Indi Young’s mental models are the perfect way for your team to integrate your user’s perspective into your design
As you can tell from the above quote from user experience expert and past J. Boye conference speaker Jared Spool, our latest confirmed speaker for Philadelphia Indi Young comes highly recommended. Several of our community members have also spoken highly of her.
While there is no single methodology for creating the perfect product, you can certainly improve your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing certain things. Indi has written a book about just that. The book, titled Mental Models, gives you the tools to help you grasp those reasons and design accordingly.
During the financial crisis, Indi founded Adaptive Path with six other interaction designer—information architect—writer—speaker—teaching pioneers. After five years of intensive projects, Indi stepped aside to write her book, Mental Models.
In Philadelphia in May, Indi will host a 3 hour workshop on how to align design strategy with human behavior. You will leave the workshop with an understanding of how mental models have helped organizations from a variety of industries, and be able to create your own mental models right away to improve your applications, services, and products. You’ll understand the pros and cons of the concept of mental models, and how they fit with other user experience design methods. And you’ll be able to avoid the frustrating mistakes that often get in the way while developing mental models.
We’re really excited to welcome Indi to our group of conference speakers. To keep Indi busy, we have convinced her to also do a brief presentation on the user experience track. More on that later.
