I need to explain the term mapping as it may not be familiar to everyone. However, this is most certainly not MY term and has been much more clearly explained by others, e.g. Don Norman the 'Godfather' of usability.
Mapping refers to the relationship between controls and the things being controlled. Take the steering wheel: when you turn it to the right, the car moves right; to the left and it turns left. Easy. No mental translation required. The mapping is easy and effective. Some physical controls have less desirable mapping. For example, the stove with four gas rings arranged in a square grid with the on/off controls arranged in a neat, vertical line next to them. It is not immediately easy to see which control turns on/off each gas ring. To get round this problem, each control usually has a little icon next to it to clarify the gas ring it controls. But you need to look at the icon and you have to take a small mental pause while you mentally map from the linear arrangement to the square grid arrangement of the actual gas rings. It doesn't take much effort to do the translation; but it takes some. It's also easy to make mistakes with this arrangement, especially when you go into 'automatic pilot' mode. Again, mostly these mistakes don't matter much; more an annoyance than anything.
Another way of thinking about mapping is proximity (though I'm stretching the term somewhat, but this is after all just a thought experiment). How close are the controls to the thing being controlled? The bigger the distance the more effort required to understand how the controls affect something. If the light switch is in another room to the light, you may not immediately see that manipulating the switch has an effect. Or, you may be in the room and not be able to find the light switch at all. Note distance needn't be only physical, it can be cognitive or temporal. More on this later.
The working world is full of situations that require us to translate one type of information or task into another form. The original form of the information or task doesn't necessarily map well to the new work goal. Or, the tools we use may not map well onto the tasks we are undertaking. Or, the time taken to find the things we need to do the tasks may be too long. Here are some simple examples of poor mapping in the workplace:
- The company values: we believe in empowered employees. A most difficult mapping: how do employees 'map' the term 'empowered' to their day-to-day tasks.
- Company organisation: often the organisation of a company doesn't map well onto new work tasks as it evolves and changes. E.g. a company made up of separate, well defined departments may struggle when more inter-departmental team work becomes necessary.
- Emails: most emails contain a mix of questions, instructions and information. It takes quite a lot of mental effort for people to 'parse' each email and translate it into actions. The email format does not map well onto enabling people to respond quickly and effortlessly.
- Software: we all use software that doesn't seem to map well onto the task at hand. The 'bloated' word processor we use to write software or the application chosen by someone else who doesn't really understand the tasks we do.
- Information: we all spend ages searching for information (documents, emails, knowledge in people's heads) that isn't close at hand when we are doing a particular task.
Damn, got to pause it there...it has suddenly got very late!
