There are a lot of methods that you can use to gain a deeper understanding of how your users think. In this chapter, we will explain how to apply different methods to understand your user's mental model. Different techniques will give different results; therefore, some methods will be more useful for some objectives than others. Practice with all of them and create your own set of tools.

In this chapter, we will go through the most common methods used by many user experience designers. They are easy to implement and the investment in time will be justified by the quantity of information you will get.

These methods consist of small tasks to give to your participants. Allowing them to use their own terminology will help us understand how they think and how they expect the system to interact with them.