Book Review: Mental Models by Indi Young

I've always liked the idea of mental models; the idea that once you can get at the beliefs and assumptions a person holds in their head, everything about their mistakes, misunderstandings and oversights with respect to any given product or system will become clear. Matching systems and technologies to mental models; ensuring users build accurate mental models in the first place - it's the holy grail of product design.

So I was delighted recently to receive a review copy of 'Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior' by Indi Young. The book seeks to explain what mental models are, when and why you should use them and what they can bring to a project. It begins with the premise that good design depends on empathy, which in this case means 'that you completely understand what a person wants to get done' and is distinct from simply 'studying how a person uses something.'

Achieving 'complete understanding' means identifying your user groups, researching their behaviours, thoughts and feelings during their interaction with your product or a similar one; looking for patterns and organising those patterns from the bottom up into a model. Young suggests a number of processes and diagrams for organising and collating this information which enable you to align clusters of behaviour with the proposed or actual features of your product - the closer the match, the higher the viability of your business strategy for a particular solution. Crucially, the completed diagram is not about showing what people do; it's about showing how and why a defined segment of your users tends to accomplish something - the difference being that the latter view includes all the high level environmental and cognitive factors and motivations which also influence human behaviour.

The main sections of the book explain how to create and use mental models, including a detailed breakdown of the processes involved in recruiting and interviewing participants in a study; analysing transcripts; finding patterns and building the model. Each section features diagrams and tables, often featuring detailed real-life examples, which certainly make it easier to grasp the finer points of model building. Young is generous in sharing her own learnings during the development of the process, and acknowledges that it's normal to feel overwhelmed and even panicky during data gathering - but '...it's a finite set of data and you will eventually get through it'.

Young clearly has her own well-researched mental model of her readership and explains how her target readers - be they product strategist, designer, team manager or practitioner - should proceed and what each can expect to get out of the various sections of the book. Despite the ease with which such material can be excessively complicated, Young keeps the simple stages simple and retains a focus on what is practicable, useful and meaningful when interacting with real users and real products. Nor is she above revealing the short cuts, the bits that can be skipped and the quick and dirty methods which will work for smaller, less well funded teams and individuals. Her process is a classic example of preparation being everything: getting the mental model right can take an apparently disproportionate amount of time and effort, but if you do it properly, it will eliminate countless hours of wasted effort stand you in good stead for months - and sometimes even years.

There's a passion for mental models in this book which is contagious, even to an existing supporter of the concept. It's about making design a successful, and therefore strategic process, by helping practitioners really and truly understand why they're doing what they're doing.



Indi Young is running a workshop on mental models on June 2nd in Brighton.
You can purchase her book from Rosenfeld Media and get a 10% discount when you quote UNEWSA.


Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior
by Indi Young
Paperback, 299 pages
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media (2008)
ISBN-10: 1933820063

Associated Link: Mental Models by Indi Young

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