A mixed methods study to learn about users' mental models and help my team decide how to approach building a portal homepage.
Mendix offers a low-code application (app) development platform to enterprises. Their core offering is their integrated development environment (IDE), but my research focused on user experiences in the online portal facilitating the IDE. This included topics such as single app and app portfolio management, and how teams collaborate while developing software.
We observed that navigating through the Mendix portal felt messy, like a collection of different websites rather than a cohesive space. How could Mendix users get the most out of the portal when they couldn't find what they needed?
Focusing on the landing experience seemed like a good place to start. For the business, we wanted to centralize information about building apps to encourage more and better app-building. For the user, we wanted to make the experience feel more intuitive and personalized.
To do this, we needed to better understand how Mendix users thought about tasks that facilitate building apps. For example, what do they associate with the development work versus with app portfolio management? In other words, we needed to know their mental models.
Research goal
Objectives
I designed a mixed-methods study to collect quantitative data through card sorting to uncover users' mental models, and to collect qualitative data through semi-structured interviews to uncover the meaning users attached to how they thought about app development.
I conducted two rounds of interviews with 10 participants representing different job roles (including developers, product owners, and analysts) and levels of experience using Mendix software (from new users to highly experienced with Mendix and low-code tools in general).
During each interview, I asked participants about their backgrounds, current contexts, and how they use browser bookmarks, which I took as an indicator of how users already centralize information relevant to building apps. I then asked participants to do an open card sort activity, sorting about 20 cards, each showing an action or item related to using Mendix.
During the open card sort, participants first sorted cards by importance, then into groups and titled the groups themselves. I decided to make the card sort open because although it would take more time to analyze the data, I wanted to reduce bias from nudging participants into mental models our team had about how to structure platform content.
The open card sorting allowed us to explore participants’ mental models of platform-related content. Based on how participants grouped the cards, and on how they rationalized their choices, we could infer their needs for the portal.
I used a similarity matrix, generated in R and formatted in Excel, to look for agreement among card groups. I found very few card pairings, indicating a lack of agreement among platform content groupings, at least at first glance.
I then conducted a thematic analysis on the rationales given by participants for the groups and group titles they came up with. I codified the qualitative data in two rounds to land on 11 key themes. Themes represented the meaning users associate with platform content.
Once I had the themes, I linked them back to the cards in a network map. This result represented users' aggregated mental model of the Mendix platform.
Overall, we found that:
I handed the network map representing users' mental model of Mendix platform content to the Product and Service Designers in the team, which they used to create a modular homepage experience for the Mendix portal. Modules were organized in the same way as the network map indicated, and were made customizable as a first step towards greater personalization.
This project also launched more discussions in our unit for how to personalize the experience for core user types, and how to scale personalization.
Furthermore, our team demonstrated a new way of working in our unit in which a project could tackle a user problem across different products, focusing on the user experience more holistically.
