Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Full-day Seminar, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Indi Young, author of Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
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 finding it difficult to make the leap from user research to a concrete design? 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.
Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users' behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user. Mental models are representations of people's behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use. Mental models provide design teams with a very clear picture of what their users are trying to accomplish, so the product or design can be structured accordingly. In essence, mental models model the attention flow of your users.
In this full-day workshop, Indi Young, author of the hot off the press book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, will teach you how to better understand the user experience before making design and strategic decisions through the use of mental models. Mental models provide a clear roadmap of where your organization should invest its energies, and also where it shouldn't, allowing you to stretch your limited resources.
Mental models will also allow you to derive information architecture from users' tasks that will last 10 years, and get everyone from discordant team members to busy executives on the same page. 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.
In this seminar, you will learn:
- How to derive navigation from the mental model diagram. You'll get step-by-step instructions on how to turn user research data (such as interview transcripts) into "mental model" diagrams, a visualization of user needs and tasks that becomes an effective communication tool.
- 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.
- Common mistakes to avoid when building mental models. There are several mistakes people typically make when building mental models, which can negatively affect the whole outcome. You'll learn what to look for and how to avoid these mistakes.
After this presentation, you'll come away understanding how to create your own mental models right away to improve your web sites and applications. You'll understand the pros and cons of mental models and how they fit with other user experience design methods.
In addition to hearing all of the great insights from Indi, you will receive a seminar notes booklet that has the key points, examples, and demonstrations that are a handy reference when sharing the knowledge back at the office.
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. This seminar is also appropriate for attendees at the managerial or director level who are interested in running more reliable projects. Attendees should have a basic familiarity with information architecture and product design.
If you have been tasked with designing a product or website with tons of content and want to understand your users' behaviors, philosophies, and emotions, this is the seminar for you!