Indi Young — Innovation With Mental Models

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.

Presentation slides

Session descrip­tion

In his recent book, The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun argues that

inno­va­tion does not hap­pen in a flash of inspi­ra­tion. Instead, it takes

years of research to deeply under­stand a prob­lem space. A designer who

method­i­cally exam­ines, adopts, or dis­cards var­i­ous hypoth­e­sis about the

topic is the one who comes up with the best solutions.

In this talk, Indi Young will present a method­i­cal (but rapid!) approach to

inven­tion. Using a men­tal model dia­gram depict­ing the behav­ior of a customer

seg­ment, she will show how to rec­og­nize when your cur­rent offer­ings could do

bet­ter at match­ing needs and how to syn­the­size new ideas.

With the ideas in this pre­sen­ta­tion, you will be able to think up new

prod­uct ideas and improve upon old prod­uct fea­tures in a guided, strategic

manner.

About Indi Young

Indi Young PortraitIndi 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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3 responses to “Indi Young — Innovation With Mental Models”:

  1. […] Innovation with Mental Models was one of my favourite pre­sen­ta­tions from Web Directions North this year. Indi, not to men­tion the clients she did the work for, was incred­i­bly gen­er­ous with the detailed descrip­tion of her men­tal mod­els approach to user research and prod­uct design. […]

  2. […] また、「Web Directions North」のスライドも例によって、SlideShareで見ることができます。 | View | Upload your own […]

  3. […] sure I’ve spo­ken about Indi’s excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion from Web Directions North ear­lier this year before. It was such a clear headed expla­na­tion of her Mental Models methodology […]

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