February 2025
Service Design
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“Mental models collect just enough data about users to help you determine where and how to concentrate your efforts.”
Indi Young’s book ‘Mental Models’ was one of the most recommended books on my reading list; people like Erka Hall praise it and recommend it in their own works. While working on a solution to a transit application, I encountered a powerful mental model that drivers had for their work that ended up being a great solution for dispersing buses on the same route.
I’ve read lots of articles about mental models but have been wanting to learn more, especially after this last project. Most articles typically just reference great examples of design and how they build on existing mental models. I therefore decided to give Young’s book a read and ended up being surprised: it’s much more about the research process than the design process from my perspective. She writes in excruciating detail about the process that she’s used since the 90s or so; I found a lot of it to be helpful even though it wasn’t what I was expecting!
Young defines a mental model as something that ‘give[s] you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought processes, along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating.
The most effective argument for mental models that Young provides in her book is:
“we were able to convince teams that we weren’t researching all the creativity out of their projects. We were researching the risk out.”
She argues that mental models give you unparalleled confidence in your designs, clarity of direction for both users and the business, and continuity of strategy over a long period of time. In other words, they require you to zoom out, slow down and create a lasting product that truly takes users into account from the beginning by defining them via their behavior, not their [changing] preferences.
1) Behaviors and Philosophies - what we’re really trying to isolate
2) Open questions only
3) No words of your own - we want users to use their own vocabulary, not adapt to our own
4) Follow the conversation - don’t plan out interviews like in a quantitative environment; mental models are highly independent and should be treated as such in the interview process
5) Not about tools (tool agnostic)
6) Immediate experience
Often when writing these mini-reviews, I will include some highlights from the book but this is a rare occasion in which there doesn’t seem to be a great way to do that; one must simply read it. There are a few things that stood out to me though. Young reminds the reader that mental models research is very much a qualitative method and one should go about asking participants questions with this in mind; she says that she uses “non-leading interviews’ because they give more space to the participant (and their vocabulary) than the interviewer. Specifically, she states that when asking questions, we should use leading words like “did,” “have,” or “are” as open question starters.
Later on in the book, she talks about tasks (what behaviors are centered around) and the labeling of tasks as: tasks, implied tasks, third-party tasks, philosophies, or feelings. I found this section to be immensely helpful (ie. the hallway test) for my own immediate purposes. Later, she discusses what a team might look like when conducting interviews; there may be interviewers, combers (those identifying tasks within interview transcripts), and groupers (those grouping tasks together in similar categories). It is in this section that I found another immensely powerful tip: don’t ever start grouping things until you are done with interviews. In other words, always work from the bottom up; otherwise, you may end up placing tasks (or some other data) into a pre-determined category that may not have otherwise even existed.
Overall, I found this book to be a great source of information. When reading other reviews, readers complain about the length and somewhat odd editing practices but I still found it to be a wealth of knowledge. I have a feeling this will be a book that I’ll need to reference later on!
