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.
Customer Journey Map Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Mapping, Product Management
A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of your customer’s experience. It allows you to capture the path that a customer follows when they buy a product, sign up for a service, or otherwise interact with your site. Most maps include a specific persona, outlines their customer experience from beginning to end, and captures the potential emotional highs and lows of interacting with the product or service. Use this template to easily create customer journey maps for projects of all kinds.
Decision Tree Template
Works best for:
Decision Making, Mind Mapping, Diagrams
Making difficult decisions gets easier when you can look clearly at your choices and visualize the outcomes. That’s just what a decision tree will help you do, empowering you to invest your time and money with confidence. A decision tree is a flowchart that looks just how you’d imagine—with “branches” that represent your available choices. It provides a stylized way to play out a series of decisions and see where they lead before you commit your real-world resources, which is especially valuable for startups and smaller companies.
How Now Wow Matrix Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Product Management, Prioritization
There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm — but some are more original and easier to implement. The How Now Wow matrix is a tool that helps you identify and organize those great ideas, as well as reinvigorates your team to think creatively and take risks (a taller order as you scale). Grab this template to create your own matrix, then rank the ideas you generated in a brainstorm as “How” (difficult to implement), “Now” (easy to implement), or “Wow” (both original and easy to implement).
KWL Chart Template
Works best for:
Education, Brainstorming, Retrospectives
Sharing and learning new knowledge is the fuel in the tank of any ambitious team or organization. A KWL chart is a graphical organizer that powers the learning process. This easy template lets you design and use a KWL, with three columns: Know, Want to Know, and Learned. Then you and your team will fill in each column by following three steps: Take stock of what you know, document what you want to get out of your session, and finally, record what you’ve learned.
3x3 Prioritization Method Template
Works best for:
Operations, Prioritization, Strategic Planning
It’s all about assessing a task or idea, and quickly deciding the effort it will take and the potential impact it will have—ranked low, medium, or high. That’s what the 3x3 prioritization method does: Help teams prioritize and identify quick wins, big projects, filler tasks, or time-wasters. With nine bucket areas, it offers slightly greater detail than the 2x2 Prioritization Matrix (or Lean Prioritization Method). It’s easy to make your own 3x3 prioritization matrix—then use it to determine what activities or ideas to focus on with your valuable resources.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.