Mental Models workshop with Indi Young

This workshop is for web designers, product designers and marketing professionals who want to uncover their customer needs at a deeper level.

Indi Young There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons.

Those in the field of cognitive research have been describing and defining mental models for a few decades. Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users' behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user. Mental models are representations of people's behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use.

In this full-day workshop, Indi Young, author of Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, will teach you how to better understand the user experience through the use of mental models before making design and strategic decisions. Mental models provide design teams with a very clear picture of what their users are trying to accomplish, so the product or design can be structured accordingly.

Who?

Indi Young is an applications and navigation guru who began her work in Web applications in 1995. She specializes in gathering user research data to create mental models for use in business/user gap analysis. A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, she has worked with an impressive collection of clients. Indi recently finished writing her long-awaited book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior published by Rosenfeld Media.

When?

The Mental Models workshop will take place on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 from 9:30am until 5:00pm.

Where?

28 Kensington Street is in the heart of Brighton's trendy North Laine, within easy walking distance from the train station. View a map

How much?

The workshop costs £395+VAT per person but Early bird tickets are available until May 7th for £345+VAT per person.

Places are limited to just 25 people to keep the workshop nice and intimate.

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The Advantages of a Mental Model

  1. What is a mental model?
  2. Why use mental models?
  3. How mental models hook into other UX techniques
  4. Shortcuts and other ways to use mental models

Mental Model Team Participants

  1. Defining task-based audience segments
  2. Specifying the recruiting details
  3. Setting scope for the interviews
  4. Interviewing the participants
  5. Analyzing the transcripts

Creating the Mental Model

  1. Building the model automatically
  2. Building the model block-by-block
  3. Comparing the results to the original hypothesis

Alignment and Gap Analysis

  1. Drawing a content map of your proposed solution
  2. Aligning the content under the mental model
  3. Prioritizing the opportunities
  4. Testing your structure and labels