Indi Young

Founding partner Indi Young has a new relationship with Adaptive Path. In early 2006, after five memorable years with the company she worked tirelessly to build, Indi decided to shift her focus toward writing (yes, the mental model book!).

While Indi is no longer a day-to-day Adaptive Path staff member, our collaboration continues; she currently works with us as a consultant, trainer and creative colleague. The transformation of our relationship has given her the freedom to focus on her book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, and Adaptive Path the opportunity to claim another famous author as our own. We're pleased that Indi gave this important method for user-centered design her full and focused attention.

Professional Background

Indi is an applications and navigation guru who began her work in Web applications in 1995. Her clients range from technology start-ups to large financial institutions. Projects include global corporate intranets, consumer finance and investment tools, enterprise software lead generation sites, knowledge management tools, workflow applications, and business-to-business e-commerce.

Previous to her Web applications work, Indi was a software engineer. Her projects focused on bringing a well-researched user experience to new applications being built by her team. These projects ranged broadly, including a compile-edit-debug environment in Unix Xwindows/OpenLook and a physician chart tools in PenPoint, to name a few.

Indi specializes in gathering user research data to create mental models for use in business/user gap analysis. Since 1995, she has done over 15 of these task analysis projects, starting with a customer call-center project for Visa.

Indi graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the Cal Poly School of Engineering in San Luis Obispo, 1987. She worked on her master's degree in Computer Science at Colorado State University Fort Collins. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Bay Area special interest group in user interface (BayCHI). She speaks at the bi-annual User Interface Engineering conference.