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UIE Virtual Seminar Presentation

Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head

When it comes to your users, do you really know what they want? Is your team struggling to agree on a common design because everyone has a different opinion about what’s right? Are you unsure how to organize your site or product to match user expectations?

Design teams work hard to address the entire user experience, yet many don't have the right techniques to uncover all the information occupying a user's attention. To build a robust design, it's essential that design teams firmly understand what users want to get done. That’s where mental models come in.

To help you get into the head of your customers, we’ve turned to expert UX designer, Indi Young, who has written the hot off the press book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

In this Virtual Seminar, Indi will introduce you to the concept of Mental Models, a method for modeling the attention flow of your users. Mental Models give design teams a solid method for matching functionality and features to the user's motivations, thought processes, emotions, and philosophies.

In this presentation, Indi Young will discuss:

• How mental models represent the whole user experience. You will learn how mental models will help you better understand the entire user experience before making design and strategic decisions.
• How to develop mental models that represent the true roots of your users' behavior. By walking you through the process of building mental model diagrams and teaching you the “hallway test,” Indi will show you how to dive down to the core emotions, philosophies, and actions that drive people's behavior.
• How you will discover things about your customers you never thought to ask. Mental model diagrams enable your team to see beyond the boundaries of what they've decided is the product. Indi will discuss some of the valuable information teams have gathered from mental models.
• Common mistakes to avoid when building mental models.

Google, the United Nations, Wells Fargo, and PeopleSoft are just a few of the organizations that have leveraged Mental Models to improve their designs and processes.

Who Should Attend?

This seminar is for web designers, product designers, user ethnographers, and marketing professionals who want to uncover their customer needs at a deeper level.

Instructor Biography

Indi Young recently published her long-awaited book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, which shows other user experience professionals (and laypeople as well) how to align product design with customer behavior research. Mental models help organizations get inside their potential customers' minds, which leads to more lucid decision-making during the lifetime of the design. Indi leads a small band of re-designers and re-thinkers in a quest to bring the effectiveness of mental models to enterprises around the globe.

After graduating from Cal Poly with a degree in Computer Science in 1987, Indi lasted five years as a programmer. During this time she became acutely aware of gaping holes in software where the user interface ought to be, because that was what she was responsible for. Having few tools for understanding user motivations, Indi started out drawing state machines of user activity, and ended up just going out to talk to users about the deep roots behind what they were trying to accomplish. Thus her career as a UX designer was born.

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