Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior

The resulting diagram tells a story about the viability of your business strategy for a particular solution.

Once you have created the top half of the diagram, you focus on the lower half. Take the product features that you intend to create and align them beneath all the towers they support. In other words, you align the features that your business values beneath concepts that people mentioned. When you have finished, you will see areas of the mental model that are less supported than others, and you may have leftover functions that don’t support anything in the mental model.

To create a mental model, you talk to people about what they’re doing, look for patterns, and organize those patterns from the bottom up into a model.

So the full mental model about your morning has several parts. The “Eat” section would have various divisions within it depending on whether you were heading to work or joining the family for Sunday brunch.

The towers in the diagrams represent group names for the behaviors within. The sets of towers represent a higher-level group of the behaviors.

A mental model for a particular topic is, in essence, an affinity diagram of user behaviors.

What is an Affinity Diagram?
Affinity diagrams, in the simplest interpretation, show groups of related things. You can make an affinity diagram out of your grocery list. Some items, like milk and eggs, might be found near each other in your store. Other items, like pasta sauce and spaghetti, are elements of a single meal you’re planning.

For example, when you wake up in the morning you get dressed, you eat, and you get on the train. These can be considered “mental spaces” in a diagram of your morning (Figure 1.1).

A mental model consists of several sections, with groups within each section. Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behaviors made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.

need to know the person’s goals and what procedure and philosophy she follows to accomplish them