situation where other people wanted to second-guess your design decisions? Sometimes these people can comprise whole departments. Battles ensue among groups as to who makes the final design decision, or who gets preferential placement in a particular solution (e.g., placement in primary navigation of a web site). That’s office politics. A mental model can act as a third-party mediator. It is essentially a collection of data placed in relationship to other data based on your interpretation. The data is concrete—your interpretation is circumstantial. Suddenly the conversation isn’t about the design you’ve created; it’s about your analysis of the data. Conversations with your erstwhile foes center on phrases like, “My understanding of what this customer means is x; what is your interpretation?” People from different disciplines can come to a common understanding of the customer’s situation. You both end up on the same side of the table, both looking at the neutral data. This fortuitous arrangement produces more effective design discussions and faster decision-making.
How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?
“Developing a design using mental models (and displaying the results) is a durable reminder to the team and the organisation that you did not just ‘make something up.’ It’s the IA equivalent of calculus from first principles. Once you have done it, it’s hard to imagine justifying design any other way.”
—Craig Duncan, Head of the Information Management Unit of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction
Derive Architecture
If you are designing for software, you can use the complete diagram to derive the top-level organization of the application, such as navigation or toolbars. Additionally, you can use the mental model as a starting point for interaction design and as a guide for feature definition.
How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?
“The framework provided by a user mental model takes the guesswork out of IA, or at least makes your guesses more likely to be on target.”
—Camille Sobalvarro, Senior Manager of Web Marketing, Sybase
Stop Spending All Your Time Re-Architecting
I see a lot of companies who are still stuck in a cycle of redesign—re-architecting what they have created over and over. They define something to fix, change it, and then realize the initial definition was a little off. I’ve seen many five-year roadmaps that look like the one in Figure 1.3, but all these important items keep getting pushed off because the architecture still isn’t right or the strategy keeps changing.
Five-Year Plan
Improve functionality of tools
Add better tools to empower the customer
Serve dynamic news, events, announcements based on region and role
Fine-tune messaging (marketing) opportunities (internal ads, external ads, contests and giveaways, special sales, landing pages for brand-specific islands)
Figure 1.3.
Five-year roadmap for one web property belonging to a multi-national semiconductor corporation.
Don’t stay stuck in this cycle of re-inventing your solution or re-addressing your information architecture. You need an overhaul of your regular development process. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path refers to this as “punctuation in product development.”[7] Use a mental model as a guide to get the definition right the first time, then focus your energy on
fulfilling business goals instead of focusing on iterative changes within a single medium.
Clarity in Direction
The clarity argument brings your internal organizational structure and its strategies into the picture. You need a clear design strategy that will act as a container around all of the solutions you create.
Pay Attention to the “Whole Experience”
The “whole experience” includes all the ways an organization interacts with its users: stores, account statements, customer service calls, product ordering web sites, packaging, and so forth. Jared Spool, the founder of User Interface Engineering, writes a comparison[8] about whole experiences between MP3 players from Apple and SanDisk. He says, “SanDisk hasn’t created what Apple has built: a powerful user experience for listening to great music. While possibly technologically deficient, the iPod combines the player
hardware with the iTunes software, the iTunes Music Store service, the Apple stores for sales and support, and the prestige that comes from the Apple brand…SanDisk can’t compete if it only focuses on the hardware engineering.” Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and get it right most of the time, win attention and loyalty. Because the mental model depicts the whole of the user’s environment—it is not focused on one aspect, service, or tool—it represents the user’s perspective of the whole experience.
Emotion in the Experience
There is a lot of lingo with X in it these days: UX (user experience), MX (managing experience), and UX strategy. The X stands for “experience,” which has to do with the whole environment in which a person interacts with your solutions and your organization. The concept of “the user experience” has been around for a long time, especially in disciplines other than human-computer interaction, such as architecture and retail store design.
For an experience to be considered successful, people have to be able to use it and want to use it. I’ve heard this described as useful, usable, and desirable. It applies to all sorts of fields—toys, buildings, silverware, electronic devices, etc. Here is a quote from a Swedish furniture showroom owner that sums this up nicely. “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful. But if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”* There is an emotional component to the use of a thing that businesses are becoming more aware of.** Mental models capture not only the cognitive intent of a person but also the emotion, social environment, and cultural traits of a concept. The alignment of possible business strategies completes the picture.
* House and Garden magazine March 2007 article, “The Design-Obsessed Traveler– Stockholm,” quoted as “the credo of Design House Stockholm, a top city showroom.”
** See Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.
Peter Merholz, one of the founders of Adaptive Path, puts it this way. “An experience strategy is a clearly articulated touchstone that influences all the decisions made about technology, features, and interfaces. Whether in the initial design process, or as the product is being developed, such a strategy guides the team and ensures that the customer’s perspective is maintained throughout.”[9] He also strongly believes that you should stop designing products. “When you start with the idea of making a thing, you’re artificially limiting what you can deliver…Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.”[10]
Use Design as a Business Advantage
Brandon Schauer, a design strategist at Adaptive Path, has been talking[11]