how-to

I received an enthusiastic, but bewildered cry for help from a UX designer in South Africa, Jeanne Marias. She wrote, “I am pioneering a service design project, part of which I’m wanting to do a Mental Model of ‘The New Member Journey.’ I’ve charged ahead and gotten the whole team excited about mental models, but […]

Many products are still technology driven. Your organization invents something no one else does. The rest of the process goes like this: I have this tail. I put it on the donkey. I spend money testing and fixing the tail to get it closer to what the donkey wants it to do. In Most Products […]

Leaders don’t want to waste resources. They want to know the organization has done everything possible to ensure success and done everything possible to discover concealed opportunities. Notice the focus on the organization, almost forgetting about the people the organization serves. Originally published as a JohnnyHolland post, Bosses Seek Confidence and Avoid Risks, suggests taking […]

Picking out an actual “guiding principle” from a transcript is difficult. A guiding principle is a sub-conscious philosophy that guides how a person makes a decision. When you look at a transcript, the words “I believe,” “I think,” or “my philosophy” sometimes trick you into thinking that you’re looking at a guiding principle. But this is […]

I was recently helping a few people create audience segments for their projects. It’s so hard to get outside the normal way of thinking about people by title or role or demographic. As a way of getting past that, and additionally as a way of emphasizing that audience segments are merely a way to help […]

You wanted to test your combing/labeling skills … right? You wanted to hone your ability to grab the most descriptive verb possible, and pull out the implications of what the person is really trying to say? Here is a set of examples with a little discourse about why I suggest the label I suggest. The […]

“What is a task, exactly?” This question came up in conversation today as the team at the University of Buffalo starts to comb some of the 47 interviews they conducted. It is an unfortunate choice of words on my part, which may lead people astray during combing. The word “task” is leftover from the practice […]

I’ve been guiding the fabulous folks at the University of Buffalo (and the team at their design partner mStoner) through the interviewing process this week. One of the university stakeholders for the project wanted to be interviewed as a participant–as someone who keeps track of what an organization is doing and crafts his decisions based […]

In the first five months of 2009, I’ve guided four teams through making their mental models. We have combed transcripts, labeled quotes, and grouped the labels from the bottom up to create the structure of the mental models. We have made 11 different models together. What has come up again and again is the difficulty […]

At nearly every presentation and workshop I give, someone comes up to me and asks, “Have you tried (insert tool name here) with your method? It’s really cool.” I shake my head no and politely ask them what they think the tool would do. Every explanation boils down to this: it would automate the analysis […]

I just finished my Australian Road Show with the Web Directions folks. It was really illuminating doing the workshop three times in a row. I conduct five classroom exercises in each day-long workshop, and one thing really stood out for me this week. When workshop attendees tried their hand at grouping data (represented by a […]

First the small print: I use the archaic term “task” to mean any behavior or motivator or reasoning that a person mentions. “Task” is limited in definition, but it’s simpler to say than any other combination of words that I actually mean, like “Behavior, Belief, and Emotion.” Just wanted to point this out … During […]

The words in the labels will make or break the mental model. Here is some advice to bear in mind. First, start each label with a clear, present tense verb. I often see things like “worried” and “manager” and “needed” as the first word in mental model labels. Ix-nay. Verbs have power. Use them. Second, […]

Frequently, you may find yourself with a task box in your mental model that does not belong to any of the other towers in a mental space. This task box becomes a tower of it’s own, with just the one task box in it. Although I’ve said that the height of the tower is not […]

Are you in the middle of grouping the behaviors, beliefs, and reactions you found in the interviews? Having difficulty deciding what to do with a few of the opaque ideas? Here are some general guidelines that I follow if an idea is: Too Vague: I try to re-define it, getting at the root and giving […]

I get to work with lots of teams at wildly different organizations in the course of my practice. It never fails to impress me that the people on these teams are brilliant, driven, humorous, helpful, and plain great to be around. I am in the lucky position of being able to learn just as much […]

In the book, I talk a little bit about the idea of asking business folks and product managers to join me for the interviews. The idea is to involve them in hearing the customer’s stories and also to get their direction if I’m exploring a topic that is new to me. Yes, sometimes the interviews […]

I’ve finished writing my slides for my three hour workshop at Agile08. The theme behind the slides is making mental models fit within an Agile sprint. Some people’s sprints are two weeks long. Other people’s sprints are 6 weeks long. It varies. If you are living in the land of the shorter sprints, though, I […]

In my book, I talk about the bottom half of mental models as containing the ways in which your organization supports people doing the things in each of the towers. I have also mentioned aligning your competitor’s services below the line, too, just to see how you can be different from them. Two weeks ago […]

The other day, Douglass Turner asked me a good question. Here’s what he asked: “One thing unexplained in your book is how to interpret relative length of the bars in the mental model diagram. In fact the vertical axis is (oddly) unlabeled. My Tufte instincts recoil in horror and disbelief in an otherwise lovely book. […]

I get many variations on this question, “Are interviews the only way to build a mental model?” The answer is no, interviews are not the only way. There are many sources you can analyze, some of which are even richer than non-directed interviews. Here are some ideas. (Please comment if you have additional sources to […]

Organizations fear risk, and as a response to that fear, employees dutifully try to record everything that could possibly be of importance. In audience segmentation, this means capturing hundreds of variables, which quickly becomes a barrier to actually defining and using the segments. Instead, use a behavioral perspective instead of these variables, and re-define how […]

Doing user research abroad doesn’t have to be daunting. Keep these logistical tips in mind; you should have no problems working with participants from around the globe. You’ll get excellent results when everyone is comfortable, clearly understood, and compensated for their time. (This post was originally published at Adaptive Path. Since Adaptive Path became a […]

This is an early version of how to conduct a rich listening session, where you find out the thinking going on inside someone’s mind as she pursues a larger intent. For example, “I’m presenting to a class this afternoon–how shall I approach this class, and how should it differ from the last class I presented […]