tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

User Assistance
Most of us have a mental model of a restaurant: We understand it’s a
place where we get fed in exchange for money. We can go there, be seated,
be served, eat, pay, and leave. But our mental model is defeated at a
self-service buffet restaurant where we are neither seated nor served.
To prevent this defeat, such restaurants put up signs not required at
more conventional places: “Take tray here” and “Pay here”. These signs
help us to adjust our mental model, along with our range of options to
act and behave. For further adjustment of our mental model, the restaurant
informs us on a leaflet that they can also cater our wedding. Alas,
because each situation is new and adaptations of mental models is often
fleeting, we forget this information soon, because it is not meaningful
for us – and someone else caters our wedding.
Mental models have several strengths: They are flexible and teachable
(as many functions of the brain are). As a result, we can add self-service
buffets to our model of restaurants after we’ve visited one – or even
heard about one from a friend. They are a springboard to meaningful
knowledge by helping us learn. In mental models, we “connect the dots”
and remember successful experiences. What worked yesterday, in a
self-service buffet or with a new product you operate, shapes how you
approach questions and tasks tomorrow. Mental models help us decide
what we try to solve a problem – and also where and how we look for
help.
Mental models are also a major foundation in the fields of humancomputer
interaction and user experience design. Hence we technical
communicators can learn from usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s explanation:
“A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand”
which “impacts how they use it” (Nielsen, his emphasis).
Note that mental models, and the actions we base upon them, rely on
our belief rather than our knowledge! David Weinberger puts belief and
knowledge into perspective: “Knowledge is a subset of belief. We believe
many things, but only some of them are knowledge.” (Weinberger 43).
Nielsen gives several examples of mixed-up mental models concerning
software which illustrate how our beliefs or mistaken knowledge lead us
to deduce that a software product or website is not working: Some users
confuse operating system windows, such as Microsoft’s File Explorer,
with browser windows in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and expect both
to copy, move, or delete files identically. Other users confuse icons and
applications – hence the warning that deleting an application icon from
the desktop does not actually remove the application itself. (Of course,
many of these confusions can and should be solved in better user experience
design, but that is not the focus of this paper.)
From Nielsen’s work, technical communicators can learn two relevant
limits of mental models: They are inert, despite all flexibility. “Stuff that
people know well tends to stick, even when it’s not helpful” (Nielsen).
Hence, the Save function still uses a diskette icon which fewer and fewer
people have seen or used. And hence, many technical communicators
are still forced to create deliverables in PDF or CHM, even though superior,
more efficient formats and tools have been available for a long time.
The inertia points to a more fundamental limit and to the real reason
why technical communication so often fails: Mental models are ultimately
uncontrollable!
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tekom-Jahrestagung 2012