6-Yonjae Lee

The feature my group was redesigning was the display of YouTube home page.  We gave users some degree of liberty to rearrange the main page.  In the mental model, the users would have thought that they will rearrange the page by dragging features around, just like they move a cup on the coffee table.  A user clicks a part of the main page with the left button of the mouse, drags it to where he or she wants, and release the button to finish the move.  The mental model would not even require the user to make any action to initiate the rearrangement, but just allow the user to grab any part he or she wants and start moving.  Also, if the user did not want a feature to be displayed, the user might have tried to drag it out of the browser to delete it.

The mental model surely requires less steps than the implementation model.  If an implementation model was used, the design would be more complicated.  The user who wants to change the main page has to access settings page, and access the page where the user can change the main.  Even worse, the user might be forced to use less intuitive method.