The never-ending bar

On the latest Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen: Mental Models, I am reminded of a personal experience that I have shared in a class to explain what is a mental model.

Some years ago, my father, a retired person, began to spend his free time learning to type. At first he started using an old typewriter, one of the old iron typewriters, which was still around the house. One Sunday when I went home for lunch, I encouraged her to use my old computer. So far he had never touched a computer in his life, and it took me several weekends to teach him how to use Word.

A few days later I received a call from him: he said, a little distressed, that he had written many pages and “... he had written many pages and "... he had written many pages and "... he had written many pages...".“the bar on the right had become too small and was running out (...), how could I keep on writing”.

It took me a while to understand over the phone what he meant by the little bar on the right... The scroll bar! It took me a long time to explain to him that he could continue writing without any problems, that the document “didn't end”, and that he could write as many pages as he wanted.

In the real world, a notebook, a pile of paper, a glass of water... have an end, a limit. Not in an electronic document, there is no perceived end (at least as far as the hard disk will go), hence the mental model inherited from the real world: limited capacity.

Also the side elements of the program: toolbar, menu, scrollbar... distract us from the main focus of the task, and make us, for example, wonder what they are for. In this sense, applications such as Writer for iPad, created by the people at IA, seem to solve this problem by focusing on the main focus of the task, in this case writing, eliminating from the workspace everything that is not necessary and at the same time getting closer to the user's mental model.

 

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