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Mental Models

Aligning design strategy with human behavior

Mental Models

By Indi Young. Rosenfeld Media, 2008.
Available in paperback and digital package (1-933820-06-3), digital edition (ISBN 1-933820-19-5)

Mental Models

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. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Mental Models is available in full-color paperback and digital (PDF) versions. Substantial supplemental content is available on this site, and all of the book's images can be downloaded from Flickr.

“Mental Models” Blog

Below the Line - Aligning Other Things

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 at the MX Conference in San Francisco, Secil Watson, SVP at Wells Fargo, mentioned something in her presentation about tracking customer satisfaction. You could, indeed, mark how well each thing you do serves your customers, according to the average satisfaction rating that customers assign it. This might be a nice way to "decorate" the boxes below the line so you can pick out areas that need help more easily. Thank you, Secil, for a great idea!

IT Project Mental Model

Here's a mental model from Martin Hornstein that he did for his computer science thesis, "Formulation of an implementation methodology for e-collaboration-systems: analysis, evaluation and conception." In this diagram, Martin aligns software tools available to an IT manager to the behaviors listed in the towers. The goal of his thesis was to evaluate each tool for the circumstances. Martin has just graduated from University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz (Germany). His mentor for the project was Dr. Bernd Schopp of Namics A.G..

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