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Diagnosing a Settings Page Nobody Can Navigate
Support tickets consistently say some version of "I can't find how to turn off notifications" for a product whose settings are actually organized as: "Account" (login, password, linked devices), "Billing" (plan, payment method, invoices), and "System" (notification frequency, data sync, storage limits, API access) — a structure that mirrors the three engineering teams that own those areas internally.
- Using Indi Young's mental-model/system-model framing, diagnose exactly what's wrong here.
- What research would you run to find the user's actual mental model for these settings, and what would you expect it to reveal?
- Propose a revised structure, and explain what principle drove the regrouping (not just the new labels).
- Why would simply renicknaming "System" to something friendlier, without regrouping the items inside it, likely fail to fix the complaints?
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