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.