User Mental Models: What Users Believe About Your System

A user's mental model is their internal story about how your system works, based on past experiences and beliefs, not objective facts. It's how they predict what will happen next. Users expect your site to behave like others and map digital actions to real-world analogs, like a shopping cart. The biggest mistake is assuming your own expert mental model of the product is shared by users; this gap is the primary source of usability problems and frustration.