Resources
Background for Your Boss (or Client)
- What is an "Indi" style mental model diagram? (as derived from Don Norman's definition of a mental model)
- How is generative research used? How to Wield Empathy in design work, and The Future of eReaders
- The book How Customers Think by Harvard Business School's Gerald Zaltman.
- Six Sigma and UCD and how mental models are less cumbersome than Voice of the Customer
- Put one of my recorded interviews on your bosses' iPods so they can listen while they work out, or ask them to read a written interview. Interviews make nice summaries.
Articles
- Forward for the ebook UX Design for Startups by Marcin Treder - Jan 2013
- The Johnny Holland Series: Search for Empathy, with a Chinese translation of one essay here. - Mar, Apr, May, Jul, Sep 2012
- "Intelligence vs Understanding" in Scroll Magazine, Issue Number 1 - Oct 2008 [post]
- "Look At It Another Way" in A List Apart - Sep 2008 - [post]
Comics
- Brad Colbow created an info-comic with my input, "How to Understand Your Users with Personas" in Think Vitamin (now called Treehouse, and the comic doesn't appear) - 14 Oct 2009
- Brad Colbow and I team up again for, "Mental Model Diagrams" in Smashing Magazine - 23 Apr 2012
Presentations
- Slide decks: some full audio and some summary decks from several presentations I've given.
- Video: Presenting Sparking Creativity Through Empathy (42 min) at the IIT Design Research Conference, Chicago, IL - September 2008
- Video: Presenting a Google TechTalk Digging Beyond User Preferences (1 hour 3 min) at Google, Mountain View, CA - July 2008
- Video: Presenting a Yahoo TechTalk Empathy & Innovation (1 hour 10 min) at Yahoo, Sunnyvale CA - April 2008 - [post]
- Online seminar: Collecting the Deeper Story (1 hour 15 min, for a fee) for Moscow-based UX Marathon "UX Toolkit" Online Conference - October 2011
- Online seminar: A free snippet of the Future Practice virtual seminar Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy and the follow-up Q&A - December 2008
- Online seminar: Getting Into Your Customer's Head (2 hours, for a fee) in association with UIE - Feb 2008
- Book Club Meeting: Live tweet summary of helpful tips I mentioned at the UX Book Club meeting about mental model diagrams, Philadelphia, PA - May 2011
Essays
- Solving some common debates at your organization: Organizing Your Global Corporate Intranet, Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design, Is Your Homepage Immature?, and Message to the Masses
- The misuse of surveys: Marketing Research <--> Mental Models, Oxymoron: Scientific Survey, and Who Can Believe the U.S. Unemployment Figures?
- The difference between an organization people tell horror stories about and one people love: "Aloof" Wasn't What You Meant, Support Intentions Not Existing Workflows, Undercover Mental Model, and Heart Not Installed
How-To
Short-Cut The Process- Getting to a mental model as quickly as possible, even using real stories from your audience segments.
- Get the ball rolling by just diving in
- Reference the mental model in other documents: add mental spaces to experience map diagrams.
- 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
- Don't get too caught up in making perfect hypothetical audience segments
- Write your audience descriptions in the first person, as characters
- Getting beyond marketing demographics
- Avoiding demographics when recruiting
- An essay of mine, Task-Based Audience Segmentation, at Adaptive Path.
- An essay by Steve Baty mentioning mental models as a generative method and other approaches for evaluative methods.
- Let participants know what to expect by calling it a Conversation Instead of an Interview
- Interviews are really more like therapy sessions. The data is more qualitative and rich, providing empathy. Here's a 30-minute chat about interviewing on Radio Johnny.
- What to cover during an interview, what to avoid, and how to improve your technique
- 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? And why shouldn't I use a survey to collect data to composite together?
- An essay of mine, Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis, at Adaptive Path
- Some helpful interviewing tips by other experts
- Refrain from using your analysis skills during Combing vs. Grouping
- Three simple rules to keep in mind while crafting labels for the quotes. (Hint: These rules apply to box, tower, and mental space labels, too.)
- Examples for Picking out Guiding Principles, how to stop Seeing Beliefs Everywhere and also look for emotions behind belief-like statements
- Avoid the classic mistakes of Granularity & Repetition
- Having a tough time? Here are some tricky examples explained.
- Guidelines for grouping 3000 line items, as per Voltaire Santos Miran's blog entry about the summer 2009 project at University of Buffalo (with mStoner)
- 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.
- An explanation of what Atomic Tasks are, compared to Tasks.
- What do you do with items that are vague, redundant, or seemingly non-relevant?
- Look for the intent behind each label and put those bits of data together, from the bottom up.
- 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.
- Making a content model is hard. Here's how to capture the right level of granularity.
- Understand the definitions of site navigation, also translated to Dutch
- Follow two golden rules: keep it to three levels & don't use product names as labels
- Design new weather forecast icons based on mental model of people who generally commute to work and exercise outdoors.
- 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
- Encourage stakeholders to listen to interviews on an iPod
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.)
- Spreadsheet template to contain ideas from gap analysis and prioritize them (including the prioritization chart)
- 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
- A perspective from the other side: three pages of notes by Julie Strothman from my IA Summit 2009 workshop. Recognizing me, Julie came up and introduced herself to me in the taxi line at the airport. I love that when it happens!