From the course: UX Foundations: Interaction Design

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Mental models

Mental models

From the course: UX Foundations: Interaction Design

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Mental models

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- We don't just perceive and remember the world around us. We also strive to understand it and make sense of how it works. We form concepts by taking our experiences and the information we have gained, breaking them down into meaningful pieces and sorting them into general rules or related groups. We use all of these connections or associations, the information structures or schemas, and concepts to form mental models. Mental models are our thoughts and expectations about how things work in the real world. And they influence how we behave, solve problems and perform tasks. They also help us decide what to do. When designing a new product, we need to consider people's mental models so that we can make it easier for them to understand, use and gain benefit from it. For example, we have concepts about what a car is, and we have mental models for how it works and how to drive it. We can get behind the wheel of almost any…

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