Mental models in research synthesis: setting the user free
An effective way to capture the nuances of user experience from the lens of mental spaces and interpretations
Do people actually change?
I bet they do! Not once, not twice but all the time. Call it curse or blessing of being a designer, I can’t help but observe people whenever I am in a social setting such as shopping at a mall or eating food in a restaurant or going to the theatre to watch a movie. If you do it too, you would have noticed that you can place people into different impressions of themselves based on how they behave, express and act at different points in time throughout that tiny segment of time-space continuum, interacting with other people, artifacts information and spaces.
An angry young man arguing with the staff for giving him a hamburger instead of a cheeseburger at McDonalds suddenly becomes a loving father as he turns back to his beloved daughter. Within no time the same loving father is furious and scolds his daughter for running away towards the dangerous escalator fearing that she would hurt herself.
These differences in behaviors and actions are a combination of external stimuli and internal belief systems called mental spaces in the area of behavioral research . When these two intersect with one another a unique behavior is revealed and a distinct action is taken.
To understand this clearly, let me tell you about an incident that occurred a few years back? A friend of mine and myself were about to go on a business trip overseas. My friend couldn’t shop for the business attire earlier because of other commitments and decided to do it on the morning of the day we were supposed to board our flights. I noticed something strange in his behavior, my inherently picky and non-compromising friend who usually browsed through sea of options and carefully inspected every little seam on the clothing like an archeologist before he made a purchase decision suddenly transformed into an intentional, decisive and compromising customer who just wanted a piece of attire that looked OK, fit him well and received a positive affirmation from me. He finally chose the product based on the fitting because that sat at the top of his priority in this situation and he chose a color that I affirmed but one that he usually rejected when purchasing clothes.
Now how do you model and describe this friend of mine as a user? A finicky one, a picky one, a compromising one, a decisive one, or something else? I leave it open to interpretations.
However I want to highlight the power of context and mental representations that influenced his decisions, behavior and actions.
Would he behave and act the same way, if we were not boarding the flight a few hours later? Probably not. Maybe he acted this way because he needed something urgently and his mental model didn’t allow him the space to be picky or relaxed at this point in time. But the reasons go much deeper than this simple interpretation. What was he really thinking? How was he really thinking? Which of the logics and understandings were competing in his brain? Why did he chose a color that he usually disliked? Why did he prefer size over color? We may need to do a contextual enquiry with my friend to further understand this. It isn’t easy to rationalize such behaviors, but one thing is certain that people change and they change distinctively.
Why can’t we use personas to capture the nuances of this change?
Personas are useful but not effective. Personas which have been traditionally used to build archetypes and fossilize users into referential 2D artifacts are really good at building a useful profile but often fail to capture this 3 dimensional user and contextual morphosis in their behavior, attitudes and actions. It doesn’t reveal the internal mental representations that lead to build conclusions, form perceptions and predict outcomes.
Recently while working on a classroom project, I was trying to develop a persona from affinity mapping and I came to a standstill with realization that my persona wasn’t able to capture such behavioral and attitudinal morphosis. In the persona shown below you can see the information on the user (archetypal) becoming a static representation of her.
Lorraine Chisholm, Strategist & User Experience Consultant, Work at Play puts this into context beautifully in her article named “The Persona is Past Its Prime: Meet the Mental Model”. (Read the full article here). She says:
“ It’s time to ask: what is the value of personas? What can you do with a persona? Just having an image with some kind of detail and characteristics and story around your user is not enough for a contemporary user experience designer to go on. We need much more nuanced information. She continues on to say: “The persona limits its character to one setting, which means that while the user is likely to behave differently in unique settings, personas don’t reveal those scenarios to us. These are the kind of blind spots that conceal a user’s nuanced needs and behaviors.”
She has very effectively captured the limitations of persona and argues that Mental Models can effectively capture such nuanced information related to user behavior and actions. To which I concur.
Does it mean that Personas are not useful?
I would argue they are still quite useful. The personas may not be capturing the nuanced information but these are still an effective artifact to capture the emerging archetypes from your research data and establish important contexts in which users are dwelling such as their background, demographic information, specific frustrations and goals etc.
In my opinion preceding a mental model with an archetype or persona would help you build better mental models. The reason being you need to know the person (archetypal) in order to build a more nuanced model around their dynamic needs, goals and frustrations, and Mental models are an effective way to do that.
In the same example of persona that I referred in the earlier section, I was effectively able to capture a unique perspective of activities and events that were competing with the user’s play time instead of just focusing on similar activities. Besides this the persona also effectively captured some of the frustrations which are yet contextually static but useful to build understanding.
Why do we need mental models?
To understand why we need mental models as a framework we need to understand the role of context (environment, culture, etc.) and mental spaces in influencing user’s mindsets, motivations and perceptions.
Contexts matter! Yes they do! The story of my friend mentioned earlier in this article is not a unique case, people are always making decisions and taking actions within a dynamic environment and it proves that when we are considering the user and trying to capture their needs, then their personal experiences, capabilities, contexts and external stimuli matter.
