I chose Indi Young’s Mental Models workshop over others on offer this year at Interactions 10 because for me it fills a gap in research skills – adding a formal methodology for working with contextual interview data to drive generative design. I’d encountered the end deliverable – an affinity diagram by any other name – in Adaptive Path materials and workshops – but had only been using the content mapping portion of the diagram.
In contrast to techniques which focus on evaluating current practices or tools and suggesting solutions to problems with them, the intent of this flavor of mental model is to identify problems that require solutions. This of course has use as well in eliminating problems from project discussions that don’t actually require solutions.
The IxD10 workshop was a half-day version of a full-day workshop. After briefly covering an overview of Indi’s process, we focused on best practices for non- or lightly scripted interviewing and imho the absolute most important thing to get right when building a mental model that is useful for informing design – “combing” the interviews. The gold that you are panning for in the combing stage is evidence of user behaviors, beliefs, and reactions rather than preferences or artifacts.
Full disclosure 1: I found the combing and labeling tedious and deceptively difficult –hopefully because my projects are biased towards evaluative rather than formative research. Doing the combing well, however, is more than critical to the success of the model. Take a look at the combing entries on the book’s resources page.
We completed the session with a small group design exercise where we identified products that answered needs exposed in a mental model diagram that Indi provided. This exercise was surprisingly effective in driving home the idea that this process is about identify problems to solve.
Full disclosure 2: I’m a dog person, and the cat person focus of the exercise was a challenge! Two of the entertaining and unforeseen products the groups identified:
Find Indi talking about mental models on Twitter and on the Mental Model’s book blog on the Rosenfeld Media site.
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