all up. They start conversations, and convert people to the fact that IA is indeed a legitimate discipline.”
How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?
“It helped us talk to our users rather than about them.”
—Simonetta Consorti, Information Architect on the UN Prevention Web Team
Adopt the Customer’s Perspective
In the past couple of decades a paradigm shift took place in large corporations towards the philosophy of putting the “customer first.” This paradigm traditionally applies to service and support, but also has been applied to product design. Companies are finding that as global competition increases, fewer people are beating a path to their doors. Rather than creating a product internally, and then hiring marketing and sales people to persuade customers to buy it, companies are taking a closer look at what customers need. They are designing products that will sell on their own merit.[14]
How Did Mental Models Help Your Organization?
“Mental models are like user perspective goggles.”
—David Poteet, President of New City Media
I often work with groups who have adopted the “customer-first” philosophy but don’t quite have the vocabulary for it. Employees in these organizations tend to answer questions about customers in terms of internal business goals. At the beginning of each project, I interview all the people who have a stake in the project’s outcome. I ask each of them: “What benefits will your customer see from this project?” Most stakeholders will respond with an answer that morphs from a vague customer problem directly to their business goal. To protect the innocent, I’m not going to name names. Here is an example paraphrased from what I hear: “Right now, the navigation on the site is really just a bad experience. We’ll make the experience a lot easier for them. Rather than generate lots of content, we’re going to be smarter about it and help them filter it. Customer satisfaction scores will go through the roof.”
This echoes what they’re thinking from an employee focus; therefore, the answer is from a business perspective. What I hope to achieve by developing task-based audience segments and mental models is to persuade business stakeholders to speak at length from the customer perspective. I want to hear these employees answering the question with something more like this: “As a customer, I will get appropriate content that is relevant to my problem. I won’t have to sort through so many content choices. I will be able to quickly filter all the information for what I need.”
Adopt the Customer’s Verbs
To start this subtle paradigm shift, I encourage everyone in the organization to start speaking in verbs. People are usually already aware of the customer perspective and ask questions such as, “Well, what is the customer trying to do?” The answers often echo the question: “The customer is trying to deploy the system.” There is peril in this approach. The “customer is trying to” phrase puts a barrier in place. It telegraphs that the speaker is someone other than the customer. It means that the speaker is describing his understanding of what that customer is doing. I ask people to cut to the essence. Most companies know something about what their customers are doing; state these actions confidently. Use verbs that describe actions from the customer’s point of view. Choose expressive verbs that are representative of a specific situation. If the customer really is “trying to deploy the system” because they are not sure they can actually deploy it, the illustrative verb “attempt” might be a better choice. These verbs naturally have to come from the customer’s point of view rather than the business employee’s. Either “Figure out how to deploy the system” or “Attempt to deploy the system” is a better choice. Or perhaps there is no problem deploying the system, so “Install the system” or “Roll out the system” may better describe what the customer is doing.
Being inside your customer’s head is powerful. You can see how using the customer’s verbs expresses their view of the world. Try to be aware of the way you speak to colleagues at meetings. Use the customer’s verbs. Verbs are the most powerful way of getting people to shift towards “customer first” for product design.
Verbs from the Customer
Katie is a business user of a suite of office software created by a certain well-known Seattle manufacturer. Here are some of the verbs she uses to describe her work day:
Learn details of using company products
Write help guides for company products
Read cases from customer support
Argue for product improvements to software team
Recommend marketing approaches to marketing team
Study XML manuals for writing XML-based help guides
Attend XML training
Create help guide formats/templates in Word
Organize Word files
Submit bug to software team
Help co-worker format his Word templates
Look up Word formatting question
These descriptive verbs help you see Katie’s world from her eyes.
Continuity of Strategy
A mental model with features and solutions aligned beneath it becomes a roadmap for strategy over the next decade. After your initial brainstorm of how to support users, you will know that you can’t possibly implement every idea in the next three or four quarters. Things will get pushed off. New ideas will materialize as the market and technology changes. You will see new opportunities in three years that don’t exist today. The diagram persists as a visual map of where you plan to go.
Rely on Mental Models to Change Slowly
User mental models change slowly. Take the concept of cash. Coinage has been around for centuries upon centuries. People exchange coinage for services, goods, and materials, and they have developed ways to carry, obtain, and securely store cash. Then the ATM came along and changed how people obtain cash. It has not yet been fully adopted. Many still prefer the mental model of going to a bank and getting cash from a teller. Now plastic exchange of currency has become widely available. You can use a debit, credit, or pngt card in place of currency, which makes the act of carrying, obtaining, and securely storing cash largely unnecessary. But adoption of the plastic model was slow, thus the mental model regarding cash was slow to change. You can be reasonably sure that most mental models you make will likewise be valid for many years to come. Basing a continuous strategy on a long-lived artifact is a good idea.
Keep the Knowledge, Shift the Team Members
Also, it is a fact of life that the members of a particular team change over time. One of the more difficult problems organizations face is preservation of internal knowledge. Mental models guide your team’s progress over the years and become a place where decision history and rationale is recorded, as a foundation of decisions to come.
So if you’re thinking a mental model might help you with your work, you may be asking, “How does it fit into what I’m already
