Mental Models. Indi Young. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Indi Young
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Управление, подбор персонала
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781933820194
Скачать книгу
is a business user of a suite of office software created by a certain well-known Seattle manufacturer. Here are some of the verbs she uses to describe her work day:

       Learn details of using company products

       Write help guides for company products

       Read cases from customer support

       Argue for product improvements to software team

       Recommend marketing approaches to marketing team

       Study XML manuals for writing XML-based help guides

       Attend XML training

       Create help guide formats/templates in Word

       Organize Word files

       Submit bug to software team

       Help co-worker format his Word templates

       Look up Word formatting question

      These descriptive verbs help you see Katie’s world from her eyes.

      Continuity of Strategy

      A mental model with features and solutions aligned beneath it becomes a roadmap for strategy over the next decade. After your initial brainstorm of how to support users, you will know that you can’t possibly implement every idea in the next three or four quarters. Things will get pushed off. New ideas will materialize as the market and technology changes. You will see new opportunities in three years that don’t exist today. The diagram persists as a visual map of where you plan to go.

      Rely on Mental Models to Change Slowly

      User mental models change slowly. Take the concept of cash. Coinage has been around for centuries upon centuries. People exchange coinage for services, goods, and materials, and they have developed ways to carry, obtain, and securely store cash. Then the ATM came along and changed how people obtain cash. It has not yet been fully adopted. Many still prefer the mental model of going to a bank and getting cash from a teller. Now plastic exchange of currency has become widely available. You can use a debit, credit, or pngt card in place of currency, which makes the act of carrying, obtaining, and securely storing cash largely unnecessary. But adoption of the plastic model was slow, thus the mental model regarding cash was slow to change. You can be reasonably sure that most mental models you make will likewise be valid for many years to come. Basing a continuous strategy on a long-lived artifact is a good idea.

      Keep the Knowledge, Shift the Team Members

      Also, it is a fact of life that the members of a particular team change over time. One of the more difficult problems organizations face is preservation of internal knowledge. Mental models guide your team’s progress over the years and become a place where decision history and rationale is recorded, as a foundation of decisions to come.

      So if you’re thinking a mental model might help you with your work, you may be asking, “How does it fit into what I’m already doing?” The next chapter will answer this question.

      CHAPTER 2

      When? Using Mental Models with Your Other Work

       Determine Your Research Method

       How Mental Models Hook into Other UX Techniques

       Скачать книгу