program selection system

What’s a mental model? Those in the field of cognitive research have been defining mental models for a few decades. The term “mental model” has come to mean “a mental representation.” The mental models described in this presentation are representations of people’s behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use. Aligned with the ways you support users, mental models provide a clear roadmap of where your organization should invest its energies, and also where it shouldn’t, allowing you to stretch your limited resources.

This 30 min experience report gives attendees another perspective on how one software company is approaching selling and executing user experience projects using Agile methodologies. Specifically, we will focus on our experience and approach to expanding User Research (UR) component in our projects. We feel that UR is vital to a successful software project but is the hardest part of User Experience to sell because it is often viewed as 1) taking more time, 2) costing more money, 3) slowing down development, and 4) unnecessary (“we already know the users”).