Modes & Mindsets.

Someone asked me recently how HCD research transitions to UX research. It’s an interesting question with regard to nomenclature, but terminology aside, I think modes and mindsets help to bridge the gap between the kind of research done from a product agnostic standpoint and that which is done within the product context.

I don’t draw that distinction.

Second level heading as a sentence.

Instead, I see two perspectives:

# Strategy
Identifies trends
That drive to opportunities;
Uncovering the critical nuances in those trends
That determine priority.

# Realization
Starts with an opportunity
Uncovering desired outcomes
Provides the necessary context
And charts a path to success
That ties business value
To user value

Always be closing.

I think this is true on the client side, but doubly so for consulting: as practitioners, we should always be justifying our existence by identifying new opportunities (strategy) while solving current challenges (realization) - regardless of where in C&M we sit.

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There’s an element of storytelling in any client engagement - that’s basic brand building - but storytelling is as much about what you withhold as it is what you expose; it relies on the audience to fill the narrative gaps and draw the intended conclusions.

Which brings us to personas.

Second level heading as a sentence.

“I hate personas”
I don’t hate personas any more than I hate waterfall; they’re just tools for specific jobs.

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What does frustrate me is how personas have become the lingua franca generative research synthesis artifact.

It’s a blessing and a curse that even our clients now come to us insisting on personas by name - typically with ‘journey maps’ in tow - as shorthand for generative research. Or in some cases, secondary research (read: ‘provisional’ or ‘proto personas’). Cringe.

While it’s great that basic UCD principles (#elevateHX) have achieved acceptance, the reliance on personae presents a few challenges:

* Depth of field - how broad? How specific? How many? How to determine value or priority?
* Sample rate / bit depth - what details or contextual nuance is excluded?
* Bias - what perceptual bias is unintentionally introduced by imagery, demographic details, or other narrative elements?
* Shelf life / extensibility - how will the persona be maintained for accuracy / relevance / freshness over time? How relevant is a current persona to a future scenario, where they are potentially impacted by the solution proposed?

Modes and Mindsets is an alternative synthetic format for primary user research that seeks to address some of these challenges.

At its simplest: modes are categories of distinct activity; mindsets are observed behavior patterns.

Contemporary to Brad Frost’s atomic design method and loosely related to it, you can think of these two elements as *atoms* that combine to form the *molecules* against which a product or service can be evaluated.

If your current mode is “group learning” (a distinct category of observed activity) but your mindset is “bored and distracted” then as a designer I can both create concepts and evaluate success based on this structure - perhaps a PowerPoint lecture is less engaging than a group activity.

I can also identify a mindset *outcome* my work is intended to influence, and evaluate the resulting mindset *shift* associated with different concepts.

Modes also contribute to this extensibility by capturing observed ‘user requirements’ that extend beyond the product space. And this is perhaps their most powerful aspect, for both client and firm: they throw open the doors to service design.

Which is to say, where my concept development once was focused on how to get the *website* to fulfill a requirement, I now have a product agnostic category of need that I can solve through any medium. And that not only delivers a potentially more valuable and holistic solution scope to my client, but also creates user centered and research validated opportunities to leverage capabilities across consulting, if not the entire firm.

Ostensibly you could do all that with personas, too (and many of you already are), so why switch?

I used a couple of borrowed terms to make myself look smart: depth of field and sample rate. These challenges are related.

Depth of field refers to the amount of detail in a photograph rendered in focus. If you’ve ever used portrait mode in a camera app, you’ll notice that it blurs out details beyond the subject, so that there’s less noise competing with the primary target.

Sample rate is a digital audio term that describes how an analog signal or sound is mapped onto digital media - chopped and squared off so that it can be stored in a binary format.

The point I’m belaboring is that creating a persona as a representative snapshot of a group or observed trend requires a degree of manipulation - both in focusing on some specific details at the exclusion of others and in fitting the analog observation to a ‘sampled’ or distilled format - to suit what is effectively a narrative purpose: creating characters.

This manipulation is tricky at best: an attempt to marry quantitative and qualitative data at a level of focus appropriate for the contractual obligations of the project while inspiring empathy for a synthetic (read: fake) subject.

So we typically provide narrative details - either drawn from one or two distinct participants that we recall ‘clearly,’ or we just fill in the data gaps with assumptions.

This may sound like an indictment; it’s not meant to be. Because we want both empathy and alignment on our project teams and among our clients. But this brings me to the last challenge: bias.

Empathy is garbage.
I’m not trying to be cute, or a jerk. Though I am clearly both. What I am suggesting, however, is that the empathy we attempt to generate more often manifests as *sympathy*, and it prompts our clients to fill out the rest of the narrative gaps or context (as we have done) with their own lived experiences / assumptions. Also known as biases, prejudices, stereotypes, misunderstandings, etc.

So let’s see it in action.
[YTB examples]
Project history
What we were trying to achieve
Mode examples
Mindset examples

What I *failed* to do at project start was to confront the client directly about the sample size and outcomes. The four ‘focus areas’ provided by our client liaison were overly broad and not distilled to measurable success criteria. That should have been the first step in honing the research program to a more specific group of participants.

What that resulted in was a very small sample size of participants relative to the unusually large scope: the entire universe of benefits recipients in Texas. But no research plan is perfect, and you dance with the one what brung you. Ultimately this first phase of research created a foundation for much more specific follow on studies, and established the overarching experience model / construct for future enhancement and extension of the TIERS product.

Moreover, it introduced that structure and language to a client in a format that forced them to consider the benefits experience outside of their individual silos / remits, which is exactly where we wanted them to be.