4. Thinking Styles

About This Course

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)

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 - Apr-2019

It gives you a good theoretical base of how to build thinking styles from research material

– Tomás Ottolenghi - May-2021

If you don’t know which of these classes to start with, try signing up for the course that’s coming up next, which is what I did.

– DJ Heo - May-2020

I wasn't entirely clear that the courses were sequential, and wished I'd had the analysis coursese under my belt before taking Thinking Styles.

– anonymous - May-2020

Each engaged student becomes part of how this fluid process is taught, and how it may be practiced in the future.

– Cindy Lowrey - Apr-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).

– anonymous - Apr-2020

If you want your product research to add meaningful value to people, this course is a must.

– Bertus Kock - May-2021

Indi brings so much energy, sheer curiosity to class. By the way, her own war stories are gold!

– DJ Heo - May-2020

Indi's class is extremely well structured and paced very well, with exercises, and she gives you time to think and process what she's explaining.

– anonymous - Apr-2020

Indi's lovely and personable nature make her really enjoyable to listen to.

– anonymous - Apr-2020

You’re probably here because you’re a curious person wanting to learn about doing better research. So just give any of her classes a chance and see how much you grow with it! :)

– DJ Heo - May-2020

Go for it. It's all useful and better than the NNG courses I've been on

– Oliver Shreeve - May-2021

I love how tangible and clear Indi made the content. It's the only online course ever that I didn't lose interest in after the first class (or even after 15 minutes sometimes...).

– anonymous - Apr-2020

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 - Apr-2019

Indi's reduced rate for countries with a big currency value difference is the best example of an inclusive, ethical, and actually just altruistic person - I've never heard or seen this anywhere else.

– anonymous - Apr-2020

I would say it's a good alternative to persona usage

– anonymous - 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 - Apr-2020

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 better understanding their needs.

– anonymous - Apr-2019

Indi’s class allows you to practice research rigor and apply what you learn in a real-world setting.

– DJ Heo - May-2020

I hadn't realized how much rich data I've been missing about users just by how personas have been created and used.

– anonymous - Apr-2019

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 - May-2021

Just do it

– Yannis Masouras - May-2021

A class like this is hard to come by, where you learn tactical tips to do strategic research right.

– DJ Heo - May-2020

You walk away learning that questions are a powerful tool of clarity. The skills you’ve just practiced with Indi will guide you to a deeper understanding of people as people, not users.

– DJ Heo - May-2020

Although I was in the 'Follow-Along' (not Live) group, I still feel like I benefitted greatly. (Although I can see the immense value of doing it real time with homework assessments.)

– anonymous - Apr-2020

The Thinking Styles course was by far the most engaging course I’ve ever taken remotely. You forget it’s entirely taught online.

– DJ Heo - May-2020

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.

– Cindy Lowrey - Apr-2019

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: