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I have mentioned in the first chapter of this book that mental models can be applied to many different situations. Here I want to point out that mental model research can scale to differently sized problems. Scalable adequacy is defined as “the effectiveness of a[n]…engineering…process when used on differently sized problems…Methods that omit unneeded notations and techniques without destroying overall functionality.”[8] Mental models collect just enough data about users to help you determine where and how to concentrate your efforts. There are several ways to scale the mental model method.

When the Project is Almost/Already Finished

You might be at a late stage of design and development when you pick up this book. Don’t despair; it’s not too late to take advantage of a mental model, or at least a rough draft of one. Say you already have prototypes and usability test results. Say the users just don’t get it. Sketching out a mental model will help you see exactly where your design veered off in a direction different than users. If the departure between your solution and user goals is significant, now is the time to convince someone to spend a little time on research so that the patches to the first version are not a waste of time. Developing something involves a lot of iteration, and if your first try is wide of the mark, subsequent tries will benefit more from a solid understanding.

What if your beta application is faring well and you want to know in which direction to move next? It’s perfect timing to align functionality to a mental model and prioritize the gaps. When your team sees this diagram it will become a lot clearer how user research can help, even at this point.

In both of these instances you and your team can create a rough draft of a mental model in a matter of a day or two. First figure out which of your users you want to cover. Pore over existing user research data and try to extract knowledge using a behavior-and-philosophy-based perspective.[9] Then get in a room (virtual or physical) and brainstorm behaviors. From the existing research and your collective experience over the years, your team will be able to produce around 40% to 50% of the behaviors that actual research would create. Remind everyone to spit out descriptions from the user’s point of view. Say, “There were a few people I heard from who did it this way,” instead of, “I would have done it this way.” Leave the personal pronoun “I” checked at the door. Think of real-life behaviors you have encountered, not your own real or hypothetical reactions.

After a few hours of brainstorming, take a break, then try grouping things together. You can create a reasonable draft of a mental model in just a few days. This method is how I did it during the heady dot-com boom at the end of the last century. Be aware, though, that every single mental model I produced with a team this way was missing at least one or more significant mental space. More ominously, only one of the dot-com companies I made a mental model for is still alive today,[10] and for them I employed the full-blown method with 34 interviews. Thought-provoking.

A draft mental model diagram can be the result of a few days worth of well-disciplined, task-oriented thinking on the part of the team. You can then check assumptions against this draft and even conduct gap analysis.

When You Have Little Time and Money

You might have extremely limited time or almost no budget. I have increasingly heard of teams following a three- or six-week “agile” develop-ment cycle. How does that leave you time to do proper user research?

Well, if it is going to happen, it has to occur in little chunks. Spend one of your development cycles mapping out the entire set of task-based audience segments you deal with, selecting the highest priority segment, and writing a recruiting screener to find these people. Hire a recruiter to line up some interview appointments. Then spend another development cycle interviewing four people from one of the audience segments (four is the minimum to start seeing a pattern of repeated behaviors). Analyze the transcripts. At the end of this second cycle, you should have a mental model for that audience segment. At this point, you can do any of three things: You can proceed to another audience segment and interview those people; you can use the mental model you just created to design the solution you’re working on; or you can take a step back and use the mental model to strategize where to focus your development efforts for the next few quarters. In any case, there are ways the process can be broken down to fit into your development cycles.

What if time is even tighter, and spending four weeks analyzing transcripts simply won’t fit into your deadline? If you can, strive to conduct interviews with real people—the benefit of hearing their words is worth the cost of eating up a week or two of the time before your deadline. Instead of transcribing those interviews, my frequent collaborator Mary Piontkowski suggests capturing rough notes about behaviors in real time as you conduct the interviews, or creating these behaviors right after the interview from the notes you took. Without a transcript you will probably miss half of the behaviors, but the important ones will stand out in your mind and your notes. That will be good enough for a shortcut.

And what if there is no time to conduct interviews? Talking to real people is the most important part of creating the mental model. If your organization already conducts usability tests with some regularity, piggyback short interviews on top of each session. Ask the participant to stay with you for an hour, and spend half the time on the usability test and half of the time conducting a non-leading interview. At least this way you will get a chance to talk to real people.

Those in charge of the development cycle schedules usually see the advantages of an underlying base of research. Work on persuading them to set aside resources for this re-usable, long-lived information.

When You Don’t Have Enough Influence

You might not be able to persuade anyone to follow this method. This is an extremely frustrating position to be in, and I empathize. Don’t give up. You can pull together a rough draft of a mental model by yourself, simply by listing behaviors and grouping them, then laying them out in towers and mental spaces. You will have to work based on your accumulated understanding of customer aims, and you will want to write the behaviors from the customer’s point of view. In the end, you will have a mental model that probably shows 30% to 40% of the mental spaces and towers. Treat the diagram as a rough draft, and use it to persuade others on the team to investigate further.

I have also heard of practitioners “flying under the radar” so to speak. They lay out all the steps to create a mental model, including task-based audience segmentation, interviews, and analysis, but they spread them out over the course of several months. When they have an unscheduled hour or a break from their assigned projects, they conduct an interview or analyze a transcript. In the end, they have a solid mental model to present at design meetings. I have heard this wins the respect of management and clears the way for subsequent user research. Be warned that this approach takes a very dedicated, determined personality, but that might be you!

Six Shortcuts to Mental Models

What you might have already guessed is that the approach I describe in each of the scenarios doesn’t only apply to that scenario. Go ahead and choose any of the shortcuts that seem likely to work best for you.

 Rough Sketch: Sketch a rough draft yourself

 Rough Draft: Gather your team and create a mental model based on existing data and your collective understanding

 Rough Notes: Conduct the interviews, but skip the transcripts and pull behaviors from your notes of the conversation

 Fly Under the Radar: Conduct interviews and do your analysis as you can, over the course of several months

 30-Day Cycles: Go ahead and conduct interviews, but focus on just one or two audience segments, narrowing your data set from four to 10 interviews

 Piggyback on Usability Tests: After each half-hour usability session, tack on a half-hour interview

In the next chapter, I’ll go into whom to include in your work and when to do it.

[1] See Donna Maurer’s upcoming book Card Sorting, published by Rosenfeld Media. http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/

[2] See the work of Liz Sanders at http://maketools.com

[3] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research

[4]A brief explanation of Six Sigma appears on my book site under the Resources section: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/content/resources For further exploration of many other user research techniques, there is a fabulous matrix of these tools in June Cohen’s book, The Unusually Useful Web Book, page 49

[5] See Chapter 11, “Adjust the Audience Segments.”

[6] A striking example was shown at MX—Managing Experience through Creative Leadership, San Francisco 2007, by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, in the form of a short video (really a series of still images with voice-over) of a futures trader making decisions about pork distribution for an upcoming sunny spring weekend. It was a story about how that trader used various tools, including phone, email, weather reports, and the prototype trading application to diagnose and act upon an opportunity.

[7]Wikipedia definition: “An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_case

[8]“The Problem with Scalability,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM), Sept 2000/Vol.43, No. 9 by Mauri Laitinen, Mohamed E. Fayad, and Robert P. Ward.

[9] Existing user data may come in the form of preference or evaluative research. Try to deduce root causes, if they exist in the reports. (We’ll cover root causes in great detail in Chapter 8.)

[10] The company that survived the bust under the guidance of CEO Peter Ostrow is http://www.testmart.com, selling previously owned, re-calibrated test and measurement equipment.