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.)