to set aside resources for this re-usable, long-lived information.
When You Don’t Have Enough Influence
You might not be able to persuade anyone to follow this method. This is an extremely frustrating position to be in, and I empathize. Don’t give up. You can pull together a rough draft of a mental model by yourself, simply by listing behaviors and grouping them, then laying them out in towers and mental spaces. You will have to work based on your accumulated understanding of customer aims, and you will want to write the behaviors from the customer’s point of view. In the end, you will have a mental model that probably shows 30% to 40% of the mental spaces and towers. Treat the diagram as a rough draft, and use it to persuade others on the team to investigate further.
I have also heard of practitioners “flying under the radar” so to speak. They lay out all the steps to create a mental model, including task-based audience segmentation, interviews, and analysis, but they spread them out over the course of several months. When they have an unscheduled hour or a break from their assigned projects, they conduct an interview or analyze a transcript. In the end, they have a solid mental model to present at design meetings. I have heard this wins the respect of management and clears the way for subsequent user research. Be warned that this approach takes a very dedicated, determined personality, but that might be you!
Six Shortcuts to Mental Models
What you might have already guessed is that the approach I describe in each of the scenarios doesn’t only apply to that scenario. Go ahead and choose any of the shortcuts that seem likely to work best for you.
Rough Sketch: Sketch a rough draft yourself
Rough Draft: Gather your team and create a mental model based on existing data and your collective understanding
Rough Notes: Conduct the interviews, but skip the transcripts and pull behaviors from your notes of the conversation
Fly Under the Radar: Conduct interviews and do your analysis as you can, over the course of several months
30-Day Cycles: Go ahead and conduct interviews, but focus on just one or two audience segments, narrowing your data set from four to 10 interviews
Piggyback on Usability Tests: After each half-hour usability session, tack on a half-hour interview
In the next chapter, I’ll go into whom to include in your work and when to do it.
[1] See Donna Maurer’s upcoming book Card Sorting, published by Rosenfeld Media.
[2] See the work of Liz Sanders at http://maketools.com
[3] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research
[4]A brief explanation of Six Sigma appears on my book site under the Resources section:
[5] See Chapter 11, “Adjust the Audience Segments.”
[6] A striking example was shown at MX—Managing Experience through Creative Leadership, San Francisco 2007, by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, in the form of a short video (really a series of still images with voice-over) of a futures trader making decisions about pork distribution for an upcoming sunny spring weekend. It was a story about how that trader used various tools, including phone, email, weather reports, and the prototype trading application to diagnose and act upon an opportunity.
[7]Wikipedia definition: “An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_case
[8]“The Problem with Scalability,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM), Sept 2000/Vol.43, No. 9 by Mauri Laitinen, Mohamed E. Fayad, and Robert P. Ward.
[9] Existing user data may come in the form of preference or evaluative research. Try to deduce root causes, if they exist in the reports. (We’ll cover root causes in great detail in Chapter 8.)
[10] The company that survived the bust under the guidance of CEO Peter Ostrow is http://www.testmart.com, selling previously owned, re-calibrated test and measurement equipment.
CHAPTER 3
Who? Mental Model Team Participants
Whom should you include when choosing the members of your team during the mental model process? What kinds of skills do you need? Who will contribute and in what way? There are three basic types of participants: the project leader, the practitioners doing the research and analysis, and the project guides—stakeholders who review the work periodically, ensure it takes into account the details specific to each of their departments, and direct the focus of the project. This chapter outlines the ideal situation and encourages you to reach out to those with whom you might not normally work.
Project Leader
A researcher, information architect, interaction designer, or other person familiar with user research and design should lead the project. “Leading the project” means running all the workshops, staying on top of findings and shifting the direction of research accordingly, and actually conducting some of the work. This person should be completely familiar with the reasons for the research and the methods used. In other words, this person should be able to create and distribute the mental model herself. Think of this person
