The absence of mental models on social networks

I’m a big believer in mental models and often structure research questions around them. From understanding news to finance to communication, I try to understand what people’s mental models are, and how we might better support them through design. Recently however, I’ve observed something that I hadn’t experienced before: the absence of a mental model.

As part of my job, I often study how and why people use different communication tools, like their phone, email, IM and social networks. I often probe people about their social network usage and what they think is going on. How does it work? Who can see what? What things are connected? Remarkably, when talking about their social network usage, people often can’t describe or map out how it works. They think hard about it, look at me and simply state that they don’t know, that they haven’t thought about it before, that when they do think about it, they can’t figure it out. When describing their activity on social networks, their different explanations for what is going on are often contradictory. They simply haven’t formed a concrete mental model of the social network, conscious or otherwise, despite having used it for months and even years. They don’t understand the sharing model, or who can see what.

This absence of a mental model leads to lots of inefficient and problematic interactions, lots of misunderstanding about content visibility, and lots of opportunities for improvement.

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