By Indi Young. Rosenfeld Media, 2008.
Available in paperback and digital package (1-933820-06-3), digital (PDF) edition (ISBN 1-933820-19-5)
There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.
"Indi Young’s mental models are the perfect way for your team to integrate your user’s perspective into your design. Indi has written a comprehensive guide for anyone who wants to make use of this power design technique. I’ll be giving this book out to all of our important clients and insisting they make it part of their process."
—Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
Mental Models is available in full-color paperback and digital (PDF) versions. Substantial supplemental content is available on this site, and all of the book's images can be downloaded from Flickr.
Jeff Parks returns to Boxes and Arrows with several good podcast interviews from UX Week 2008. He interviewed me after attending my afternoon workshop about mining non-directed interviews to make a mental model. The podcast is about halfway down the page, under the title "Unpacking Stories to Serve People Better."
The Web Directions South conference is just three weeks away! For those of you who couldn't make Web Directions North last January, here is your second chance. Spring is just beginning to poke it's head out in Australia, so it should be a good time to share your growing vernal energy with web-minded folks.
Over 30 sessions across 3 tracks and 2 days, plus another 2 days of workshops, covering off front and back end web design and development, mobile design and development, information architecture, user experience and interaction design, social media and networks, accessibility, Ajax and Javascript, semantic web, HTML 5, web application security, marketing and advertising online.
With speakers including Jeffrey Veen (Adaptive Path and Google), Derek Featherstone (accessibility), Daniel Burka (interaction design), Douglas Crockford (Ajax security), Jeff Croft (typography), Ruth Ellison (accessible design), Hurol Inan (web analytics) plus many others with more still to come.
WSG members can take $50 off the price with the discount code WDS08-WSG.
