synthesis / analysis techniqUe · ReseaRch DeliveRable 55 Mental Model Diagrams People tend to behave in ways consistent with dearly held beliefs. 1 The mental model diagram can help you articulate root causes behind behaviors and develop solutions that deeply resonate with people. A mental model diagram is a rigorous framework for analysis that aligns the behaviors, beliefs, and emotions people have as they set out to accomplish a task (the top half of the diagram) against your features, product, and service offering (the bottom half of the diagram). The goal is to help teams make appropriate product development strategies that align with how people already approach problem solving in their daily lives, as opposed to building a product that neither resonates with them nor augments their existing patterns of behavior. When creating a mental model diagram, you must identify the group to study, called the task-based audience segments. Constructing the diagram then becomes an instrument used to assess whether an existing product or service offering actually benefits and empowers people in this segment. 2 Later on, these task-based audience segments can be used when recruiting for future research studies such as interviews, card sorts, and usability tests. For each task-based audience segment, try to study at least four people. 3 Mental model diagrams are built from the bottom up, using singularly focused behaviors, beliefs, and emotions as its building blocks. Each of these are derived directly from interview transcripts (or very thorough interview notes), and diary studies of your task-based audience segment. A task can 1. One of the seminal works on mental models comes from the cognitive sciences. See: Johnson-Laird, Philip. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. 2. Young, Indi. Mental Models: Aligning design Strategy with Human Behavior. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Rosenfeld Media, 2008. 3. See note 2 above. 4. See note 2 above. 5. See note 2 above. Further Reading