Mental Models

ACM Ubiquity Book Review

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:26:42 -0800

On 22-Apr-08, the ACM Ubiquity site posted a brief review of my book by Ross Gagliano, retired professor and co-founder of the Computer Science Department at Georgia State University.

Web Forge Book Review

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:11:16 -0800

The Italian site FucinaWeb posted a review of my book by Antonio Volpon on 29-Apr-08. I don't read Italian very well, so Babelfish helped me through. There are good comments about how personas and scenarios, when done right, are the fruit of field research and do not dwell on the persona's biography too much. Good personas represent a group's behaviors and philosophies germane to a particular endeavor. Poor personas emphasize the kind of fashion a person wears when choosing a retirement plan.

Usability News Book Review

Fri, 09 May 2008 09:54:28 -0800

Usability News, published by the British HCI Group, posted a book review by editor Joanna Bawa on 8-May-08. She did a great job explaining what the book meant to her!

Below the Line - Aligning Other Things

Tue, 06 May 2008 14:20:34 -0800

In my book, I talk about the bottom half of mental models as containing the ways in which your organization supports people doing the things in each of the towers. I have also mentioned aligning your competitor's services below the line, too, just to see how you can be different from them. Two weeks ago at the MX Conference in San Francisco, Secil Watson, SVP at Wells Fargo, mentioned something in her presentation about tracking customer satisfaction. You could, indeed, mark how well each thing you do serves your customers, according to the average satisfaction rating that customers assign it. This might be a nice way to "decorate" the boxes below the line so you can pick out areas that need help more easily. Thank you, Secil, for a great idea!

IT Project Mental Model

Fri, 02 May 2008 21:15:28 -0800

Here's a mental model from Martin Hornstein that he did for his computer science thesis, "Formulation of an implementation methodology for e-collaboration-systems: analysis, evaluation and conception." In this diagram, Martin aligns software tools available to an IT manager to the behaviors listed in the towers. The goal of his thesis was to evaluate each tool for the circumstances. Martin has just graduated from University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz (Germany). His mentor for the project was Dr. Bernd Schopp of Namics A.G..

“Innovation with Mental Models” Slidecast

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:59:22 -0800

I just got the audio synchronized with the slides from my Web Directions North keynote. These slides include the Engage dating site example now, since they launched a few weeks ago. If you don't have time to take a look at the slides, at least grab the audio file and listen to it while you do a workout.

How Is Behavioral Audience Segmentation Different?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:07:28 -0800

Just so you know, you're not alone. It's not easy to bring a perspective shift to a team or an organization. How are others coping with it? I received this encouraging email from Laura Hansen at California State University East Bay.

"I'm trying to champion your methodology here at work, as it's been very helpful so far in organizing the project. It is still challenging for me to abandon my marketing demographic mindset (was I really that brainwashed?-- not that I was ever all that convinced) for something more real and personal, but things are moving in good directions."

Laura's talking about the way I encourage you to look at your audience from a behavioral point of view, rather than a demographic or strictly psychographic point of view. Psychographics? For example, the hotel group Joie de Vivre creates hotels that are each unique from the other, based on the psychographics of the readers of a particular magazine. People going to the Hotel Vitale in San Francisco are readers of Dwell magazine. They like modern, simple, organic ... but the readers of this magazine may behave differently. One reader may be inclined to act on suggestions to reduce her carbon footprint and cut out pictures of modern architecture she likes while another may just enjoy reading the magazine and then donating it to the local dentist's office, treating it as entertainment rather than influence. Their psychographic may be similar, but their behavior is different.

What Do I Ask About During the Interviews?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:21:02 -0800

I got a question from Jane Jung Edrosa today that I think other people also have, so I want to share it with you here. Jane asks about what topics to cover during the interviews with her research participants.

Jane: Our website, Realtor.org, is a member website that supplies information, resources, tools to real estate agents and brokers. Should the scope of the non-directed interviews be focused on how Realtors run their business and function as Realtors, which may bring up the subject of using websites and specifically Realtor.org as a resource to run their business or function as a Realtor. Or should I focus the interview directly toward how Realtors use Realtor.org. I'm afraid if I use the latter, I might miss out on other websites Realtors visit and functions they provide that might be helpful to them that we don't currently provide and should. ... In the recruiting process, we'll have to make sure we screen for Realtors that have used Realtor.org within the month.

Indi: Yes, you're right. Definitely use the wider scope: how Realtors sell real estate, treat clients, interact with other Realtors and brokers and mortgage folks, learn about new legislation and new forms, set up broker tours and open houses, collaborate with inspectors, home "staging," and caterers, etc. Yes, they may use Realtor.org as one tool among many, but don't just focus on that. I would even suggest only screening for half of your recruits being recent users of Realtor.org, and the other half never or rarely using it as a tool, just so you open yourself up to finding out about surprises.

If the list I mentioned above seems way too wide for the scope of your project, whittle it down a bit to the areas that you are interested in. Perhaps Realtor.org will *never* want to be in the business of hooking Realtors up with inspectors, right?

