Weekly notes — part 1
About 6 months ago I started listening to podcasts. I usually listen to them when I’m on the train or when riding my bike. Especially the bike riding is a time when I can’t do anything else so there are also no distractions, I can fully listen to what’s being said. The only problem is that I often have to stop because I heard a quote or an advice I want to use later, or because an idea was sparked. I always write those down in a little yellow book I carry around and over the months I have built up quite a lot of quotes and notes.
Now yesterday I was listening to an episode of ‘Late nights with Trav & Los’ where they were talking about the word ‘interesting’ being a non-word. It’s something people say when they don’t know how to respond to something but still want to sound knowledgeable. So their goal was to not use the word ‘interesting’ as a response to something for a while but instead explain why something has struck a chord with you. That is exactly what I want to do with the quotes I wrote down.
Since I have quite a lot already and new ones keep coming as I listen to podcasts, I want to make this a weekly thing. It helps me reflect and reinforce why something was worth writing down, and because I revise them again after writing them in my book hopefully they stick better and I can better implement them into my life.
The first note I have in my book is about object oriented UX, which Sophia Voychehovski talked about on episode 135 of UX Podcast. What I wrote down is not an exact quote but more a summary of what I took away from that part of the talk.
When talking to users listen for the nouns they use, those are the mental models they have in their minds. UX design is about users creating, modifying and finding objects. They have a goal with an object and your interface is just a means to an end.
— Sophia Voychehovski
At that point I had had a few conversations with our CEO/PO about mental models and why they were important. He had fully embraced them and was hammering on mental models all the time. The only question still was how to uncover them effectively. He also does sales and has a lot of contact time with (potential) users so if he’s able to listen for them we might uncover a lot of them, increasing our chances of making a design that fits the users well faster.
To be honest I had completely forgotten about this quote untill now, so I tried to put this to use immediately. Last friday I had a usertest with two users, afterwards one of them stayed for a bit to brainstorm. Immediately I noticed the nouns he used, which were very interesting ones which definitely provided insights regarding what I’m designing. Now I’m looking in my notes to see what those nouns were but apparently I was dumb enough to not write them down. Note to self: write that stuff down!
Anyway, I do remember the nouns stood out to me and I found the ones he used often interesting. They were very closely related to physical universities, such as ‘classes’, ‘deliverables’ and such. I’m now trying to make listening for those words a habit since I think this isn’t only useful to listen for with users but also with colleagues and stakeholders. Uncovering mental models of stakeholders might make it easier to speak their ‘language’ and hence decreasing the chance of miscommunication.
I’ll keep you posted about this.
