Purpose

Mental models are used to capture and display the internal representation that users have regarding a particular process. These models are constructed from their real-world experience within a particular domain. These models come with certain expectations and leverage metaphors learned from previous experience, which must be accommodated in the design.

Process

In order to create our persona's mental models, we again, relied strongly on our primary research. We created a series of flow diagrams that showed the choices and decisions that our subjects made when selecting a new recipe and cooking a new item.

From our initial investigation, we produced some preliminary models:

Josh's preliminary mental model

Margo's preliminary mental model

Having created mental models based on actual user data, we then abstracted out the incident-specific detail and made general mental models for each persona. These were based on their particular use case, but would be remain applicable to a variety of similar situations.

Final Mental Models

Margo's mental model

Josh's mental model