Mental Model Template
Understand your users’ thought processes with mental models. Develop understanding and innovation with your team.
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About the Mental Model Template
Before you can give your users what they want, you need to understand how they think. But how can you do that? Enter the mental model. These powerful representations simplify complex ideas and thought processes into understandable chunks.
Ready to get inside the heads of your users? Here’s how the Mental Model Template will help you make informed design decisions.
What is a mental model?
A mental model is a visual representation of what a user believes about a system. It is an intuitive understanding of a system based on past experiences, observations, and logic.
Mental models are based on research rather than facts. You can’t know exactly what a user is thinking, but mental models give you a better understanding. These models are based on a simple psychological concept: people apply the knowledge they’ve gained from previous experiences to their everyday tasks.
Mental models guide the design of solutions by focusing on what customers or users need. By having a better understanding of their customers and users, companies and teams can make better business and design decisions.
Create your own mental model
Doing a mental model exercise with your team is easy using Miro's Mental Model Template. Simply open this template to start customizing it:
Fill out our ready-made, flexible template to save time creating from scratch.
Add sticky notes, shapes, and arrows to create a powerful map.
Prototype on an infinite whiteboard. Discuss and share your ideas online using chat, video, and comment features.
Provide your teammates with real-time access to collaborate from any device at any time.
The benefits of mental modeling
There are many benefits to creating your own mental model with your team. Here are a few reasons to try it:
Confidence in your design. Creating a mental model gives you and your team a solid foundation of research on which to base your design decisions. Based on this research, your team is empowered to reach the best design decisions.
Building a strategic roadmap. Keeping informed about your customers' needs develops your competitive advantage. It keeps your team focused on delivering greater value to your customers.
Understand the big picture. Mental models are a way to examine the whole user experience. This will enable you to choose the best design decisions and ultimately win customer attention and loyalty.
Make informed decisions. Mental models aren’t exclusively for design. They can help you break down and solve difficult problems in your daily life. By creating a mental model of your own thoughts and beliefs, you can make faster, more strategic decisions.
Types of mental models
There are so many mental models to choose from that it can be overwhelming. But the type of mental models you use will depend on your team's needs. As businessman and philanthropist Charlie Munger put it, “You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, ‘Here are three things.’”
Here are just a few examples of popular mental models for you to keep in mind.
Classical conditioning. Also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning, this mental model focuses on unconscious or automatic learning. It looks at how people (and animals) learn by association. Classical conditioning involves a stimulus that evokes a learned reflex or response. This unconscious learning can happen by itself or be done deliberately.
Hyperbolic discounting. Also called present bias, this mental model considers people’s decisions and actions around rewards. With this cognitive bias, people choose smaller rewards and immediate satisfaction over larger rewards they will receive later. Sales and marketing teams use this mental model to encourage customers to buy products.
Commitment and consistency bias. This mental model is about people’s desire to be consistent with what they’ve already done. Once they have made a decision or committed to something, they feel pressure to stick to their prior actions and beliefs. They want their behaviors to be consistent with their values and self-image.
Example of a mental model
Mental models are popular tools to use in the design process. They show what the user believes about how the user experience should work. Based on this, designers can produce a product that meets their user’s expectations. Let’s look at a practical example of how a design team uses the Mental Model Template to design a great product for users.
The design team is working on a food delivery app. After creating user personas for their app’s target audience, they use the Mental Model Template to write down ideas about what users will expect from the app.
To do this, they ask the following questions:
- How will the user place food orders? - How will the user search for restaurants in their area? - How will the user expect to make a payment? - How will the user receive their order details?
These wants and needs are written on sticky notes in one section of the Mental Model Template. Based on the user’s wants and needs, the design team comes up with a list of features to satisfy these needs. These features include search bars, tracking payments, delivery history, order details, and push notifications. These features are captured on different colored sticky notes. Everyone in the team now knows what features need to be built or improved on.
Creating a mental model has given the design team a single page that maps the expected needs of the user. The team can use it to analyze whether the interactions they are coming up with are aligned with how the user thinks they should be. By referring to this mental model, the team can design the best product experience and meet their customers’ needs.
Other useful templates for designers are the User Flow Template and Customer Journey Map Template. Using a combination of these tools helps your design team collaborate and produce an incredible product.
Get started with this template right now.
Example Mapping Template
Works best for:
Product Management, Mapping, Diagrams
To update your product in valuable ways—to recognize problem areas, add features, and make needed improvements—you have to walk in your users’ shoes. Example mapping (or user story mapping) can give you that perspective by helping cross-functional teams identify how users behave in different situations. These user stories are ideal for helping organizations form a development plan for Sprint planning or define the minimum amount of features needed to be valuable to customers.
UML Diagram Template
Works best for:
Diagrams, Software Development
Originally used as a modeling language in software engineering, UML has become a popular approach to application structures and documenting software. UML stands for Unified Modeling Language, and you can use it to model business processes and workflows. Like flowcharts, UML diagrams can provide your organization with a standardized method of mapping out step-by-step processes. They allow your team to easily view the relationships between systems and tasks. UML diagrams are an effective tool that can help you bring new employees up to speed, create documentation, organize your workplace and team, and streamline your projects.
Organizational Chart Template
Works best for:
Org Charts, Operations, Mapping
Who makes up the team? What roles do they play? Who does each member report to? An organizational chart, or org chart, can answer it all at a glance. Ideal for onboarding new employees, these visual diagrams plot out company structure and the chain of command to help your team members understand reporting relationships, their role, and how they fit into the broader organization. Our template lets you choose your own chart structure and easily plot the connections between employees, roles, and departments.
Card Sorting Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, UX Design, Brainstorming
Card sorting is a brainstorming technique typically used by design teams but applicable to any brainstorm or team. The method is designed to facilitate more efficient and creative brainstorms. In a card sorting exercise, you and your team create groups out of content, objects, or ideas. You begin by labeling a deck of cards with information related to the topic of the brainstorm. Working as a group or individuals, you then sort the cards in a way that makes sense to you, then label each group with a short description. Card sorting allows you to form unexpected but meaningful connections between ideas.
Six Thinking Hats Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Brainstorming
The Six Thinking Hats by Dr. Edward de Bono was created as an alternative to argument, it is designed to help teams explore and develop ideas collaboratively. Use this template to boost creative thinking and get different perspectives so you and your team can make better-informed decisions.
Meeting Reflection Template
Works best for:
Meetings, Brainstorming, Team Meetings
When schedules get hectic, “learning by doing” becomes the default way to learn. So make time for your team to learn in other valuable ways — by reflecting and listening. Led by “learners,” (team members who share with the rest of the team), a meeting reflection lets teammates share new information about a client’s business or an internal business initiative, offer problem-solving techniques, or even recommend books or podcasts worth checking out. Meeting reflections also encourage colleagues at all levels to engage in each other’s professional development of their teammates.