Information Technology Reference
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operates—when you turn the key, you expect the engine to start, and so on. This
model will allow you to carry out limited troubleshooting if the car does not
behave as you expect it to. If you are a car mechanic, however, you will have a
much more developed structural model of how the car works, which will allow
you to diagnose and remedy any problems.
Designers have a functional mental model of how users behave. These models
may be naïve and contain several inaccuracies because they have created and
refined these models based on their own experiences of how they themselves
behave, rather than based on their experiences of how their users really behave.
One of the main purposes of this topic is to help designers to develop a more
sophisticated and more accurate model of users. You should, at this point in the
topic, know that, while not all users are the same, they are similar in many ways.
Users differ in terms of the knowledge they possess, their capabilities, and their
attributes. They also share common structures in how they receive and process
information, and interact with the world. Understanding how these differences and
similarities influence their behaviors will help you to design systems that are better
suited to a wider range of users.
You should have learned by this point in the topic that users behave unusually
when they find themselves in novel or rarely encountered situations. This is
because their mental models are not fully developed for those situations. In these
situations, users often have to go back to basics, and use their mental model to
carry out some problem solving. The way that they problem solve has associated
biases, weaknesses, and strengths that you may be able to deal with in your design.
As part of the problem solving process, users will often make decisions about
what actions to take next. Decision making, like problem solving, has associated
biases, weaknesses, and strengths that can be used to inform system design.
Problem solving and decision making are probably the most widely observable
and, arguably, the most important behaviors of users. Many fields of research study
these topics, including psychology, economics, and statistics. Here we focus on
how people make judgments and decisions, and how to support these processes in
system design.
6.2 Mental Representations
Users can make use of several types of representations when they are problem
solving or using an interface to perform a task. For example, users can understand
an electronic circuit as a series of propositions (the secondary accumulator is
connected to the laser bank), as a diagram (shown in Fig. 6.1 ), or implicitly as a
series of steps to make the circuit work, such as ''First flip switch 1, and if that
does not work…'' (Bibby and Payne 1996 ). Each of the representations has dif-
ferent strengths and weaknesses. The propositions may be easier to learn, the
schematic allows some types of problem solving, and the rules require less
knowledge to be learned or stored for later use.
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