6 - Rachael Smith

For our project my partner and I chose to redo the homepage of Youtube. We were told and found that the homepage looked too cluttered and found that most of the items that were shown on that page people didn't use. Therefore, we decided to get rid of all the clutter and make it more pleasing to the eye of the user and more helpful. The book defines a mental model as, "... What we believe to be true, generally based on our experiences, and how we assimilate new things into our existing knowledge." (103) In this case the mental model would be that the user thinks that the website is cleaner and more helpful. Although it says that mental models aren't always the truth but in this case that is exactly what Youtube was trying to show to the user. They didn't have any other underlying motive such as, bringing you eye to an advertisement or making the page load faster.

In this case the implementation model isn't something different. The book defines it as something that, "... Is aimed to please the geeks" (103) meaning it really isn't there to help or please the user but something they just put in there. The only think I could think of for that is the moving search bar. We created a search bar that moved down the page with the user. This would be something fun that the programmers would add, but at the same time it is also helpful to the user.