Presentations

• My Webvisions 09 presentation, Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy (a new version from last year), May 2009
• A snippet of the Future Practice virtual seminar Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy and the follow-up Q&A, December 2008
• Slidecast Companies Are People, Too: How Mental Models Helped Teams Do What They Dreamed from User Research Friday; video of me presenting same slides, which for some reason has a separate second half. San Francisco CA, November 2008
• Video of me presenting a Google TechTalk Digging Beyond User Preferences (1 hour 3 min) at Google, Mountain View, CA, July 2008
• Slidecast Sparking Creativity Through Empathy (57 min) from @Media conference, London UK, May 2008
• Video of me presenting a Yahoo TechTalk Empathy & Innovation (1 hour 10 min) at Yahoo, Sunnyvale CA, April 2008 - [post]
• Virtual Seminar Getting Into Your Customer's Head (2 hours, for a fee) in association with UIE, Boston MA, Feb 2008
• Slidecast Innovation is Overrated (1 hour 11 min) from Web Directions North conference, Vancouver BC, Jan 2008 - [post]

What Your Boss (or Client) Should Read

• "Intelligence vs Understanding" in Scroll Magazine, Issue Number 1 - Oct 2008 [post]
• "Look At It Another Way" in A List Apart - Sep 2008 - [post]
• The advantage of conversation over observation
• Findings from global projects that answer the question, Is Our Intranet Too US-Centric?
• What makes a product successful: Desire & Heart
• Pull back from design and focus on what a person is doing
• An essay of mine, Keep office politics from out of your design, at Adaptive Path
• Stop producing one product for the masses and start producing three or five products for the conflicting personalities and goals of different groups
• An essay of mine, Is Your Homepage Immature?, at Adaptive Path

How-To & Why-To

Get Stakeholders to Understand This Method

• Explanation by Helge Tennø of Screenplay in Oslo, Norway about how this method helps advertisers and marketers, "Don't Market to Consumers, Market to Situations"
• Explanation of Six Sigma and how Voice of the Customer research relates to mental models.
• How mental models are less cumbersome than Voice of the Customer
• Encourage stakeholders to listen to interviews on an iPod

Run the Project

• Follow this visual timeline for a full-blown mental model project, and show your boss exactly what you'll produce
• How mental models synchronize with Agile development
• Use stories to spread understanding amongst global team members
• An essay of mine, User Research Abroad: Handle Logistics in Four Easy Steps, at Adaptive Path
• If your team is not co-located, here are 15 tips for remote collaboration

Segment Audiences by Behavior

• Getting beyond marketing demographics
• Avoiding demographics when recruiting
• An essay of mine, Task-Based Audience Segmentation, at Adaptive Path.

Recruit Participants

• Let participants know what to expect by calling it a Conversation Instead of an Interview

Find Out What Makes People Tick: Gather Stories

• What to cover during an interview and what to avoid
• How to understand what a participant is saying better
• Interviews are rich, but what else is rich, and what else can I use that I already have?
• An essay of mine, Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis, at Adaptive Path
• Some helpful interviewing tips by other experts

Analyze the Data

• Do the analysis yourself (rather than using an automated tool) for a more nutritious result for your brain.
• What to do when you end up with a tower containing only one task box.
• Three simple rules to keep in mind while crafting labels for the boxes, towers, and mental spaces.
• Avoid the classic mistakes of Granularity & Repetition
• An explanation of what Atomic Tasks are, compared to Tasks.
• Once all the interviews are combed through for behaviors, beliefs, and emotions, you start to group the items by affinity. What do you do with items that are vague, redundant, or seemingly non-relevant?
• While grouping, look for the intent behind each label and put those bits of data together, from the bottom up.

Format the Model

• To make the diagram look professional, Use Proper Case in all the titles and boxes.
• The height of the towers does not signify anything, really
• More on printing mental model diagrams, with real-life examples.

Derive Information Architecture

• Understand the definitions of site navigation
• Follow two golden rules: keep it to three levels & don't use product names as labels

Short-Cut The Process

• Getting to a mental model as quickly as possible

Employ the Model Over the Long Term

• How mental models sustain the "Long Wow"
• Track customer satisfaction for each tower in the model
• Preserve organizational knowledge as team members come and go

Templates & Scripts

• Templates for Combing and Grouping data in Microsoft Word and Excel
• Updated Python script for the PC. (Python old 2006 scripts for the PC and the Mac to generate the diagram from a template.)
• Introduction Letter to Interview Participant explaining the research project and format of the interview
• Introduction Letter to Interview Translator outlining the role you wish the translator to play during a foreign-language interview
• Moviegoer Recruiting Spreadsheet
• Template for printing to sticky notes

Appendices

• Appendix A - How Much Time and Money?
• Appendix B - The Evolution of the Mental Model Technique