What Your Boss (or Client) Should Read

• "Intelligence vs Understanding" in Scroll Magazine, Issue Number 1 - Oct 2008 [post]
• "Look At It Another Way" in A List Apart - Sep 2008 - [post]
• The advantage of conversation over observation, and how surveys suck
• The difference between an organization people tell horror stories about and one people love: Detachment vs. Intentions. Also: Desire & Heart, focus on what a person is doing
• Essays of mine, Is Our Intranet Too US-Centric?, Keep office politics from out of your design and Is Your Homepage Immature?, at Adaptive Path
• Stop producing one product for the masses and start producing three or five products for the conflicting personalities and goals of different groups
• Put one of my recorded interviews on your bosses' iPods so they can listen while they work out, or ask them to read a written interview. Interviews make nice summaries.

How-To & Why-To

Get Stakeholders to Understand This Method

• Explain what a mental model diagram is, related to the common definition
• Explanation by Helge Tennø of Screenplay in Oslo, Norway about how this method helps advertisers and marketers, "Don't Market to Consumers, Market to Situations"
• Explanation of Six Sigma and how Voice of the Customer research relates to mental models.
• How mental models are less cumbersome than Voice of the Customer
• Encourage stakeholders to listen to interviews on an iPod

Run the Project

• Follow this visual timeline for a full-blown mental model project, and show your boss exactly what you'll produce
• How mental models synchronize with Agile development
• Use stories to spread understanding amongst global team members
• An essay of mine, User Research Abroad: Handle Logistics in Four Easy Steps, at Adaptive Path
• If your team is not co-located, here are 15 tips for remote collaboration

Segment Audiences by Behavior

• Getting beyond marketing demographics
• Avoiding demographics when recruiting
• An essay of mine, Task-Based Audience Segmentation, at Adaptive Path.

Recruit Participants

• Let participants know what to expect by calling it a Conversation Instead of an Interview

Find Out What Makes People Tick: Gather Stories

• What to cover during an interview and what to avoid
• How to understand what a participant is saying better
• Interviews are rich, but what else is rich, and what else can I use that I already have? And why shouldn't I use a survey?
• An essay of mine, Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis, at Adaptive Path
• Some helpful interviewing tips by other experts

Comb Through the Transcripts

• Refrain from using your analysis skills during Combing vs. Grouping
• Three simple rules to keep in mind while crafting labels for the quotes. (Hint: These rules apply to box, tower, and mental space labels, too.)
• Stop Seeing Beliefs Everywhere and also look for emotions behind belief-like statements
• Avoid the classic mistakes of Granularity & Repetition
• Having a tough time? Here are some tricky examples explained.

Group the Data

• Guidelines for grouping 3000 line items, as per Voltaire Santos Miran's blog entry about the summer 2009 project at University of Buffalo (with mStoner)
• Do the analysis yourself (rather than using an automated tool) for a more nutritious result for your brain.
• What to do when you end up with a tower containing only one task box.
• An explanation of what Atomic Tasks are, compared to Tasks.
• What do you do with items that are vague, redundant, or seemingly non-relevant?
• Look for the intent behind each label and put those bits of data together, from the bottom up.

Format the Model

• To make the diagram look professional, Use Proper Case in all the titles and boxes.
• The height of the towers does not signify anything, really
• More on printing mental model diagrams, with real-life examples.

Slot Content Beneath the Towers

• Making a content model is hard. Here's how to capture the right level of granularity.

Derive Information Architecture & Design

• Understand the definitions of site navigation
• Follow two golden rules: keep it to three levels & don't use product names as labels
• Design new weather forecast icons based on mental model of people who generally commute to work and exercise outdoors.

Short-Cut The Process

• Getting to a mental model as quickly as possible

Employ the Model Over the Long Term

• How mental models sustain the "Long Wow"
• Track customer satisfaction for each tower in the model
• Preserve organizational knowledge as team members come and go

Presentations

• My Webvisions 09 presentation, Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy (a new version from last year) - May 2009
• A perspective from the other side: three pages of notes by Julie Strothman from my IA Summit 2009 workshop. Recognizing me, Julie came up and introduced herself to me in the taxi line at the airport. I love that when it happens!
• A snippet of the Future Practice virtual seminar Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy and the follow-up Q&A - December 2008
• Slidecast Companies Are People, Too: How Mental Models Helped Teams Do What They Dreamed from User Research Friday; video of me presenting same slides, which for some reason has a separate second half. San Francisco CA - November 2008
• Video of me presenting a Google TechTalk Digging Beyond User Preferences (1 hour 3 min) at Google, Mountain View, CA - July 2008
• Slidecast Sparking Creativity Through Empathy (57 min) from @Media conference, London UK - May 2008
• Video of me presenting a Yahoo TechTalk Empathy & Innovation (1 hour 10 min) at Yahoo, Sunnyvale CA - April 2008 - [post]
• Virtual Seminar Getting Into Your Customer's Head (2 hours, for a fee) in association with UIE, Boston MA - Feb 2008
• Slidecast Innovation is Overrated (1 hour 11 min) from Web Directions North conference, Vancouver BC - Jan 2008 - [post]

Templates & Scripts

• Templates for Combing and Grouping data in Microsoft Word and Excel
• Updated Python script for the PC. (Python old 2006 scripts for the PC and the Mac to generate the diagram from a template.)
• Spreadsheet template to contain ideas from gap analysis and prioritize them (including the prioritization chart)
• Introduction Letter to Interview Participant explaining the research project and format of the interview
• Introduction Letter to Interview Translator outlining the role you wish the translator to play during a foreign-language interview
• Moviegoer Recruiting Spreadsheet
• Template for printing to sticky notes

Appendices

• Appendix A - How Much Time and Money?
• Appendix B - The Evolution of the Mental Model Technique