Mental Models and Conceptual Design Flashcards
Cognitive frameworks
*Understand how people reason and react to interface experiences
*Internal: mental processes (user)
*External: interaction with technologies, environment and context (designe
Conceptual models
*Definition: term used to describe the ways systems are designed to be understood
*A good conceptual model is a high-level description of:
*what it should do, behave and look like
*how it should be understood by the users
Doing Conceptual Design
*Conceptual design involves
*Structuring the information space
*Creating of alternative solutions
*Determining which design concept to pursuebased on MM
Tools involved in conceptual design:Sketching, Brainstorming, Card sorting, Semantic networks, Flowcharts, Scenarios, Storyboards
Conceptual Model Excludes
*Low level presentation
*Implementation details
*Menu and screen designs
*Widgets
Conceptual Model Includes
*Metaphors and analogies e.g. the “desktop metaphor”
*Concepts –objects, actions you can do to them; user roles; attributes of both. *relationships among concepts
*mappings from concepts to the user experience envisioned;
*terminology that will be used (consistently) to tie it all together
*interaction types; how will they interact with it?
*interface types; is it/should it be constrained? how would different interfaces affect result?
Metaphors
*Known concepts that you can rely on to help users understand how to interact with the system
*Interactions:
*Swipe to turn page on ebook
*Move backwards to explore file
backups.
*Ecological, contextual system structure
*Dropbox: a box you drop everything
into
*Icloud: mother ship that connects to
everything
*Personal relationships:
*Siri as a personal assistant
interaction type
what the user is doing when interacting with a system.
*e.g., command line (how you talk to it), intelligent (function), gestural (hardware), touch (both hardware and interaction type)
Interface type
the kind of interface used to support the mode
Interaction Type
*Instructing
*instruct a system and tell it
what to do; issuing
commands and selecting
options (e.g. print a file, save
a file)
*Conversing
*interacting with a system as if
having a conversation (e.g.
search engines, advice-
giving systems, help
systems, virtual
agents)
*Manipulating
*interacting with objects in a
virtual or physical space by
manipulating them (e.g.
dragging, selecting,
opening, closing and
zooming actions on virtual
objects)
*Exploring
*moving through a virtual
environment or a physical space
(e.g. google maps, GP
Conceptual Design -Brainstorming
Team activity
Stream-of-consciousness but organised!
*Write stuff down (whiteboard preferred)
*Be playful: ‘What is the opposite of what
we want?’Postpone criticismReach for
quantity
*Combine and improve ideas
*Sessions generate lots of material that must be filtered and organised
Conceptual Design –Card Sort
*can be used to:
*discover user-generated groupings
*organize the information collected in
the discovery phase
*later
define groupings for menus, controls
and Web page contentgenerate labels f or menus, buttons and navigation links
Conceptual Design –Card Sort
*Result of a card sort (e.g. menu organisation)
Conceptual Design –Card Sort Advantages
Quick and easyCan be done before preliminary design
Let’s you know how people organiseinformation
Expose underlying structures
Conceptual Design –Card Sort Disadvantages
*Only involves the elements that you have written on the cards
Suggest solutions that imply real structuresDifficult to navigate with lots of categories
Conceptual Design –Semantic Networks
*a web of concepts linked through association
