Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

Chapter 4. Support the User’s Mental Model

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• Design for Mental Models

• Eliminate Implementation Models

• Prototype the Design

• Test It Out

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When we consider how to organize papers, we may think of filing cabinets. We fill filing cabinets with hanging folders, and fill those with manila folders, each with its own stack of files. We use labeling systems to help us remember what each folder contains.

In modern operating systems, we can glance around a virtual desktop full of folders (represented by icons), spot the one we need, open it up, and scan its contents to find the file we need.

In reality, though, computers use addresses to tell them where each specific bit and byte is stored. The addresses on the hard disk don’t need to correspond ...