Mental Model Template
Understand your users’ thought processes with mental models. Develop understanding and innovation with your team.
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.
Empathy Map for Product Development
Works best for:
Empathy Map
The Empathy Map for Product Development template helps you delve into the minds of your users, understanding their needs and pain points. Use this template to gather insights that inform your product features and design. By empathizing with your users, you can create products that truly resonate with them, leading to better adoption and satisfaction. Perfect for product managers and development teams.
Strategic Group Mapping Template
Works best for:
Mapping, Strategy
The Strategic Group Mapping Template is a cutting-edge visual tool designed to translate the competitive landscape of their industry. By allowing users to plot entities based on distinct criteria, this template provides an at-a-glance view of market dynamics. One standout benefit of using this tool is its ability to identify clusters of competitors and market gaps, paving the way for businesses to strategically position themselves for optimal success.
Brainwriting Template
Works best for:
Education, Ideation, Brainstorming
Brainstorming is such a big part of ideation. But not everyone does their best work out loud and on the spot, yelling out thoughts and building on others’ ideas. Brainwriting is a brilliant solution for them—creative thinkers who happen to be more introverted. This approach and template invites participants to reflect quietly and write out their ideas, and then pass them to someone else who will read the idea and add to it. So you’ll get creative ideas from everyone—not just the loudest few.
Entity–Relationship Diagram (ERD) HR Management System Template
Works best for:
ERD
The Entity–Relationship Diagram (ERD) HR Management System Template in Miro is designed to streamline the management of employee-related information and processes within an organization. This template allows for the visualization and organization of complex HR systems, making it easier to understand relationships and processes. It enables users to map out departments, positions, and employee details, including attendance records, payroll, and performance reviews.
Strategic Technology Roadmap Worksheets
Works best for:
Roadmap, Planning, Mapping
We all know that technology commercialization success starts with the end in mind, a product with market viability.
Mood Board Template
Works best for:
Design, Brainstorming, Ideation
When you’re kicking off a creative project, it’s sometimes important to communicate the mood you’re trying to evoke — but it’s so hard to do it with words. So create a mood board and use images, color palettes, textures, and typography. Mood boards are also perfect for gathering inspiration and sketching out and pitching ideas, and they’re not just for designers — your content writers, sales teams, and product teams can use them too, and this template makes it easy for all of you to get started.