Conceptual Model
A conceptual model is a simplified story about how something works. It does not need to be accurate, only useful enough to predict what will happen and what to do when something goes wrong. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things makes it central to good design: people build the model from what an object shows them, and a coherent design gives them a model that works.
What it is
People rarely understand how a device really works. They carry a working picture of it, built from the look of the object, past experience with similar things and anything they have been told. That picture is the conceptual model, and it is what they use to decide what to do.
Norman's book treats the conceptual model as one of the things that make an object understandable, alongside signals about what can be done, a clear mapping between controls and results, constraints and feedback. The vault's record of the book gives his example of a refrigerator with two controls, which suggests that each control sets the temperature of one compartment, while in fact the controls interact through a shared thermostat and valve. A model suggested by the design that does not match how the thing behaves leaves people unable to get the result they want.
Norman is credited here with the design vocabulary around the idea. The book does not name who first proposed mental models, so no originator is claimed on this page.
In effect
The idea carries over to brands. A brand's assets, such as its name, mark, colours, type and voice, are the things people see, and what people build from them is a model of what the brand is. When the assets agree, the model is easy to form. When they pull in different directions, people have to work to reconcile them, or they form a model that is wrong.
In a brand identity system, the equivalent of a coherent conceptual model is a short statement of what the brand stands for, against which every asset and every new application can be checked. That is an application of Norman's idea to branding. It is not something he tested, and the book is about doors, stoves and software.
The related notion of the system image, the model that the visible parts of a thing convey as a whole, is a useful companion: in a brand, the system image is everything a person has seen of it.
What it does not say
The Design of Everyday Things is a framework book by the person who coined much of the framework, so most of what it offers is definition and not finding. The conceptual model is Norman's term of art and his argument, and it is attributed to him as such. It is not a measured effect, and this page makes no claim that coherent brand assets raise sales.
The branding application on this page is ours and has not been tested as a design for brand systems.
Sources
- Norman, D. The Design of Everyday Things (revised and expanded edition, 2013; first published 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things).