Date: Week 8, 18th February
Topics covered: Aspects of Cognition. Mental Models.
In this week’s class I gave an overview of some aspects of cognition along with a discussion of the relevance they might have for design. I also briefly presented Card’s Information Processing model and also the notion of mental models as both an idea of one way that people make sense of their interactions with the world and as a useful orientation for designers of interactive systems.
The aspects of cognition that we discussed in the class were:
-
Attention
-
Perception and recognition
-
Memory
-
Learning
-
Reading, speaking and listening
-
Problem solving, planning, reasoning and decision making
See the reading, Ch 3 of ‘Interaction Design’ for a detailed discussion of these aspects.
The notion of ‘Mental Models’ has been a long standing and quite influential idea in Human Computer Interaction. The basic idea is that people have internal mental representation of the way a system works and they use these representations as models to help them when they use a system. One possible application of this idea for designers is that by designing our systems so that the working of the system is clear in the interface, it is easier for users to form a useful mental model of the product.
Critical Questions
The idea of Mental Models is often appealing to designers because it seems to make sense and offer practical and useful insights into the way users interact with products. However, there are some critical questions you should consider also.
-
Do people really have Mental Models? What separates a Mental Model from everyday knowledge?
-
Focusing on mental representations can divert attention from the many other resources people use to help them when using interactive products. What about other people, or physical resources?
-
How much does this actually help designers? Does it simply substitute the problem of choosing the correct mental model for the problem of designing?
Slides: available
Practical Task:
-
In groups of 3 - 5.
-
See if you can find evidence for Mental Models in the way people use interactive products.
-
Ask a person to show you how they use a product. Ask them to explain what they are doing as they use it. Try stopping them from time to time and asking what the think the product will do (and why) before they make an action. Then when they take the action, ask them if the response of the product matched their expectation.
-
Prepare an A3 poster presenting your findings for submission at next week’s class.
Readings:
-
Norman, D., 1999. Affordances, Conventions and Design. Interactions, 6(3), 38-43.
-
Djajadiningrat, T., Overbeeke, K. & Wensveen, S., 2002. But how, Donald, tell us how?: on the creation of meaning in interaction design through feedforward and inherent feedback. In Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems. ACM Press, pp. 285-291.