Mental Models

Mental models are tiny ships inside glass bottles inside of your brain. No, of course not—that would be ridiculous. Mental models are basically our way of understanding something, so to say a mental model is how one conceptualizes a concept. Now, that may sound like kind of circular reasoning, but we can think of it like this: my mental model of how to make a sandwich is, you know, get the bread, get the meat, get the cheese, slice the tomatoes, stack it up. That is essentially my mental model of how I construct a sandwich.

This is a concept that I first encountered in UX and UX research—mental models. We construct mental models in how we use our technology through a process that is, I think, a kind of give and take between designers and users. For example, when graphical user interfaces were first invented, users had never encountered anything like that before, as previously computers had relied on command-line interfaces. However, some very smart people at Xerox came up with the idea to leverage users' existing mental models to make graphical user interfaces intuitive, even though they were brand new and had never been seen before.

That’s why we call the main screen on our desktop a "desktop" because it quite literally was modeled on an analog desktop, where you could have papers stacked on top of each other and files organized within folders. These were all taking advantage of what we call affordances—when we match our model of a digital item to a physical item, such as files on our computer being represented by a manila folder icon. This was something widely used in offices and similar environments at the time, and was familiar to users and signaled to them, “Okay, this is the place where I store information.”

So to connect this directly to mental models, the mental model here was a desk with papers on it and filing systems for users. Now we have a digital representation of that same model, matching the interface to how users’ mental models of an informational process existed.

Next, I’ll explain that we can apply this concept broadly and not just in UX. Think, for example, if you’ve ever done this: walk around a room—like your bedroom or your living room—that’s very familiar to you, but with your eyes totally closed. Would you be able to navigate it? I would guess that you can. I can say for myself I can at least somewhat navigate because I have a mental model of how that space exists in my head, right? I’m familiar enough with that environment that I know where the bed is, where the couch is, where my desk is, intuitively, without having to see it directly. Obviously, I’m kind of fumbling around, but the model is there.

We can also think of this in non-physical terms. For example, our mental model of a typical workweek is, right, Monday to Friday, 8:00 or 9:00 AM till around 5:00 PM, with a lunch break, etc. There is nothing inherent or natural about that work model; that is just the conception that was come up with over the past century or two and has become the standard mental model for what a “regular” workweek is. We can certainly understand that many people do not work such regular schedules or schedules that match this mental model.

We can even think of this in the abstract, and I’m interested in urban planning, so I’ll compare urban to rural environments. The only difference between these things really is our conception of them. Of course, there are different physical aspects in terms of how we construct them—like the density of buildings and things like this—but ultimately, what defines an urban versus a rural environment is that we call it that. That is, again, our mental model.

So, our mental model of a city, for example, is that a whole bunch of people live there, the buildings are closer together, and it has a lot of stuff going on in terms of businesses, etc. Or we can go more specifically in North America. We think of a “downtown” as being essentially a central business district filled with lots of tall office buildings or otherwise a high concentration of office space.

So here we can see the idea of a downtown is a mental model. We expect that a certain area of the city will have certain characteristics, so when we go there, we expect there to be lots of office buildings and things like that, but also, in the downtown area, we would expect a higher density of, for example, entertainment venues, and maybe less residential. There’s no inherent reason for these things; it is a result of a mental model that we have constructed through our social processes.

Finally, we get to the “who cares?” Anyone who’s ever been in a design class probably knows about mental models. But what I would like to point out is that we can apply this concept not only to digital design or design in general, but we can really apply it broadly to many aspects of life. We have mental models about everything from how we do our laundry to our conceptions of how a government functions or how we relate to one another.

I would argue we can view these mental models essentially as systems and processes that we can evaluate in very much a similar way that we would a digital product in UX research or UX design. And very much the same as in UX, we can seek to improve the experience of the user and update their mental model—or our own mental model.

A silly example that is illustrative: I only learned recently that you’re supposed to pour in the laundry detergent before adding your clothes into the washer. But my mental model had always been putting the clothes in, then adding the laundry detergent, then starting the washer. So here I can update my mental model to see that that is not the inherent way the laundry is done and that I can add the detergent first, then the clothes, then start the washer.

But I would ask a reader: can this apply beyond just doing your laundry?

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.