Indi Young’s Mental Models book is on the way

We’re just putting the finishing touches on our first book, Indi Young’s Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior. If all goes well, Indi’s wonderful book will be sent to the printer next week, and go on sale in about a month. (Want to be notified when it’s available? Click here.)

As you’d expect of a publisher’s first book, it’s been a long, arduous haul chock-full of good, hard lessons. But Indi’s work really stands out, and we’re quite pleased with the end result. We hope you will be too.

We’re especially glad (and even a little relieved) that we tested the design of the book’s printed edition (using a bound full-color prototype (printed by LuLu.com). The data gleaned from observing target readers perform common tasks and complete a post-test questionnaire was incredibly valuable; all publishers should be doing this. (We’ll be testing the PDF edition of the book later this month, and if you’re in the New York City area and would like to be a test subject, please let us know.)

For now, you’ll have to settle for a taste of the end product; here are Mental Models’ lovely front and back covers, designed by Jason Kernevich of The Heads of State:

Update (12/27/07): Mea culpa, we were a little optimistic in this post, but Indi’s book is indeed at the printer now, and we’re told it’ll be done in about a month’s time. Again, let us know if you’d like to be notified when it goes on sale.