A proposal of design method of obtaining the construction items of mental models in product design

  • Authors:

  • Naoya Okazawa;Toshiki Yamaoka

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of System Engineering, Wakayama University, Wakayama, Japan;Faculty of System Engineering, Wakayama University, Wakayama, Japan

  • Venue:
  • DUXU'13 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability: web, mobile, and product design - Volume Part IV
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of obtaining a user's mental model and using it for design. It is necessary to consider a mental model in designing user-friendly products. However, little study has been done to use a mental model in the design process. A mental model can be defined as a system image and operation image which people have about the appliances. It indicated that people operate the appliances according to their mental models. In addition, mental models can be classified into two points of view of a functional model and a structural model. The proposed method uses a protocol analysis. In this study, we conducted a test about two products to verify the effectiveness of the method. The target products of the test are a digital camera and an electronic dictionary. As the results, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified. According to the construction items of mental models in product design, Designers can feedback them the product design. Moreover, the proposed method can be applied to GUI design.