Mental Model Diagram

WHY IT EXISTS Teams often build features based on internal assumptions about what users want, then discover those features go unused. The mental model diagram exists to ground product decisions in how people actually think and behave, derived from real interviews rather than opinion, so that what gets built maps to genuine user needs.

THE MENTAL MODEL Picture a horizontal landscape split by a center line. Above the line sits the user's mind: their goals, tasks, feelings, and reasoning, clustered into towers of related behaviors. Below the line sits your product: the features and content you offer or plan to offer, aligned under the behaviors they support. The diagram is a literal alignment of human intent on top and product capability on the bottom.

HOW IT WORKS You conduct task-based interviews and transcribe them, then extract individual behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as atomic statements. You affinity-group these into towers and clusters that represent coherent mental spaces. Next you place existing and planned features beneath the towers they actually support. Reading the gaps reveals two failure modes: behaviors with no supporting feature, which are opportunities, and features with no behavior above them, which are candidates for cutting.