The user's mental model of an information retrieval system
SIGIR '85 Proceedings of the 8th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Transparent Queries: investigation users' mental models of search engines
Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
The influence of mental models and goals on search patterns during web interaction
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Mental models: a theoretical overview and preliminary study
Journal of Information Science
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Undergraduate students' mental models of the Web as an information retrieval system
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Merging metadata: a sociotechnical study of crosswalking and interoperability
Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries
Finding Problems: When Digital Library Users Act as Usability Evaluators
HICSS '12 Proceedings of the 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The Design of Everyday Things
Do you care if a computer says sorry?: user experience design through affective messages
Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Visual-interactive querying for multivariate research data repositories using bag-of-words
Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
The user-centered development and testing of a dublin core metadata tool
Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Boxing clever: how searchers use and adapt to a one-box library search
Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration
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A mental model is a model that people have of themselves, others, the environment, and the things with which they interact, such as technologies. Mental models can support the user-centered development of digital libraries: if we can understand how users perceive digital libraries, we can design interfaces that take these perceptions into account. In this paper, we describe a novel method for eliciting a generic mental model from users, in this case of a digital library's search engine. The method is based on a content analysis of users' mental representations of the system's usability, which they generated in heuristic evaluations. The content analysis elicited features that the evaluators thought important for the search engine. The resulting mental model represents a generic model of the search engine, rather than a clustering of individuals' mental models of the same search engine. The model includes a number of references to Web search engines as ideal models, but these references are idealistic rather than realistic. We conclude that users' mental models of Web search engines should not be taken at face value. The implications of this finding for digital library development and design are discussed.