team traning - check

We now have a great team of people ready to tackle this new project. We wanted to make sure we had a balance of "big picture people", "people persons", and "detail people". We need a diverse group because the process has several different steps and the whole thing will go much better if we start off with the right people for the job.

Our big picture people have a good grasp where PCPL is headed and will help keep our project headed in the right direction

Our people persons will be conducting the interviews with library users.

Our detail people will be responsible for combing out all the tasks that the interviewers uncover.

Out team as a whole will then take all the information we have gathered and put it together to create the mental model.

Our first team meeting was a training session on this process. The team was given an overview of the process, the timeline, the goal of creating the mental model and some ideas on how we can use the model once it is created.

First stop - Audience segments

The first step in creating our Mental Model is to identify the audience segments. In other words, we want to find out who we should talk to. Since this process is task based, we need to focus on what people do instead of on traditional marketing segmentation such as age, gender, education level etc. Instead we focused on brainstorming the tasks that people do at the library. We had no problems here! We were able to list all sorts of stuff that people do from coming in to get out of the heat, to checking out books. The next step got a little tricky for us though. We needed to group our big list of tasks together to make it more manageable, okay no problem we thought but it wasn't quite so clear. The team had a very difficult time making the transition to grouping by verb to grouping by actor. In other words, we wanted to put similar tasks together in one group like changing account pin number, reviewing list of checked out books, and asking for list of overdue items. These all fit under the category of managing library account if you are just looking at the actions done. But we need to look at who does these things, the last task doesn't really fit because that task is done by someone who needs/wants help with accessing their account instead of someone who managers their account independently of staff. So we took a break, took some time to think it through, got some additional guidance from Indi and took another crack at it. The second meeting still wasn't exactly easy, but it was better and we made a lot of progress.

The Project Begins

Welcome to the first installment of Mental Space Invaders. This will be the riveting tale of Pima County Public Library's quest to create a Mental Model! "A what?" you may be asking yourself.  That is what I was wondering too when I was asked to lead this project. A mental model, very basically, is the way someone thinks about how something works. However, very specifically, PCPL is creating a Mental Model as developed by Indi Young from Adaptive Path. This is a method of discovering the reasons why users do things and the way in which an organization supports them in accomplishing those things.
My first step on this quest was reading Mental Models Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young. This book has become my near constant companion (if only it would do its fair share of the dishes) and I feel like I am starting to get a handle on the process. The Mental Models blog on the Rosenfeld Media site has also been extremely helpful. I am pretty excited about the possibilities this process has for giving us the opportunity to really understand our users. I keep thinking about this as a reality check for us, a way to find out what people are actually doing instead of guessing at what we think they want or even designing programs based on what they tell us they want. What they actually do might be different than either of those things or it might not, but we will find out!

So on to the first step - assembling a crack team of mental model builders!