The Trends and Research Progress of Mental Models in Interaction Design: A Bibliometric Study

This study systematically summarizes the global characteristics of interaction design centricity model research in the international context, which grasps the current research progress and hotspots and explores the new trends of future development based on the current research hotspots. Using the literature on mental models of interaction design indexed in Web of Science as the data source, the authors use VOSviewer and CiteSpace to draw a scientific knowledge map by bibliometric method from the distribution of literature in terms of year and output, countries/regions, research institutions, authors, journals, and keyword clustering, etc., and carry out a visual analysis to sort out the research lineage. The results show an overall upward trend in the number of literatures within the search scope, particular in China and the United States which are at the forefront of research. The research hotspots mainly focus on the study of the theoretical concepts of mental models, the study of design strategies for matching user mental models, and the study of constructing effective user mental model measurement methods and evaluation systems. It also concentrates on the future research focuses on automation, affective computing, task analytics, deep learning, and human-robot interaction, etc. Furthermore, the trend of the research is to pay more and more attention to the development of intelligent applications as well as more scientific measurement methods and evaluation systems. The research institutions and organizations are working together to establish a scientific knowledge map. The establishment of evaluation system, research institutions and authors failed to cooperate closely. The current situation is that there are lack of many high-yield authors and lack of in-depth research results on users’ micro-mind model. The authors believe that the evaluation method of interaction design based on the mind model is still to be further researched.