Jasonrichardson’s Weblog

I’ve recently been working on a Mental Models project with our UX team based on Indi Young’s Mental Models book.  We’ve been brainstorming our tasks and have conducted an affinity diagram session to develop groups of tasks that our potential performers may complete on the site.  During our session we organized the tasks on a white board and created group names shown below.  While we were conducting the session we had to transcribe the groups to Excel for our next step and then clean up the room and remove the cards from the whiteboard.

After removing the cards we had a road map of data still on the board.  Looking at the colors and words it looked like we were onto something even without the data being there.  It looked like containers were still on the board and something  had to be inserted into these buckets.  Thinking it through it occurred to me that it would be a good test to have potential users fill in the containers with their own words by telling us what tasks they would place in each bucket.  For instance, what tasks would they expect under “subscriptions” or “client related.” This would be a way to cross check our brainstorming with users concepts and see where there are overlaps and gaps.

If there are tasks that they would drop into the “buckets” that are along the lines of our thinking, than we are definitely on the right track to making a successful application.  While it may be a similar philosophy to a reverse card sort or even a Delphi card sort this is just a quick way to gather a users view.   It has to be noted that interviews may also uncover this data.  However, this can be another way to collect the data rather quickly.

In the reverse affinity diagram session the users would have a defined group.  But in this session the users can put anything that they would feel is appropriate under each category.  The sky’s the limit for them to “brainstorm” and put their own take on the tasks.   For example, if we are conducting an affinity diagram session on researching a home purchase. Some top levels might be research home styles, research builders and research locations.  For each category there could be a variety of tasks that a user may want to accomplish.

Example of reverse affinity session

Affinity session
Task Group: Styles
Tasks:
•    Research styles
•    Review current styles
•    Select by floor plan
•    Select by square footage
•    View floor layouts

Examples from reverse
Task Group: Styles
Tasks:
Compare styles
Review styles
See floor plans
Modify layouts

In the style examples we can clearly see that there are tasks that our affinity diagram session would not have uncovered.  And since these are coming from our users it may not be a bad idea to conduct further research and see if this is a good fir for the application.  Finally, this could be done in person, over the phone or even through something as simple as excel with the headings already in place.  All the user needs to do is drop in the tasks they would expect to accomplish within a group and we’re off and running.

This could be another avenue to get to a users perspective on an application.  And it’s yet another way to merge our own work with the user’s frame of mind.  If you’re using a similar technique I’d like to hear how you go about conducting the tests.