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Course 4. Thinking Styles

4. Thinking Styles

    About this course

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    About this course

    Start date: 5-May-21

    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

    Homework:

    Expect homework to take about one hour a week. (Some people invest less time or more time, depending on their context.)

    • Homework #1: Choose some transcripts to read, and write a participant sketch for each. Your sketch will take the format of either a paragraph of concepts at depth or a list of concepts at depth.
    • Homework #2: Group participants with approaches in common. Annotate this group by merging some common inner thinking & guiding principles. Highlight people by strength of match to the annotation, then make changes if there are weak matches. See if you can make each person belong to a unique group
    • Homework #3: Describe each of your thinking style groups using first person, present tense. Decide on a label for each group that the members would be proud to describe themselves as. (Optionally: map our original hypotheses to thinking styles; test out the descriptions with real people.)

    Who is this for?

    Product owners, entrepreneurs, enterprise leaders, designers, developers, content strategists, researchers … we all need a tool to help us systematically uncover the harm we are causing. Thinking styles is this tool.

    Learn how to launch at your organization a more humane method of representing the people you hope to support.

    PICK YOUR COURSE & PRICE

    Prerequisites

    • read the essay Describing Personas
    • understanding of listening
    • understanding of listening sessions for data collection
    • watch one of Indi’s latest recorded talks
    • listen to one of the latest Other Recordings

    Recommended reading

    • The introduction to Practical Empathy
    • Article – Launching Problem Space Research
    • Chapters 10 & 12 in Mental Models
    • Chapter 6 in Practical Empathy
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    I would say it's a good alternative to persona usage
    – anonymous - May-2020
    Indi's lovely and personable nature make her really enjoyable to listen to.
    – anonymous - Apr-2020
    A class like this is hard to come by, where you learn tactical tips to do strategic research right.
    – DJ Heo - May-2020
    Indi brings so much energy, sheer curiosity to class. By the way, her own war stories are gold!
    – 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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    Indi’s class allows you to practice research rigor and apply what you learn in a real-world setting.
    – DJ Heo - 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
    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
    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
    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
    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

    How does it work?

    Duration

    4 classes of 2 hours each. The live version of a course takes about four weeks to complete.

    Time Zones

    Live courses are taught Wed 10:30am or Friday 5:30pm San Francisco time. here are two helpful tools: 1. Time zone converter 2. Explore your time zone

    Homework Review

    Students who enroll for the live version of the courses will have Indi review their homework.

    Pricing

    Several pricing tiers aim to support different budgets and currency rates.

    Enrollment options

    3 enrollment options give you the choice as to how to complete the course.

    Previous start dates

    18-Mar-20;24-Apr-19

    More courses

    3. Cultivating Patterns (analysis part two)
    4. Thinking Styles
    5. Mental Model Diagrams as Opportunity Maps
    Pricing & enrollment options

    Price & Enrollment Options

    For each course you can enroll in one of these three ways

    Live Online Classes

    Join a class of 25 or less participants, from around the globe. Classes are taught online live by Indi.

    • Live discussions & questions during classes
    • Choice of two class periods per week (Group A or Group B)
    • Partner for homework with others in your Group
    • Homework review of your work by Indi & assistant
    • Membership in Slack community
    • Access to recordings of the course
    • Recordings accessible for 3 months
    • Letter of Completion available
    • Counts toward problem space certification program

    Individual

    Regular$776
    Govt/Military/Non-Profit$582
    Out-of-Pocket$388
    Extreme Currency Exchange$80

    Pick your course & price

    Team

    If you have a team attending from one organization:

    3 people ~15%$660 each ($1980 total)
    4 people ~20%$621 each ($2484 total)
    5 people ~25%$582 each ($2910 total)
    6-10 people ~30%$543 each
    11-15 people ~35%$504 each
    16+ people ~40%$466 each

    Contact us for Team Purchase

    Follow-along Option

    If you cannot attend class, but still want to follow along with the latest course as it is taught, this is a great option for you.

    • Partner for homework with others who are also following-along
    • Some cheat sheets for self-review of homework
    • Membership in Slack community
    • Access to recordings of the currently underway live course
    • Recordings accessible for 6 weeks (motivation to finish!)
    • No letter of completion available
    • Does not count toward the problem space certification program

    Individual

    Regular/Out-of-Pocket$194
    Govt/Military/Non-Profit$145
    Extreme Currency Exchange$40

    Pick your course & price

    Archived Access

    If the course you are interested in is not coming up soon enough, consider the archived recording.

    • Last year’s course recordings
    • Some cheat sheets for self-review of homework
    • Membership in Slack community
    • Recordings accessible for 6 months
    • No letter of completion available
    • Does not count toward the problem space certification program

    Individual

    Regular/Out-of-Pocket$194
    Govt/Military/Non-profit$145
    Extreme Currency Exchange$40

    Pick your course & price

    Pricing Level Details

    Regular – When your organization will cover the cost, e.g. your boss is paying

    Government/Military/Non-profit – When a government, military, or non-profit organization is covering your education cost

    Out-of-Pocket – When you will NOT be reimbursed for the cost by anyone; also use this if you are a member of a union and your boss is not paying

    Extreme Currency Exchange – Not in the US? When your your purchasing power is at an extreme disadvantage with the US dollar, we have much bigger discounts. We want to include folks in Brazil, India, Ukraine, Russia, Malaysia, etc.

    PICK YOUR COURSE & PRICE
    Refund Policy

    Refunds are possible up until 2 days prior to your course start date.

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