My first meeting with Indi Young was at the MX Conference put on by Adaptive Path earlier this year. I then had the opportunity to interview her at UX Week for the Boxes and Arrows Podcast; sharing ideas and insights from her workshop “Unpacking Stories to Serve People Better“.

Indi Young’s work spans a number of decades – from the mid-1980’s, when the desktop metaphor was replacing command line and menu-based systems; to the mid-1990s, when the Web first toddled onto the scene; to the present day where designers work to create rich user experience. After 10 years of consulting, Indi founded Adaptive Path with six other partners, all hoping to spread good design principles around the world, thereby making the user’s experience easier for people everywhere. Indi is widely known for Mental Models, which have helped both start-ups and large corporations discover and support customer behaviors they didn’t think to previously explore. She has written a book on this subject entitled: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, published by Rosenfeld Media. Indi is now an independent consultant, conducting mental model workshops, and mentoring.

I blogged recently about the characteristics of Persuasive Design. The six elements of this process included:

1. Understand Decision Making
2. Understand Emotion
3. Create Persuasive Interactions
4. Create Persuasive Visual Design
5. Create Persuasive Content Design
6. Design Guided Paths

I find it interesting that the top two elements in this process are to “Understand” both “Decision Making” and “Emotion” as these are ultimately the purpose of a Mental Model; to “understand” the who; what; when; where; why; and how people engage in any product or service.

Mental Models aid in the development of meaningful Personas; visualize behavior patterns that illustrate both process and purpose; and allow all members of the team to share ideas and innovate based on the actions of the people for whom they are designing.