If you’re new to thinking about mental models, spend some time thinking about it. Every ‘user need’ is fulfilled by the product or the context in which that product is used.
When we started working from home, we carried home with us the same mental model of the activity. However, the old product (physical whiteboard) and the old context (office) just didn’t exist, so we had to search for a new solution.We first tried doing it with whimsical, google meet and slack.
On the surface, this feels like it wouldallow us to achieve the goal. However, we soon realized that something was missing. Even before we explicitly expressed what was missing, we subconsciously started searching for that missing thing in the digital products we knew about.
The missing thing was – we couldn’t make quick suggestions to the person making the whiteboard – equivalent of pointing to something on the physical board and telling them to change it.
In the mental model diagram, this is how it can be represented: