How do you uncover user's mental model?

How many times have you heard someone say something is not usable because it does not fit the user's mental model? The comment may well be right, but how do you know what a user's mental model is?
Indie Young, one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path, has just released a book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior(Rosenfeld Media is the publisher) that explains some methods of uncovering user's mental models.
Chris Baum talked to Indie and writes up that interview in What Is Your Mental Model? - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design.
The interview includes links to excerpts from the book and a Flickr set of images from the book. Boxes and Arrow readers also get a discount if they buy the book from Rosenfeld Media.

"It has long been known..."

The first technical writers were scientists, naturalists, and early engineers. In graduate school, I was required to take a course in rhetorical theory as applied to technical and scientific writing. It would have been more interesting as a history of scientific and technical writing, but given it was not, I tried to learn how the use of rhetoric affects perception of meaning.

In the Chemistry section of About, the section guide has provided an illuminating look at some of common rhetorical tricks employed by today's scientific research writers. Below is a taste.

"It can be shown" Somebody said they did this, but I can't duplicate their results. I can't even find the reference, or else I would have cited that instead.

"It has long been known" I don't know the original reference.

"A trend is evident" Okay, a trend does seem apparent to me, but no statistical analysis in the world will support it.

"Of great theoretical and practical importance" ...it is interesting to me or else I want it to be interesting to somebody with money so they will fund my research.

"Although there are no definite answers to these questions..." My experiment failed, but I still want to get published.

"Three samples were selected for detailed study" Because the other ones sucked!

Everything you could possible read about usability

Gary Perlman must not sleep much. He is responsible for the HCI Bibliography: Human-Computer Interaction / User Interface Usability a huge compendium of resources from publications to online columns to developer tools, and on and on.

The site claims over 36,000 publications in its listings and has been accessed over 1.5 million times since it was launched in 1998.

If you cannot find it here, it probably does not exist.

Nightmares in Usability

An interesting look at the reactions of people in a user forum when someone asks them to review a Flash-based Web site, Nightmares in Usability

Expert Reviews and Testing Produce Same Results

Rolf Molich has been exploring the reproducibility of usability testing for several years, now. In a profile of Molich in UPA Voice, he discusses the various experiments he has run over the years to compare results when several usability experts test or review the same site.
One conclusion he has reached is that very often, there are so many problems with a site, some of which are non-compliance with well-known standards and conventions, it is not surprising each researcher finds different issues.
Developers appear to have no knowledge of heuristics, Molich concludes. If they did the problems would never appear on the site.
So, is usability testing useless? No, Moclich says.
"“I still think usability testing is a very important method, but not to find usability problems. Its most important role is to make people understand the need for the prevention of usability problems. Usability tests are a very, very important political instrument. It’s an absolutely unique method for convincing product team members that usability problems exist in their product. Your baby is ugly, and something needs to be done about it. But the method is much too expensive to eradicate all usability problems or even just all serious usability problems.”

Flash, AJAX, Usability, and SEO

Maybe the emperor has no clothes. After attending a conference on search engine strategies, aimed primarily at marketers, Shari Thurow wonders how these people know that the Web market wants lots of Flash and AJAX on every site. Flash, AJAX, Usability, and SEO
Shari doubts most of her colleagues have a clue about usability.
"I'm a usability professional. I don't throw bells and whistles on a Web page because I think they're cool. I want to know if my client's target audience believes the bells and whistles are useful (user confidence) and if they actually use them for the intended purpose (task completion)," Shari writes.
She goes on to explain to the uneducated marketers just a few techniques for "listening" to their users.

Mizzou Web site gets "usability" examination

Universities often have huge Web sites, much of which is under no central design, content, or user experience team. The University of Missouri-Columbia Information Experience Lab decided to put the schools site to the test. Information Experience Lab Examines Web Site 'Usability'
Unfortunately, I could not find the actual report, only this press release. Note the quotes around "usability." Does the Mizzou PR department think this is not a real word?

Do you have mouse rage? Worse, do you cause mouse rage?

Do you have these symptoms?

• Heart rate quickens
• Increased sweating
• Furious clicking of the mouse
• Simultaneous clicking and cursing the screen
• Bashing the mouse

You, my friend, suffer from mouse rage!

According to a commissioned study put out by Social Issues Research Centre in the UK, the leading causes of mouse rage are:

• Slow to load pages
• Confusing / difficult to navigate layouts
• Excessive pop-ups
• Unnecessary advertising
• Site unavailability

As a usability expert, make sure your clients read this article. It gives backbone to all your nagging.

Jakob Nielsen - The Interview

Love him or hate him, Jakob is the face of the usability profession. UPA Voice sat down with the godfather of UX and found out how it all got started.

UPA Voice - April 2006 - Thumbnail: Jakob Nielsen