UX Glossary | C
Cognitive map
Also: Mental model diagram
A free-form drawing of how a person or group understands a process or concept, made to reveal their mental model.
A cognitive map is a drawing made by, or about, a person to show how they understand something. Ask a customer to sketch how they think returns work in an online shop and what you get is a cognitive map: boxes, arrows, sometimes a stick figure, with the order and emphasis entirely theirs.
The term comes from psychology, where it first described people’s internal picture of physical space. In UX it is used more loosely for any visual of a mental model.
Two ways to make one
Elicited. You ask participants to draw during a session. Give them a blank page and a neutral prompt such as “show me what happens after you press order”. Avoid showing your own diagram first.
Inferred. You build it from interview transcripts, grouping what people said into a picture of how they think the topic fits together. This is faster and more biased, since you are the one doing the drawing.
Cognitive map, concept map
A concept map is a structured graph with labelled links. A cognitive map has no rules. The looseness is its strength in research, because the omissions and the odd groupings are the findings.
In practice
Look for what is missing and what is oversized. If every drawing from support staff includes a step that no customer draws, the two groups are working from different models of the same service. That gap is usually more useful than any individual drawing, and it makes a good opening for a design conversation.