Sessions

Capturing the Whole User Experience
with Indi Young, AP Emeritus

Rate this session1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (19)
Loading ... Loading ...

a picture of indi young

Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and actually get it right (at least most of the time), win their customers’ attention and loyalty. And the key to creating a business that addresses the entire spectrum of user experience is to build empathy with your customers. An effective way to do this is to create a mental model, one that considers all the different ways an organization interacts with its users: stores, account statements, customer service calls, product ordering websites, packaging…everything.

A few years ago, I developed a mental model for JMS Entertainment, a movie distribution company that wanted to attract a larger audience of moviegoers. The model I created depicted the entire moviegoer’s experience, from watching trailers and reading reviews to discussing the plot points with a friend after the show. I then compared that mental model to the features of the JMS website, noting the interesting gaps and matches from a strategic point of view. I also help JMS brainstorm new ideas based on combinations seen from the perspective of the mental model. From there, an effective three-year roadmap was created, one with a clear business perspective. The result? A user experience that fully addresses the entire range of JMS’s customer needs.

In this session, you will:

About Indi Young

After nearly a decade working with Unix, pen-based systems, and Windows, Indi began her work in web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. Her clients include Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, Bell Canada, Intuit, Qualcomm, and PeopleSoft.

Indi specializes in gathering user research data to create mental models for use in business/user gap analysis. She has completed over 30 of these projects since 1995. She is also one of the founding members of Adaptive Path, which she left in 2006 to write her book on the subject of mental models, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media in late summer 2007. Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior.

Indi graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the Cal Poly School of Engineering in San Luis Obispo, and worked on her master’s degree in Computer Science at Colorado State University Fort Collins. She is a lifetime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

3 Responses to “Capturing the Whole User Experience”

  1. UX Week Takeaways at jamin.org [ Jamin Hegeman ] Says:
    August 17th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    […] Capturing the Whole User Experience with Indi Young, AP Emeritus Doesn’t matter how you draw it, as long as you understand it. […]

  2. “Capturing the whole user experience” - Indi Young « Put that button over there… Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 10:02 pm

    […] Indi’s method serves a systematic way of innovating. You can find the slides here.  […]

  3. Adaptive Path - UX Week 2007 » Blog Archive » Two New Podcasts Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 12:18 am

    […] Capturing the Whole User Experience with Indi Young […]

Join the Discussion

Supporting Documents

Keynotes