Regardless of the system development methodology adopted, being able to understand users’ information requirements is vital to the success of an information systems project. The intrinsic communications obstacles exist within an individual user, among users, and between users and systems analysts. Different requirements
determination and analysis (RDA) techniques have been widely used with different outcomes. Some limitations of these techniques can be identified. In this paper, we propose a mental modeling approach to support RDA. Popular in other disciplines, mental modeling techniques have some distinct advantages to overcome some
intrinsic communication obstacles in RDA, and to complement other techniques.