Week 3 Reflection

During the first class of week 3, the lecturer unable to attend the class, so we were asked to watch videos about mental model, conceptual model and interface metaphors. 

Mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works. It is important to understand mental model as it shapes expectation and drive engagement through familiarity. Mental model will help customer to understand and get comfortable with the product. Mental model also gives us a shortcut of understanding new situations. A good product design usually uses a familiar pattern that the customers already understand. The customer will make a connection between the product with the knowledge that they already understand. The customer will maximise their thinking and make assumption based on it. Many great games are so engaging because they know how to benefit from mental model. A good mental model will assist us to clarify and organize the design decision thus making it easier to develop a compelling and coherent customer experience. Game development is not only about programming but also about applying mental model.

A mental model is a person’s internal representation of external reality based on their learning and experience. You expect something to work on certain way based on your experience. Mental model consists of system model and interaction model. System model is how something works while interaction model is how to use something. The engineers usually have strong system model, but they’re weak in interaction model. So, the designers need to have strong system model and interaction model so they can interact with users and engineers. A product with good system model but bad interaction model will be very messy because the users find it hard to understand and get comfortable with it. So, it we need to build something new, we need to base it with something user already familiar it. For example, when iPad is created, it is something completely new, but the users easily comfortable with it because they were familiar with using notepad. Mental models can evolve over time. If mental model closely matches the actual behaviour of the device or interface, then people make accurate predictions and correct decisions and choose appropriate action. Mental model based on individual experiences so it is different for every person.

Users need metaphor to understand the complexity of systems. Interface actions or tasks mapped to something the user understood or familiar with. This will allow the users to predict the behaviour of the systems. There are three types of metaphors; verbal metaphor, virtual metaphor and composite metaphor. Verbal metaphor is comparing old technology to new technology (example: typewriter to keyboard). Virtual metaphor is interface elements with metaphor (example: drag/drop is metaphor of picking something up and move it). Composite metaphor is adding new features to metaphor (example: add menus to desktop. We don’t see menus on real-world office). Conceptual models are how systems are understood by different people. Attractive design that gives the users the information they need and want is a successful design.

My reflection: If the users can compare the similarity between the new things and things they already familiar with, it helps them to understand how the new things works more quickly and efficiently. I can also apply what I learn with my group project. For example, my target users already familiar with using online shopping app, so they will able to grasp the system we propose as we try to make it similar to most of shopping apps that's already available today.

 During the second class of week 3, a few classmates presented the class activity that were given to us.