CHAPTER 3
Who? Mental Model Team Participants
Whom should you include when choosing the members of your team during the mental model process? What kinds of skills do you need? Who will contribute and in what way? There are three basic types of participants: the project leader, the practitioners doing the research and analysis, and the project guides—stakeholders who review the work periodically, ensure it takes into account the details specific to each of their departments, and direct the focus of the project. This chapter outlines the ideal situation and encourages you to reach out to those with whom you might not normally work.
Project Leader
A researcher, information architect, interaction designer, or other person familiar with user research and design should lead the project. “Leading the project” means running all the workshops, staying on top of findings and shifting the direction of research accordingly, and actually conducting some of the work. This person should be completely familiar with the reasons for the research and the methods used. In other words, this person should be able to create and distribute the mental model herself. Think of this person as the one who either got the project approved or was appointed its shepherd by someone else who won the project. This person should also be prepared to lead the applied half of the project—that is, deriving architecture, analyzing gaps, leading project prioritization sessions, and mining the mental model for innovative ideas. There is value in having the same person play both the research and the architect/designer roles.
A product manager or project manager can assist with project tracking, logistics, team management, and political battles. Often, this role is filled by a person different from the project leader. Together, the two can coordinate the participating team members and the concepts generated.
This is a good place to say that the project leader will listen to all members of her team, no matter who they are. There’s a saying, “It’s hard to fly like an eagle when you surround yourself with turkeys.” I wonder about the notion of ever thinking of your teammates as turkeys. People are smart.[1] There are plenty of books that can help you coax out their skills and give them confidence to do great work. A mental model will fall flat if the team creating it can’t express ideas together and analyze concepts from different perspectives.
Project Practitioners
The people who actually conduct the research and create the mental model are responsible for the work of the project. Usually, one of the practitioners is the project leader. Practitioners will segment the audiences by task and create a screener for recruiting. They will draft the interview prompts and conduct the interviews. They will comb through the transcripts in search of behaviors and philosophies, and they will group the items they find by affinity. In short, they do all the work, plus show up at workshops with the project leader and the project guides to pick through all the details of what they’ve completed so far. It’s not the easiest thing in the world.
Project practitioners can come from many different backgrounds. The only requirement that really seems to matter is a detail-oriented personality type. As long as everyone understands the process and can hang in there through the detail work, things will go smoothly. I have worked with people who have backgrounds that range from paralegal work to recreational administration. The method can be successful “even if the team members make a few mistakes along the way, and are not born information architects.”[2] Your teammates just need to have a strong ability to understand new things, adapt, and think outside the structure they’ve already built in their minds.
Project Guides
A mental model project can have all sorts of intentional or unwitting guides. It is the project leader’s job to hunt for as many different sources as she can. Start with the obvious: Directors and other executives in charge of fulfilling the mission of your organization will be able to tell you the long-term strategy they are following. They can tell you their objectives, predictions, and perceived challenges for the organization. They can talk about places where things went wrong in the past. Moreover, they can talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the internal organizations, and who makes the final decisions.
Reach out to people in customer service, marketing, and sales roles. These people are continuously in touch with users and have absorbed a lot of perspective and understanding during their interactions. Explore the ideas they’ve gathered. Bring in folks from technology. Find out what’s on the horizon that they’re excited about. Ask them about what initiatives they have faith in or don’t see leading to success. Talk to the leaders of each product line and find out about their plans.
Invite a representative from each of these areas to be a member of your core team. The core team will meet several times during the project to review findings, ask questions, and keep the conceptual scope of the project on track. The more perspectives that participate, even at a light level, the better your understanding of where the mental model fits into all the things the organization is doing. In addition, it can be a great way to create widespread ownership of the design and architecture of your solution.
Project Support
There are a few more people to mention, namely the recruiters and the transcribers. Recruiters will find people for you to interview, and transcribers will type out recordings of these interviews, which are almost always conducted by phone. I highly recommend hiring professional agencies for both of these roles. If you can’t find a good recruiting agency or if the decision was made to ask someone internal to your organization to recruit, you’ll need someone with an outgoing personality who looks forward to interacting with many strangers each day. Many of us in the design industry are not the in-your-face cold-calling personality type.
Recruiting Makes Me Feel Rejected
“I have a hard time dealing with rejection in the first place.”
—Deborah Nagai, Sybase
Finding a transcriber internally is more difficult. There may be a fast typist who is eager to help the project, but giving him 10 or 20 hours worth of interview recordings to transcribe is asking too much. It would be better to find 10 or 20 good typists each willing to transcribe one hour. It would be best, however, to just find the money in your budget to hire a professional. Speaking of budget, how much time and money does a mental model project require? Appendix A (see
The next six chapters will examine in depth how to create a mental model.
[1] People that you’re likely to be working with are smart, that is
[2]