Introducing Monica-Lisa Mills

I’m thrilled to announce that Monica-Lisa Mills has joined our team as a project manager, starting today.

Monica-Lisa comes to us with a long track record of success as a strategist, organizer, troubleshooter, manager, and negotiator. Her background includes a great deal of experience in:

• IT and design project management
  
• process development
  
• Agile-inspired methodologies
  
• CRM and CMS implementations and installations
  
• user training and quality assurance
  

She’s worked for both large and small companies, as well as with nonprofits and organizations with a social mission. She’s been both a technical trainer for teachers and as a secondary school teacher. You can read more about Monica-Lisa on her LinkedIn profile.

Monica-Lisa’s personal interests-as wide-ranging as her skills-include religion, visual and performing art, and traditional unaccompanied singing. She holds a BFA in theater from North Carolina School of the Arts and an MDiv in theology from Episcopal Divinity School.

As Susan explained in her post welcoming Fran, our project managers play a crucial role in the success of our work. Finding someone with the right mix of skills and talents can be challenging, and because of this we feel very fortunate to welcome her aboard.

One of the things I love most about the people I work with is that, in addition to being completely badass at their jobs, they also have rich personal lives, interesting hobbies, and multiple creative outlets. In this and many other ways, Monica-Lisa fits in perfectly.

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Giving Gold

Congratulations to Rebecca Bernstein and her team at the University at Buffalo for the CASE gold they recently won for their work on UB’s giving site. Susan’s already sung her praises of that site in a recent blog post about what makes a good giving site, but I can tell you a bit about the backstory.

Rebecca and her team based the information architecture and content for their giving site upon the Prideful Belonger/Active Support mental model that we helped develop a couple of years back. That model provided a great deal of insight into the motivations, priorities, feelings, and thoughts of current and prospective donors. Those insights now drive the compelling stories, clear nomenclature, specific calls to action, and educational features that you see on the resulting site.

I love the work that they’ve done and the way in which the site fits into the larger puzzle. The mental model work we did helped to form the foundation of the Digital Communications Transformation Initiative, a multiyear effort that is part of UB2020, the University’s long-range strategic plan. The WCI’s deliverables include:

• Practices and infrastructure that fit UB’s Web environment, its mission and its strategic goals, scalable for the UB enterprise
  
• Standards and information architecture that can be used by university programs, schools and departments
  
• Templates that can be shared throughout the university, geared to helping users produce what they need efficiently and effectively
  
• Web content, production workflow and roles
  
• Web Content Management System (CMS) product using existing infrastructure
  
• Identification of centralized resources needed for Web development support
  

Check out how that team’s work-to-date has unfolded at:

• The School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
  
• The PhD program in Biomedical Sciences
  
• The Department of Pediatrics
  
• The Department of Biochemistry
  
• The Office of the President
  
• The University’s homepage that represents the integration of all of their efforts and lessons learned
  

Want more? Check out the complete list of launched sites under the WCI at http://ubcms.buffalo.edu/about/launched_websites.html.

I’m so impressed with what they’ve accomplished so far:

• A body of mental model research that guides decisions about content, site structure, and navigation aimed at prospective students, faculty, staff, and donors
  
• A visual vocabulary that simultaneously supports the University’s brand and the specific needs of each unit
  
• A collection of technology tools and components that are coded once and available to every group that comes under the WCI
  
• A sensible rollout plan that ensures proper support and successful launches
  

People who haven’t been through a campuswide effort like this tend to underestimate the amount of work, time, and expertise necessary either through internal resources or external help. Many mistake this sort of initiative as a design project or an exercise in programming. Many think that one IA will suit all or that content will magically appear. Some will try to cheat the process by imposing arbitrary dates and deadlines, and some will fail to anticipate the long-term resources, policies, and training necessary to sustain their efforts. Rebecca and her team know better, and I think their work serves as a wonderful model to which we should all aspire.

