The Users Mental Model
The mental model we wanted the user to have was that of a conversation, like a circle of people talking about the topic, were everyone could chime in and anyone can contribute. Much like the trash can analogy in the book, we wanted the commenting system to feel like a group discussion about the video. Like a group of people talking people can branch off and talk about a specific topic within the topic (the hierarchical, or nested commenting design) and so on. So the model is something along the lines of a large group of people in a room talking about the same subject just different aspects therein.
The implementation model differs from this because the actual code that would be used for this set up would probably include a tree of some sort to track the comments and nest them appropriately. The tree set up, as noted in the book, is one of the most user unfriendly designs in the world. So there is a rather large difference between the implementation model and the mental model of the user.
No comments:
Post a Comment