In his 1943 book “Nature of explanation” Kenneth Craik a British psychologist was the first one to talk about mental model in a similar context, he says - that we make sense of the world and how things work by means of mental representations which in turn are influenced by several factors, such as past experiences, level of knowledge and expertise, and cultural associations. (I add external stimuli to the list and you will understand why in a while.)
Now when a user’s mental space is constantly affected and changing, how do you capture this morphosis. We know personas cannot capture this morphosis effectively as explained earlier. This is where Mental Models come into play.
Author Indi Young explains this in her book Mental Models where she says “Mental Models gives a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought processes, along with emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating”
This makes Mental Models effective in addressing the nuanced goals and frustrations of the users and capturing the changing mental spaces.
Mental Models are both stable and ephemeral
When I was reading different articles to understand the available information on mental models most of the articles seemed to talk about Mental Models in context of stable behavior meaning mental models that remain consistent irrespective of situations changing temporarily for the users. Author Indi Young briefly talks about the “ephemeral” aspect of Mental Model in her amazing book.
Users are same but different in different contexts. Working in an isolated cubicle is not the same as working in an open space office culture. Watching a comedy movie in a theatre is not the same as watching a tragedy movie even if, it is the same theatre and the seat. Eating at an oriental restaurant with colleagues from the office on an office outing is not the same as eating in the same restaurant with family on a vacation. All these affect the mental space differently.
Because users are living in such complex environments today, it would be an injustice to the design process if we only consider the stable aspects of behavior. What about the users whose mental models based on stable behaviors are constantly being affected by external stimuli and they end up making decisions that are not rational/aligned to established mental models (like that of my dear friend’s mentioned earlier in this article)? This I call - mental space going into a transient state during decision making. This is why I divide the mental models into two aspects discussed in the next section.
Understanding types of mental spaces to effectively capture the complexity of human change
First one, I call the “Anchored Mental Models” based on stable behavior. Here the user decisions and actions are much more consistent because the mental spaces are not greatly affected by the external stimuli. These are the hard wired concrete belief systems which is very difficult to dislodge by any external stimuli. Like vegans or vegetarians who never eat any dairy or meat products no matter how bad the urgency is.
The other one I call “Transient Mental models” based on the ephemeral behavior. Here the user decisions and actions are likely to change because their mental spaces are highly influenced by external stimuli and their belief systems can be dislodged. Like part time vegetarians (pun intended 😃)who will eat dairy and meat if there is an urgency. This is the tricky one because it arises due to the dynamics of stimuli and affects individuals or groups differently. Transient mental models can be very useful to understand and rationalize the changes in user behavior and strange actions they take.
These models oscillate between the external stimuli (touch points, environments, physical triggers) and mental spaces (mindsets, perceptions, emotions) for users who may have a common goal or expectations from a product, service and brand or may be completely unaffiliated from the activities of a brand and its services.
The models forming in context of products, services, brands and policies are of particular importance and interest because that is where most of the products are accepted or rejected, services are appreciated or disparaged, brands are embraced or forsaken and policies fail or succeed.
Note: It is very important to understand this distinction and realize that there is not just one type of mental model . We need to be very careful while making these models because such representations are not concrete all the time but malleable, although deeply embedded in the human brain.
The example below from my professor at Institute of design IIT Chicago, Mark Micheli (Design Leadership Group Director@ Fjord) captures one such instances while designing a cleaning product for Samsung, where users could do a similar activity in different modes based on the interaction between external stimuli and internal belief systems/mental spaces.
Mark further captures types of a mental models on 2 X 2 which gives a lot of clarity into their structure and affiliation to user types and contexts.
Click her for larger view of the image provided below:
Apart from making the user 3 Dimensional, the most effective and contrasting character of mental modelling as compared to other experience modelling artifacts are the transition to solutions/solution areas, based on the emerging mental models as a problem or opportunity area.
This aspect of coming up with targeted solution based on the opportunity areas arising from mental models is captured by designer Tiago Camacho in his article Designing With Mental Model Diagrams — An Introduction. Refer image below:
Individuals who want to understand this approach of making Mental Model, this book by Indi Young is a must read. She takes the readers through a detailed process of making these mental models. Below is a portion of work in progress of a mental Model that I am creating using a similar approach that author Indi Young mentions in her book and designer Tiago Camacho mentions in his article.
Click here to see an enlarged view of the image below:
There are several existing resources to refer, reflect and learn from, attached at the bottom of the article. I personally find these resources useful but the drawback is that all these resources talk about the same approach of making a mental model based on author Indi Young’s method, whereas we have learnt that there is more than one way to make mental models based on requirements and changing contexts.
The goal of this article is NOT to explain the methods of making a mental model, that is a work due for another article. Through this article I want to reflect on the the way mental spaces within human brain change with external stimuli/contexts. The way mental representations influence human decisions, behavior and actions and in the process necessitating the creation of a mental model in design process to understand the changing user in an effective way.
In conclusion, I would say that Mental Models are highly effective artifacts that liberate the users into 3 Dimensionality rather than imprisoning them into a 2 Dimensional referential static artifact like personas. These models are a must have skills for design researchers and experience modelers who wish to understand and break down the nuances of user’s experiences while she is navigating through the complexities of ecosystems surrounding them.
Do you make mental models in your practice? If yes, what are the challenges you face and what is your process? Write in the comment sections.
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