Hello mindsets! A new way to understand users

In November 2020, our fellowship team (comprised of a product manager, Heshan Modaragamage; a developer, Korhan Akcura; and a UX designer, me) started work on supporting the development of a more member centric transition experience for Canadian Armed Forces members. To learn more about the fellowship and our project, please visit my colleague Heshan Modaragamage’s blog post. To learn more about my experience with mindsets, please see part 1 of this blog: Goodbye personas! How mindsets can help you build empathy and reduce bias.

The Code for Canada fellowship program is no longer active. To learn more, visit our fellowship yearbook.

Mindsets are a powerful tool. Like personas, they can be used to help stakeholders visualize and empathize with your user, as well as to map users’ experiences and identify pain points. However, I found that mindsets provided me with a deeper understanding of the user, how they think and feel, as well as more empathy for them.

When learning to use a new tool, it can be hard to know where to start, and mindsets are no exception. As such, below are the steps I took to create the mindsets for our users: members transitioning out of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to civilian life. 

Mindsets: What do they look like?

The steps I followed

1. Learn about your users

Other ideas for traits are: resilience, confidence, adventurousness, detail orientation, openness, and more. Assigning a trait can be challenging and you may have to try a few before you find the right ones for your users.

3. Proto-Mindset Creation: Determine Mindsets

Once the axes have been determined, it is time to name the quadrants - a.k.a the mindsets. The names should be an adjective or action that describes the approach of that mindset: how they navigate a problem or life as it relates to the traits. For our project we used: pragmatic, spontaneous, prostrate and cautious.

Note: For someone that has not worked with mindsets before, I admit that I did find this and the following step challenging. These steps were challenging in part because I had to push myself to move away from the mental model of personas. Additionally, I had to make a lot of assumptions about the members experience, needs and approach at that stage. In retrospect it may have been easier and more effective to complete steps 3 and 4 after completing the veteran consultations and plotting them on the matrix, as it would have meant fewer assumptions and greater confidence while naming and summarizing the mindsets. In the future I would consider jumping to step 5 and completing this and the next steps after plotting members.

4. Proto-Mindset Creation: Hypothesize the mindsets’ needs, behaviours, beliefs and attitudes

5. Consult with recently transitioned veterans

6. Plot members

This table criteria allowed me to confidently rate and plot the transitioned veterans:

7. Validation of mindsets

Key Takeaways

• Stakeholder workshops: In the future, I would consider facilitating workshops with stakeholders to determine the mindset axes, names and overviews. For this project, I did not engage the wider team during the proto-mindset development phase as mindsets were a tool that I was learning and I needed to better understand them myself. As well, I was confident that I had the required information as a result of our research.
• Mindset Socialization: When socializing your mindsets, start by explaining what they are, how they work and how they are created. Mindsets have not yet been widely adopted and this approach will help to create understanding and buy-in.
• Interviews & mindset variety: We interviewed six veterans to develop a baseline understanding about transitioning members and their challenges. Ideally, we would have talked to at a minimum 3-4 members per mindset. It is hard to know which mindset a user is part of before interviewing them.Additional screening prior to booking interviews can help to hypothesize a user’s mindset and ensure a good distribution of mindsets.
• Mindset iteration: Mindsets are a living artefact. To be useful and valuable over time, they must be updated and validated on an ongoing basis as a result of new findings and observations.
• Mindsets are not black & white: Mindsets reflect a spectrum or varying degrees of strength of an individual’s needs, attitudes and behaviours related to how they approach a situation. As you create experience maps and design products, it is important to remember that mindsets are not black and white.

To learn more about my experience with mindsets for CAF TG, see part 1 of this blog: Goodbye personas! How mindsets can help you build empathy and reduce bias.
 

A big thank you to Eman El-Fayomi! Eman first introduced me to mindsets and provided me with the initial template used by the Canadian Digital Service, as well as the inspiration and guidance to help me get started.

You're here to help residents, and we're here to help you. Interested in how to bring digital tools and skills into your government department? No matter where you are on your digital government journey, learn more about how Code for Canada can support your work.
 

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