Janet Chang’s Blog about Design

Mental Models: Sparking Creativity through Empathy

Speaker: Indi Young, Independent Consultant
Date: September 20, 2008

Advices: Step out of your problem solving role

Empathy
Vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
Feelings, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, behaviors, reactions, philosophies, motivations

Example – Mental model courtesy of Google Analytics Team, 2007
Understand My visitors (use first-person verbs). Make sure you are in the same mental model as they (users) are, wearing their shoes.

Advices: Play Psychotherapist to explore root causes
Don’t conduct interviews, don’t write interview questions, have conversation with people. Find out what makes them tick. Ask open questions, ask them in relation to what’s going on in the conversation. Listen, and think.

The Hallway Test – what is she thinking while walking down the hallway?

Advice: Build a Model of Behaviors and Harness it for perspective
Find patterns and similarities in the transcripts. working it from bottom to top, group and label patterns into table. bubbled up from the bottom.

Use mental models to compare and find out: How well we are supporting people (not users) in real life.

Example: Engage
Challenges are some of the emotions happens in real life, don’t happen online.
Find out the most shocking when meeting for the first time, doesn’t look like what they think.
Solution: “where i’m going to be”

Strategy is now

• Is it worth building?
• Can we trump competition in a different mental space?
• What’s the value of this to the user? To us?
• How feasible/fast is it to build this? Are there dependencies?
• When should we build it?

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Book: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Essay: Look at it another way on a list apart