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ISO a PM for LTR

From time to time I talk with friends and colleagues about why I made the switch to consulting more than a decade ago. My reasons were simple: I wanted to stay in higher education, but I didn’t want be running the same cycle of events and campaigns year after year for the same institution. Consulting provided me the promise of variety, the challenge of new issues to tackle, and the opportunity to work with some of the brightest and most interesting people in education. More than 10 years later, I’m very proud of the team we’ve built at mStoner—from our designers to our senior strategists, we’re problem solvers and relationship builders who are versatile, multitalented, and personable.

Take our project managers, for instance. For clients, their job is to ensure we deliver high-quality projects, on time and budget, with great communication and partnership along the way. For us as a firm, they play a huge part in running a healthy, growing and profitable business.

But the range of work for our project managers doesn’t stop there. As the primary contacts for our clients, our PMs offer the first line of support and clear obstacles that might otherwise derail an engagement. If that isn’t enough, on any given day our PMs may also lead usability tests, analyze qualitative and quantitative data, provide feedback on creative, step in to QA our technical work, or contribute to a strategy. In the milliseconds that remain, they also unearth the most interesting tidbits from the Interwebs or educate our team on the differences between pale ale and lager.

Sound like the kind of job you’ve been dreaming of? Just so happens we have a project manager opening. If you’re ready for this jelly, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Game on!

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Indi Young in DC on 8 September

If I weren’t going to be in Barcelona, I’d be there myself. Check out the details on her upcoming mental models workshop: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/.

And if you go, say hello for me!

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UB: Looking Back and Forward Fondly on Mental Models

A little earlier today I got a note from a user experience peer in Germany—she was asking for some advice about developing mental models in Omnigraffle. Her query made me realize that I hadn’t yet closed the loop on my UB chronicles.

Part of the reason is, honestly, we’re not quite done yet. The final stretch of the project involves mapping out a faceted search function for support and solutions section of the UB Information Technology site. If we get our way, it’s going to be seriously tricked out and cool and highly usable for IT solution seekers. More on that, in a little bit.

Since we started this project, I’ve been trying to find new stuff to bring Indi and Eric in on. They recently completed an intranet information architecture project with us for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, and I’ve recommended that we use the mental model framework for creating a new alumni and development site for a prospective client.

Why? Because I love the systematic method by which mental models collect, parse, and group data points with targeted audiences at the center of the work. I love the visual representation of the research that really helps people to grasp not only our audiences’ mental spaces, but also the information and services that exist to meet their needs within those spaces. Sometimes, the sheer gap between audience expectations and existing content jumps out at you from the diagrams—a picture can be worth a thousand words (or, come budget time, contract hours for necessary resources). Finally, I love the headstart that the models give in developing content—mental models show not only what’s necessary, what exists, and what’s missing … they also provide details what people think and feel and believe in each mental space.

Once we get the IT site more fully mapped out, I’ll follow up one last time. Meanwhile, links to my previous entries, in case you, like me, dislike even limited commercial interruptions:

• UB Mental Models Unveiled
• The Race to Place a Mental Space
• Oh, My Kingdom for a Finely Tuned Comb
• Unlearning My Cocktail Conversation
• Report from the Front, Week Nine
• Report from the Front, Week Five
• All the Pretty Little Rows and Columns
• I Get to be Batman

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Opening at Kellogg for a Web Design/Content Management/Content Editor

Our friends at Kellogg just passed this job opening on to us, check it out:

http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/web/1539932196.html

Challenging job responsibilities, top-notch institution, and best yet, you’d be working with some really good folks!

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UB: mental models, unveiled!

Last week we unveiled our mental models to the University at Buffalo community—silent sigh of relief, big yay for all of us!

Four models in total:

1. Matchseekers: people evaluating whether an institution, job, or working relationship is a good fit for them.

2. IT Solution seekers: people looking for answers to IT-related questions or issues.

3. Health Solution seekers: people looking for answers to health-related questions or issues.

4. Active Supporters/Prideful Belongers/Pulsetakers: people who want to support the institution, as well as people who track specific issues of interest within the institution.

