Usability: Improving the mental model
In his book “The Design of Everyday Things” Don Norman talks about mental models as a way to describe how a system is perceived from a designer’s perspective vs. a user’s perspective. The trick in having an application that feels natural for users is to have those two perspectives be as aligned as possible.
A few weekends ago, when I was conducting usability testing for Ronin, I noticed that the subjects were often clicking the upper-left logo to go home. This is a common paradigm on the web, and it’s often very acceptable to have the upper-left logo act as a “reset”, but I was disappointed in the inefficiency of navigation. For example, for a particular user to navigate to a certain invoice, he would click home, click on the client’s name in the “Recent Clients” section and then navigate into invoices from there. He would also frequently click from one client to another using “home” as a bridge while scanning for open projects. While this didn’t seem like much work (and he pointed to me that he didn’t mind it at all), I felt that the mental model he has established for the application didn’t quite match the mental model I had in mind as the designer of the application.
One problem I identified was that he used home as an entry point because it was the only thing common to all pages - the fact that they were tied to the home page somehow. The lack of consistently available top-level navigation made it impossible for users to develop a deeper, more accessible mode of traversing through the app.
Enter tabs.
Tabs help to establish a clear mental model.
What you’ll notice if you study most applications is that there is always a highly visible interface component that helps users establish a mental model of how to interact with the application. Media players typically have play/pause/stop commands, browsers have back/forward/address-bar, and web applications typically have tabs, or some high-level navigation element.
After adding the tabs in, I found that it helps reassure users of exactly what Ronin is designed to do. It helps scope the application so there is less learning time when a user first jumps into the application. It clearly maps out the high level concepts of “Clients”, “Projects”, and “Invoices” and gives users a consistent anchor to use apart from “home”. You’ll find that these tabs have been implemented into Ronin.
We as humans continually evaluate and reason about the things we perceive. Unfortunately, being subject to so many new ideas and applications means we can only commit a large part of our learnings to standard interface elements and practices. It’s up to the application designer to keep in mind that helping nudge this process along is often means obeying age-old rules of thumb. In this case, it’s “always have visible, clear, top-level navigation.”
