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T Course 4 ThinkingStyles

Thinking Styles

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About This Course

Prerequisites

  • Recognition of the difference between concepts at surface vs. depth
  • Understanding that concepts at depth represent cognitive empathy (inner thinking, emotional reactions, guiding principles)
  • How to conduct listening sessions for data collection
  • Writing summaries of concepts at depth using the formula: verb + key point + supporting details

Recommended Knowledge

  • Articles about Thinking Styles
  • Pages 116-119 in Practical Empathy
  • Articles about Demographic Assumptions
  • Watch one of Indi’s latest recorded talks
  • Listen to one of Indi’s recent guest appearances on podcasts

Summary

Thinking styles are deeply-researched, demographics-free mindsets. They are much more reliable and flexible than demographic & psychographic descriptions of sets of people.

Segmenting your audience by demographics invites bias and discrimination.

A well-researched persona is a good tool to guide your strategy and scenario-writing. But often personas are built in a day using quantitative data and invented “decorative” detail. When teams accept the convention of using names, faces, and ages in their personas, it allows cognitive bias to creep in. Demographic assumptions are harmful. This demographic approach to personas ends up as an unusable mashup of target market description and product design guidance. It frequently only addresses the buying behavior. If a set of personas does venture past buying into usage, they usually represent only one philosophical approach to users’ overall purpose. This one philosophical approach is duplicated with different “skins” to show “diversity.”

Thinking styles are a better way to support a broad diversity of people.

Thinking styles represent patterns of inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles derived from listening sessions. They’re archetypes. You use them in gap analysis to see where your solutions offer weak support for certain thinking styles. You use them for the characters who play roles in an org’s design scenarios: buying, on-boarding, usage, workarounds, retention. With a connection to the inner mindsets people have as they seek to achieve their own purposes, your team will become aware of broader cultures and philosophies. This variety allows your organization to multiply the number of goals and solutions you can seek to support.

You will learn how to:

  • Practice the neutral mindset of understanding people as people
  • Derive thinking styles from research
  • Provide the core concepts at depth that differentiate thinking styles
  • Represent complex sets of thinking styles in a way many teams across a large org can easily use
  • Convert existing personas to thinking-styles
  • Gather core concepts from existing research
  • Stop writing repetitive (and useless) scenarios
  • Give you org a clear path to address discrimination and support different physiology

Course Features (for new format in bundle):

  • Videos that don’t require you to look at the screen
  • Exercises with answer sheets
  • Downloadable diagrams
  • Closed captions for each video, along with descriptive transcripts
  • Accessible PDFs
  • Downloadable transcripts
  • Add on Live Group Meetings to do the exercises with Indi
  • Live Group Meetings count toward Certification in Problem Space Research
  • Membership in Indi’s Slack workspace (no time limit)
It gives you a good theoretical base of how to build thinking styles from research material
– anonymous - 7-Jun-2021
Indi’s class allows you to practice research rigor and apply what you learn in a real-world setting. A class like this is hard to come by, where you learn tactical tips to do strategic research...
– DJ Heo - 15-May-2020
Go for it. It's all useful and better than the NNG courses I've been on.
– Oliver Shreeve - 4-Jun-2021
Just do it.
– Yannis Masouras - 2-Jun-2021
It would depend on how much experience they had. I think for me, (someone with academic training as well as a decade of experience) it was inspiring yet very challenging. The concepts are complex and...
– Aria - 17-Jun-2021
I would say: be ready to work hard. Practice is 80% what you get (I think I'm repeating, but it's true). Next, I would say that all courses have a really practical impact and I would recommend taking...
– Natalia Harzu - 6-Jun-2021
You should do the course because it's a unique way to improve your way to uncover what you're missing about your users when you're doing research.
– Miguel Baeza - 5-Jun-2021
The give-and-take gave me the impression that I was part of something that's still evolving, which is exciting. Those of us applying problem space research to our work are part of the evolution. Each...
– Cindy Lowrey - 15-May-2019
It was great to work with Indi. She is a pioneer in the field of qualitative studies. She also came from a developer background which is useful when you are involved in software projects.
– Dana Lynn - 16-May-2019
Do it! You learn so much in just a few weeks. And though it's online, it's very interactive and personal, not at all like a webinar. And there's homework that Indi actually checks!
– Francesca - 15-May-2019
Consider where you are on the learning continuum of this methodology as a whole. I wasn't entirely clear that the courses were sequential, and wished I'd had a couple of the others under my belt...
– anonymous - 5-May-2020
The training is a great way to expand how you conduct user research. Indi teaches you how to conduct your studies and analyze your data so that you're getting to the heart of the users' problems and...
– anonymous - 28-May-2019
TOTALLY WORTH IT FROM MINUTE 1! You can tell Indi is a great listener in her research by the manner in which she speaks in her classes (this might sound counterintuitive, I know). Her class is...
– anonymous - 28-Apr-2020
If you want your product research to add meaningful value to people, this course is a must.
– Bertus Kock - 5-Jun-2021
This course has a different approach to qualitative analysis, much more comprehensive of actual human emotions and thinking patterns. Indi's content is not the same cliche you usually find around the...
– anonymous - 15-Apr-2021
I would say it's a good alternative to persona usage
– anonymous - 3-May-2020
It's a better way to look at the people you want to design for, based on real and not made up data.
– Bibiana - 10-Apr-2020

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: If I have questions about the course content, will Indi answer them for me?

A: Asking a question in the Slack community will give Indi, her team, and many other Slack members a chance to see the question and respond to it.

Q: Do the recordings qualify me for Indi’s Problem Space Certification Program?

A: Not quite. You will also want to join the Live Practice series for each course. In these Live Practice meetings, you get to work on exercises together with Indi and others. This is where we discuss nuances of context and share experiences that help others prepare to conduct their own research. Live Practice meetings give you a chance to double your knowledge and demonstrate your understanding.

Other Languages

Take this course in Chinese through UXOffer:

Take this course in Spanish with Bibiana Nunes:

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