The work to-date represented over 1,000 collective hours of research and analysis. In our prep for presentations, Rebecca and I asked each other “So, what we learn, and was it worth it?”

First, the learning. My key takeaways:

1. We learned how to listen differently. The process of having these conversations talk us how to listen intently without leading or constraining. One person on Rebecca’s team told her that, as a result of this project, she’d never do interviews in the same way.

2. We confirmed some of what we thought we knew. Having done this for awhile, we thought he had a good sense of our audiences’ needs and expectations. In many cases, we affirmed that sense.

3. We filled in the blanks. We knew, for instance, that prospectives evaluated both the institution and the city in making their decisions. Now we know that they evaluate the city and institution by different criteria, and that criteria changes from mental space to mental space.

So was it worth it? Yes, indeed. Particularly for developing content-the mental models give us a good deal of information about framing and delivering information to better meet the needs and expectations of our target audiences. The models also help in developing detailed architecture-knowing more about the what, when, wheres, and whys helps us to create link sets and information clusters more effectively.

And the models scale. We’re applying the matchseeker model to sites for the medical school and to university communications as a start. That same model can be used by the rest of the schools at UB as the Web Content Initiative rolls out through the institution over time. And that model can be expanded, with additional research being combed into the model to continue to enhance our understanding.

My favorite moment came when a faculty member from the medical school commented to me that the information he saw in the models confirmed his experience—not only as a doctor and researcher, but also as an individual. That affirmation, priceless.

The next few weeks, another bit of a race: baseline testing, information architecture development, usability, and wireframes…

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UB: The Race to Place a Mental Space

Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. But I’ve quietly opined to close friends from time to irregular time how I miss my first career as an underwear model. Thanks to this UB project, I’m a model once more. A Mental Supermodel, that is. You’ll forgive the lack of an accompanying graphic (my salad days are over) as I explain….

Grouping began roughly four weeks ago. Roughly 50 interviews, each with roughly 60 nuggets each (3,000-ish nuggets total), to be sorted into towers and mental spaces that make up the mental models for our audiences.

Indi’s gentle guidance kept us on track through this part of the process. Notes from our training sessions with her:

• Avoid grouping by the nouns. The temptation to cluster tasks around topic is great: resist! You may have five nuggets that contain Buffalo, the city—they don’t necessarily belong together.


• Each voice should appear once and only once per task. This rule forces you to do two things: either to combine two or more nuggets that really represent one idea, or to tease out the subtleties that make each nugget unique.


• Suspect your combs. If you’re just starting out with the mental model framework, you’ll probably need to rewrite (or as Rebecca kindly puts it, “mature”) more than half of your nuggets. That’s OK.


• Realize that the beginning of this is the hardest part. The first few rounds of grouping can be really painfully long and disheartening (where’s the pattern, where’s the pattern?). Grouping goes faster later in the process.


• Expect the process to be fluid. Deconstructing and reconstructing are part of mental model development. You may touch or relocate each task up to 10 times or more as the mental model builds. That’s better than OK, that’s essential.

My humble additions:

• Resist the need to find a place for every nugget you’re combing in. Some nuggets will become tasks or towers eventually—particularly if they represent a philosophy, motivation, feeling, or action that you think would be expressed or experienced by another individual in your audience segment. Sometimes, one can stand alone.


• Pay attention to when, as well as the what and why. In the matchseeker mental model, for instance, we have towers related to evaluating the city early in the process, during deliberations, and after decisions are made—matchseekers think and do different things related to researching a city as they move through the process. If you don’t pay attention to the timing, you can lose valuable information.


• Give yourself time to think and breathe. It’s like doing a crossword puzzle-walking away for a little bit allows your mind to process in the background … to recognize patterns and reach better conclusions. Indi told us to budget three hours on average for each conversation you group into the master-it took us a wee bit more, but we had fun doing it together.

We started grouping together as one large group, working virtually in half-day sessions to get a rhythm and develop some shared sensibilities. Then, to move things along, we divided up into two groups, the Honeycombers and the Mental Supermodels (guess which team I was on!). And for the last stretch, we broke into three teams to finish things up.

