What is a design process?

First of all, let’s start by defining the engineering design and design thinking processes and what they involve.

The design process is a series of steps that both engineers and designers use in creating functional products and processes.

The design process is inherently iterative by nature — many steps should be repeated before embarking on the next step. According to A. Ertas and J. Jones, the authors of The Engineering Design Process (1996), common stages of the iterative design process include “research, conceptualization, feasibility assessment, establishing design requirements, preliminary design, detailed design, production planning and tool design, and production.” That same complex process can be simplified into problem definition (or clarification of the task), conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design, and design communication (or production).

The design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems, which is indispensably important for understanding human needs, re-defining the problem in a human-centric way, brainstorming ideas, and adopting the solution in prototyping and testing. According to the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as d.school), the design thinking process involves five stages: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. To understand how the users behave or perceive the world, the designers resort to creating mental models, which play a decisive role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

What is a mental model?

A mental model is one of the underlying key terms in cognitive psychology. Back in 1943 Kenneth Craik, a philosopher and psychologist, proposed an idea of “small-scale models” of reality that the mind constructs to anticipate future events. J. W. Forrester, a pioneering American computer engineer and systems scientist, defined general mental models as the images of the world with selected concepts and relationships between them that represent the real system. In interaction design, a mental model is an artifact of belief: a user will anticipate an event, plan, and predict the future based on the mental models of similar events that happened in their lives in the past. Having applied the above-said to web design, it’s safe to assume that users form their mental models based on interactions with existing web sites and applications. The problem with designers is that they tend to base their ideas on their own mental models, which are quite often different from those of the end-users’, whereas what they should have been doing is emulating the UI standard patterns, where they exist, and where they do not exist — brainstorming, predicting, and constructing possible mental models. To visualize a mental model, designers use cognitive mapping.

What are the maps?

Mapping, as mentioned above, helps designers to visualize complex ideas, processes, patterns, and relationships between them. There are several types of maps, cognitive, mind, and concepts maps amongst them, all of which might seem similar, however, they are quite different. Let’s define each type, determine their strengths and weaknesses, as well as discuss their uses in UX.

Cognitive maps

A cognitive map is a generalized all-encompassing term that comprises all visual representations of mental models. Mind maps and concept maps are all examples of cognitive maps. Cognitive mapping is free-form and can include anything from a bulleted list to diagrams to flowcharts and can be created on paper, sticky notes with a pen, crayon, or marker.