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 are not conversations
• 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
• The book How Customers Think by Harvard Business School's Gerald Zaltman. The review by Reed Business Information says, "Zaltman notes that despite enormous amounts of time dedicated to customer surveys and marketing, approximately 80% of all new products fall significantly short of their profit forecast. This shouldn't be surprising, he convincingly argues, since 'a great mismatch exists between the way consumers experience and think about their world and the methods marketers use to collect this information.' He calls for creative questioning that probes the unconscious values."
• 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, even using real stories from your audience segments.

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