And at phase end, we’ve got four mental models: a matchseeker/pathfinder model, a pulsetaker/prideful belonger/active supporter model, a health solution seeker model, and an IT solution seeker model. And I must admit, I let out a sigh of quiet relief at the conclusion of building each diagram out (a process made infinitely easier by the drag-and-drop diagram capabilities of OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle). It’s sort of like being allowed to exhale while the photographer reloads.

Next week, previews of the new models to the information architecture team. Welcome (back) to the catwalk!

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Oh, My Kingdom for a Finely Tuned Comb

Indi Young, Mental Models, page 164: “The pain you feel is weakness leaving your body.” Amen, sister!

You have to imagine the scene to fully appreciate it. Picture Jeremiah, Laurel, and me-each of us tethered to our laptops by our noise-canceling headphones. Listening, listening, listening. Pause. Transcribe. Listen. Back up the recording. Play. Didn’t back up enough-more, more! Play. Transcribe. And, nugget. Then imagine our UB teammate, Eileen, doing much the same in her semi-private office space (or, for short, SPO) in Buffalo. 

The process is called combing-reviewing the audio recordings each of our 50-some conversation and extracting root tasks (or what we call nuggets) that will be later grouped together-from atomic tasks into tasks, tasks eventually clustered into towers, and towers eventually clustered into mental spaces. Each hour-long conversation requires roughly three hours of analysis and yields somewhere between 50-75 nuggets.

It was, honestly, the most painful part of the process to-date. Now that we’re in grouping mode, I’m really gratified to see how the hard work we did together is paying off. But before I talk more about what we’re finding in our grouping (next blog post, I’m such a tease), some notes from this part of the journey that I compiled in talking with the team:

1.  Ideally, you should have both audio and electronic transcripts. Time and cost considerations moved us to an audio-only combing process. We did a few proof-of-concept combs this way, thought it worked out fine. But what we didn’t take into account is how difficult it becomes to comb this way when you’re combing three interviews (or, nine hours’ worth) in a day. In one instance, I had both the original audio file and the electronic transcript for an interview-I was able to finish that comb in roughly two hours (a 33% time savings) and ended up with more nuggets than I had with audio-only combs. I think we ended up with quality material overall-but combers will have a much easier time if they’ve got both types of files at the ready. 

2. It’s also easier, when the comber is the same one who did the interview. We’re talking ideal, here—the person with the skills to lead the interview isn’t always the best person to comb out the details, but I found that it helped me a great deal when I combed my own interview.

3. Barring that, it’s best to read through or listen to an interview in its entirety before you start to comb. This will give you a better sense of the conversation as a whole, and will also help you to find the right nuggets and connect the dots for nuggets that must be pieced together from different parts of a conversation.

4. When in doubt, capture the quote, then come back to it later. Sometimes, you know that the quote was significant, but the right label for that nugget will elude you. Fear not-note the quote and write the label later. It’s like doing the Times crossword-put it down for a bit, and suddenly, the answer comes. 

5. Use their words. In writing labels, you should use the words that they used. The temptation is at this stage is to truncate a phrase or use a word that’s more succinct in your mind. Resist. Using their words will help you to remember the conversation and context, which is essential when you’re  trying to spot similar nuggets in a sea of 1,10o of them. 

6. Except when you shouldn’t. When shouldn’t you? When the term only make sense to you as the person who led or combed the conversation. One person I interviewed talked about getting out of the town’s “bubble.” In my mind, the entire riff on Stepford Wives that accompanied that comment was fresh and hysterical, but none of the other combers was in on the joke. I changed the label to explain the “bubble.”

7. Know the difference between feeling and believing. As Indi explained to me, a belief is a core value upon which individuals make their choices. A lot of times what sounds like a belief is really a feeling or informed opinion and should be labeled as such. In explaining this to Laurel, I used the following example: someone very close to me doesn’t believe in life after death. He believes that his time on this earth is what he’s got, and he’s intent on living the best and richest life he can because there’s no “to be continued.” He also likes wearing golf shirts because he believes they’re comfortable and slimming. Only the first of the nuggets qualifies as a real belief.  

