30 years of growing this method

Product & service design teams rarely enjoy the reward of making things better for people. They feel trapped in endless speeding cycles. Leaders wonder why the solutions don’t capture the market.

You need a foundation for the existing methods: Strategy Research

For the past three decades Indi has provided organizations with the knowledge to face the future with confidence and excitement. She can help your team truly see beauty in the complexity of humans and support many different perspectives.

Indi’s Bio

[short version] Indi focuses data science that listens. She is a strategy researcher who makes tools that support inclusive and responsible solutions for a broader variety of thinking styles. She teaches courses online, writes books & essays, presents talks and does podcast appearances, and pens helpful posts on LinkedIn.

Indi is a solution strategist who uses purpose-focused qualitative data science. She created her method over a 30-year span, and teaches that method in courses, coaching, workshops, books, talks, and through working with teams on research studies.

Indi spends the majority of her time helping spread techniques, confidence and humanity among UX and Product practitioners. Indi also runs research project for clients, and coaches teams through their research studies. Indi teaches applied research skills such as listening and qualitative data synthesis through courses hosted on her website and Practice Groups hosted on zoom.

Indi’s method is focused on people, not users.

She pioneered opportunity maps, which are mental model diagrams of people’s approach to a purpose aligned with the support a solution provides–or doesn’t. She helps teams map thinking styles with careful attention to resisting assumptions and representing the interior cognition of people in their own context. Teams can then measure the level of harm they cause to approaches that are outside the org’s assumptions.

Indi intends to help the field move toward creating a variety of solutions to the same purpose, in support of the variety of thinking styles people have.

Indi has written three books, Time to Listen, Practical Empathy and Mental Models. She is at work on another book in the series, Toward Variety, that will cover thinking styles.

She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency.

You can follow Indi on LinkedIn, Twitter (@indiyoung) and Bluesky (@indiyoung.bsky.social), access many resources on her website indiyoung.com and at her Medium.

Indi’s Accomplishments

Indi has given over 60 presentations at public conferences globally (8 of these were keynotes), and she has given 16 presentations at private conferences (6 of which were keynotes). Indi has been a guest on 37 shows and met with 111 small groups as a part of her effort to be there for meetups, learning orgs, and team chats.
2023: It took almost the whole year to create the jewel of the courses, Part 2: Qualitative Data Synthesis (Cultivate Emergent Patterns). Indi runs a Practice Group on the topic at the end of the year. Amyris Fernandez and team finish the translation of Time to Listen in Portuguese, and it is published in Brazil & Portugal.
2022: Indi edits and publishes the book Time to Listen, and converts the first two courses to short videos with closed captions, materials, and online quizzes, as well as a Live Practice Group Meeting format. She continues to speak and appear as a guest on podcasts.
2021: Indi writes the first draft of a third book, Time to Listen, and polishes the concepts and content of the online courses in preparation for an updated, more accessible format; works with client to produce employee thinking styles
2020: counts the 58th opportunity map Indi has created for a client
2018: Indi begins building a series of live online training about listening skills, synthesis, creating mental model diagrams & thinking-style segments; she adopts the term “opportunity map” suggested to her by several practitioners at big tech companies.
2016: Indi narrates Practical Empathy for Audible.
2015: Indi’s second book, Practical Empathy, is released.
2008: Indi begins offering workshops to organizations; she continues to do freelance research for clients.
2008: Indi’s book Mental Models is published as the first Rosenfeld Media book, introducing the problem space research method to a wider audience
2006: Indi returns to her own freelance consulting, doing research studies, mental model diagrams, and gap analysis for many clients.
2001: Indi is a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency responsible for knowledge sharing via many channels, notably the much-loved UX Week conference. Indi conducts research, creates mental model diagrams, and teaches everyone she can how to see opportunities in the gaps between the mental models and the business capabilities meant to support them.
2000: Indi draws the first version of a mental model diagram, to show a client how their product supported (or didn’t support) their B2B customers (geospatial data).
1997/99: Indi polishes her practice of non-directed interviews with people who are addressing their purpose; to appeal to product and business managers, Indi transitions from “conceptual model” to “mental model,” a representation of what the users are trying to accomplish and how they can accomplish it, looking beyond just the tool design.
1996/97: Indi works for a year as a UX designer for Ikonic, and introduces UI models to the directors, developers, and PMs there; she flips from top-down structure to bottom-up, because the top-down, ivory tower (“cloth office cube”) approach does not take into account the real-life breadth of “atomic tasks;” she creates functional documents for UI based on “conceptual models” made up of these atomic tasks
1996: Indi evolves the task model to a “UI Model” for Colloquy, intrigued by the “task analysis” method from part of a BayCHI talk given by researchers from the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab.
1993: Indi is determined to shift bank stakeholders to focus on the user, and creates a state machine of Visa call center reps tasks as they transition a desperate cardholder from having lost their card to gaining a replacement; stakeholders grasp the state machine as a less-complicated way to understand the system requirements (a 321-page document).
1992: Indi begins freelance work, starting with apps in the PenPoint tablet by Go (early handwriting recognition).
1989: Indi moves into interaction design, in Unix, during the Motif vs XToolkit+ competition.
1987: Indi begins her career as a software engineer.
1987: Indi starts her masters in Computer science at CSU Fort Collins, then quits because she wanted to push interaction design forward. (This was before any UX programs existed!)
1987: Indi gets her degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo