Elaine Fath Blog #5

The primary thing to take away from this chapter about user mental models is that people are wired to look at familiar experiences and relate them to unfamiliar or more complicated experiences that seem “similar”, even if in reality the two have very little in common on the level of execution. For example, I just used the term “wired” to describe how people think, even though human thought, evolution and experience have almost nothing in common with the literal wiring of a machine or device. But the wiring of a machine is easier to grasp, so the term has come to mean both. Even the term “mental model” falls under its own mental model—mental modelling doesn’t really have anything in common with literally “modeling,” aka sculpting. But the two seem similar to us.
The way this contrasts with programmer mental models is, because the design will be more familiar to the programmers, they are more likely to think of the design in literal terms and less likely to come up with a mental model to represent it.