I'm Going to London!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:23:50 -0800

At the end of May 2008, I'm thrilled to say I've been invited to speak at the @Media conference in London. I will present "Sparking Creativity Through Empathy." The conference is at the Southbank Centre, which is supposed to be an engaging venue. I can't wait to get there. You see, I have a confession: I've never been to London. I'm planning on spending a few days before and after the conference peeking around, going to Kew Gardens and hopefully Sissinghurst and a few others. (I'm a garden aficionado.) If you have any "don't miss this" suggestions, feel free to write me.

Brighton, Here I Come!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:59:46 -0800

Due to the generosity of Patrick Griffith, who is one of the organizers of the @Media conference in London this year, I am able to combine several engagements into one trip to the UK. It is important to me to make every flight "count." Each single flight costs dearly in terms of my carbon footprint, so I have vowed to come in at 12 flights (or fewer) for 2008. A lot of meaningful work can be done these days via telephone and remote connections, and I intend to do my part to stop jumping on a plane for minor things. (Won't someone invent a teleportation booth already?)

With this in mind, in conjunction with the equally generous Jeremy Keith and everybody at ClearLeft, I will teach a workshop in Brighton (south of London by a few train hours) the following Monday, 2-Jun-08. There's an early bird discount available until 7-May-08 for £345.

If you're in the area, please come join us!

Video of Me Presenting at Yahoo!

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:05:59 -0800

On 2-Apr-08 I drove down to Mtn View and gave a brown bag talk at Yahoo. The audience consisted of developers, designers, and managers of the various design groups. I got there a tad late, so rushed into the room and set up. All seemed fine until I started the talk and my computer froze up--like totally froze up. Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't even work. So I had to cross my fingers and reboot, so the start of this video shows me telling a story to entertain folks while at the same time coaxing my pc back to life. I think I handled it pretty well, but you be the judge. See the video on the Yahoo Developer's Network.

I Wish I Had Single Friends

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:04:54 -0800

If you have seen me speak recently, in early 2008, you will have heard me tell the story of the mental model I did about single people and their friends looking for the perfect partner. In the story, I show how some of the mental spaces are not supported well by existing online dating services. "Figure Out What to Do About an Attraction" goes smoothly and instantaneously when done in person, when two people become aware of each other in a room. Being able to talk to that person's friends helps you figure out whether you want to reveal your interest or not. "Find Out More About a Person" benefits from being able to stand on the sidelines and watch how a person behaves among their own friends. Apparently you can tell a lot about a person's level of maturity this way.

I created this mental model for a company called Engage, who wanted to make dating more natural online. A year later, they have just unveiled their new product, incorporating many of the lessons from the mental model. Chief among them is the way they encourage friends to participate in the process, asking them to comment on potential connections a member is thinking about making, and giving them points for suggesting additional people for a friend to meet. There is a "social feed" which lists the activity your friends have done at Engage recently, on your behalf, for other friends, or even for themselves. Engage is a place that "taken" (married, in a relationship) people should feel comfortable contributing on their friends' behalf. The idea is that in real life, a person managing a dating life reaches out to his/her friends for their opinion, no matter what that friends' relationship status is. In fact, the mental model indicated that singles talk to their friends who are in relationships quite a bit, asking for advice from what appears to be a stable font of experience. (Almost everyone remembers warning a friend off from someone they were interested in because "they just couldn't see the signs for themselves," right?)

Some of the other ideas Engage has on their site is the concept of getting points for various kinds of participation, getting your name on the "leader board" for the greatest number of photos uploaded, and having "chit chat" with your friends about potential fix-ups with IM-style balloons of text. You can even include people outside Engage in these conversations, without requiring that they join the site.

So at the moment, I wish I had some single friends to join me on Engage. It would be a lot of fun that way.

Workshop in San Francisco

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:19:12 -0800

This year UX Week will be in San Francisco instead of Washington DC. Another thing that is new is that there will be 3-hour workshops on the first day, and I'm teaching one of them! The workshop will concentrate on getting to the core of what your customers are doing. Getting past high-level concepts and your own assumptions is difficult. This workshop will help you learn to strip things back to the real reasons behind them, both while conducting research and while analyzing data already collected. Tuesday 12-Aug-08, 2-5pm at The Palace Hotel. Use the code FOIY for a 15% discount on registration.

Accessing Innovation

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:44:03 -0800

Vern Burkhardt, an award-winning business leader and passionate long distance sailboat racer (try Hawaii to Victoria, BC, on the big empty sea), contributes to the online innovation digest Idea Connection. I met him in January in Vancouver at the Web Directions North conference, just before the book was published. He was interested in the book and wanted to publish a review. What resulted, after we got him a copy, was this blended interview/review. I think it answers some questions about aligning planned product features with customer behavior, organizations learning to listen to customers, lessons I've learned about practitioners, and we talk about the publishing model as well.

For those of you who are sailing aficionados (and I know at least Camille will want to read this), here's what Vern says about his long distance races.

Fanmail from Geneva

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:06:11 -0800

Look what arrived in my inbox today. A photo of the team at the UN ISDR in Geneva and their mental model for the disaster-prevention folks and how they support them. Such happy faces!

Craig Duncan and his Design Team at the UN ISDR