[Podcast] Chat with Indi Young on Mental Models

At WDN08, I had a chance to sit down with Indi Young, one of the founders at Adaptive Path, to chat about Mental Models. Through her talk "Innovation is Overrated," she first set the stage to understand innovation. Two of the characteristics of great innovations are that innovations come from crafting details and focusing on people. Mental Model is a great illustration of both ideas. In our conversation we chatted about what are mental models, how are they used in the design process, and different ways to collect data to form mental models. If you can’t see the audio player, it’ll prompt you to download the Silverlight plug-in once. You can also download the plug-in here .

The following is an example of the Movie Goer Mental Model Indi showed during her keynote. Check out her presentation slides.

Indi began her work in Web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, she has worked with an impressive collection of clients, including Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. Since 1995, Indi has constructed over 30 interview-based research projects, 22 of which included mental model diagrams. She considers this methodology she has developed another good way to be a “problem solver.”

Indi is the author of the soon-to-be-released Rosenfeld Media book Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior

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