![]() ![]() ![]() Understanding conceptual models is the first step towards helping your users navigate and learn to use your product more easily. The result is incoherent, arbitrary, overly-complex products that expose off-task concepts to users and conflict with users' mental models, impeding learning, facilitating errors, frustrating users, and ultimately decreasing product uptake. Unfortunately, software designers often skip conceptual design. An ebook should provide that functionality based on a simple, coherent conceptual model, excluding concepts unrelated to users' goals, to help users incorporate the new concepts into their mental model. For example, ebook readers often provide functions not found in physical books, such as search, links to other content, or security measures. The better you design the ebook experience to match users’ mental models for physical books, the more intuitive and successful your ebook will be.Įven if your product has no analog in the physical world, or has features that have no physical analog, it is important for designers to create conceptual models and design the product based on that, so users can develop a coherent, task-focused mental model of the product. They’ll expect to be able to find chapters, turn pages, set bookmarks, highlight phrases, etc. When your users interact with an ebook for the first time, they will refer to their mental model for physical books. For example, imagine you are designing an ebook reader. If your product has an analog in the physical world, users will often apply the same mental model, so your product's conceptual model should reflect that. Mental models are how your users subconsciously navigate the world, including the digital world: apps, websites, and electronic devices. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |