Mental Models: Put on your user perspective goggles

The What, When, Why and How of creating and implementing Mental Models. Mentals Models are a visual depiction of the behavior of particular audience, with part of the model showing various ways of matching support to behaviors. This allows you to be emphathic and understand what a particular person or group wants to get done. Analyzing a mental models can show you were gaps in content are for audiences from this you can easily then fill and also find other opportunities to redefine, combine and augment existing content. Why? Guides the design of a solutions, allows you to make good user and business decisions. Acts as a road map and gives you something to measure against to know your right and you hit the mark. Validation that ideas match needs. When? Explore the mind space of someone accomplishing a task. Research that instructs the ideation phase (higher level than evaluative) asking the end purpose for every tool used rather than the details of how well a specific tool is applied. Deliver a picture of how well a solution supports a user through gap analysis. Who? Directors, Executives, Customer Service, IT, Sales and Marketing invite a person from each one of these area's to be core members of your team that reviews findings asks questions and helps build the mental model obtaining a vested interest and ownership in it. These people understand better than anyone where the mental model fits with what the organization/project team is doing. How? We'll that's what this session is for, open to Project Managers, Designers, UI Engineers and Developers alike come learn the big picture behind UX Design and become a champion of it.