There are plenty of workshops that teach you how to design well. There are more that teach you how to test and improve your offerings. But there are very few workshops that teach you what to design. In this workshop Indi Young, author of
Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, will teach you the skill of building mental model diagrams--a powerful tool to help you create products and services that do a better job of meeting the real needs of your users.
Based on interviews, mental model diagrams give you a deep understanding of people's motivations and thought-processes, creating empathy for the people who buy and use what you build. Models can be relatively simple or incredibly complex, depending on the breadth of the design problems you're trying to solve. Either way, they're a powerful tool.
This workshop will benefit almost anyone involved in the creation of a product or service. At the end of the day, you'll be able to conduct effective interviews, recognize which data should be included in a diagram, and sketch a mental model of your own.
Bio
Indi is a user experience and research consultant to organizations around the world, and creator of mental model diagrams. Indi
authored a book about mental model diagrams, the type of generative research necessary to empathize with people's real situations to spark creativity. She maintains a
set of prescriptions for solving problems particular to certain organizations.
She frequently
speaks and conducts workshops. Her work is
available on SlideShare.
Indi was a founding partner of Adaptive Path. Over two decades of consulting, she has worked alongside tiny one-person teams in start-ups as well as alongside large inter-department teams in multi-national corporations. Her work often focuses on projects with smaller budgets at non-profits, universities, and government agencies. She also leads projects at fortune 500 corporations.
Indi's passion is application design that fits better in people's real world. Indi's clients rave about her guidance. Her clarity and encouragement help teams turn the corner and achieve the goals they want. She has helped larger companies build internal user experience service teams. Previous to consulting, she was a software engineer, designing the front-end interface to a compiler environment and writing system control and database software for scientific applications.