8. Have the right tools for the work. If you’ve been looking for an argument past OSHA for a chair with back support, a large monitor or laptop stand, the new SONY digital noise-canceling headphones, or an ergonomically positioned keyboard tray, you’ve found it. 

And, finally, a quote from Miah that I believe represents us all:

“I wish I had seen the need to slow myself down and just immerse myself in this earlier.  I’m so accustomed to having email, IMs, web browsers, office phones and cell phones all occupy a portion of my attention all of the time, that it was really strange to be working on something that could not allow for any outside distractions … after getting over the initial anxiety of being removed from my “lifelines,” I was able to relax and understand the time that the combs were going to take, and to not get anxious that I was missing something.  The world went on without me, go figure.” 

I count six nuggets, anyone else?

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UB: Week 12, Unlearning My Cocktail Conversation

“Thank you. You helped to realize something about myself that I didn’t know until now.”
“No, no, thank you!”

One of the best conversations I had during the interview stage of this project was with someone who was talking about the people who made an impact on that person’s choice of career. It was fantastic, and according to Indi, exactly the type of conversation we hope to have with people.

The last few weeks, a big push to complete our calls-over 47 hour(ish)-long conversations, in total. The majority of them were fantastic, and while we’ve got a few left to go, we’ve started the combing process. What’s combing? It’s basically sifting through each of the conversations. We’re searching for nuggetscompact phrases that use people’s specific wordsthat identify behaviors, feelings, philosophies, intents, and all of the motivations that drive them. Check out Indi’s blog about this-and just to be clear, Rebecca anchored to the panning-for-gold analogy, while I went for the more pedestrian Mickey D’s. reference.

But combing is a post for another time. Today, I wanted simply to share my personal lessons learned about interviewing for mental models.

This process is seriously different than talking with stakeholders. In stakeholder meetings, you’re doing triple duty. Surely, a great deal of those meetings is devoted to finding out what stakeholders know about the audiences that they’re trying to serve. But part of those meetings is also spent building the client relationships-client and consultant need to get to know each other and to trust in each other’s expertise and experience. And part of those meetings is devoted to planning-talking about the entire process, next steps, etc. Focus groups with target audiences get us closer to source information.

These conversations, closer still. We’ve been talking directly with individuals who represent the audience segments that we’ve identified in our mental model (and as quick reminder, we’ve got six: matchseekers, pathfinders, solution seekers, pulsetakers, prideful belongers, and active supporters). Indi likens these conversations to ones that you might have over cocktails or dinner, and she offers the following rules (which you can read more about in Mental Models):

1. Behaviors and philosophies, not product preferences
2. Open questions only
3. No words of your own
4. Follow the conversation
5. Not about tools
6. Immediate experience

Only, I realized that I needed to unlearn my cocktail conversation. So let me offer my own few add-ons:

1. Don’t worry about finding common ground. You know what that’s like. You meet a new person at party and you begin to talk and the first thing you want to do is find something that you have in common—a topic you can banter about and discuss. Something that interests you, and on which you have opinions and thoughts that you’d like to share. Except that this conversation is solely about the person you’re talking to. Which to an introvert like me is a bit of a blessed relief.

2. Don’t worry about being interesting. Or sounding smart. You know what that’s like as well—oh, the pressure to be witty and engaging and loved by all! Except that, again, it’s about the person you’re talking to. Their impressions of you only matter inasmuch as they can sense that you’re truly listening, paying attention, and grateful for the time and disclosure that they’re willing to give you.

3. Don’t avoid the childish question. “Why?” “Why?” “Tell me a story about …” As long as the person you’re talking with is forthcoming, the simplest questions get the most interesting and fertile answers.

We’ve got 47-some conversations to parse—an exercise that will probably yield almost 3,000 nuggets, all in our target audience members’ own words. Then, grouping. User-centered development, anyone?

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