• David and Me, Michael Grossman’s answer video
  I saw a rough draft and even so, the final version made me chortle a few times. There’s a new editing vernacular that The Daily Show has brought front and center, and Grossman nails it.

via BoingBoing comes news that some 7-11s will be made up as Kwik-E-Marts to promote the Simpsons movie.

The article comes complete with a grand example of my beloved empty PR consumer-justification: “We’ve done research, and research shows us that our customers like . . . movies” – Does it get any more Simpsonesque than that?

Who needs the Kwik-E Mart? I dooooooooooooooo!

ObRalphWiggum: Lisa, do you like…stuff?

Tags: 7-11, apu, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, c-store, consumer research, justification, kwik-e mart, PR, ralph wiggum, the simpsons, the simpsons movie

• What is the Deal with David Pogue?
  My brilliant pal Michael critiques David Pogue’s corny videos. Same old?
• David Pogue responds
  And rips on Michael for a supposed lack of sense of humor. Pogue takes it well, but he’s clearly devoted to the cheesy side. What will happen next?

The whole back-and-forth on Are Designers The Enemy Of Design? doesn’t engage me all that much, but I did of course really like this quote from Bruce Nussbaum

This statement goes way behind “design.” Corporations have to bring consumers deep inside the walls of of the business process to participate in the development and design of new products, services and experiences. They have to curate conversations with their customers and really listen and learn from them.

Curate is an interesting verb. I can never tell if someone is being pretentious when they insert it in a context I don’t expect it, or if there is a wholly different intent behind it.

Tags: bruce nussbaum, conversations, customers, design, designers, engagement, npd

• Survey fatigue
  I loved seeing two of my recent themes collide…the overuse of “fatigue” and the bad user experience when one participates in a survey

This graphic by Stabilo Boss shows (part of) a large collage of Web 2.0 logos and has been blogged repeatedly in the past year.

And today, Barry Diller’s IAC runs a full-page ad in major newspapers. Their striking visual, a collage of their Internet properties, strongly evokes the original!

Tags: barry diller, brands, dot-com, iac, interactive, logos, web 2.0, website

• Google Syndrome – I mention a cosmetics company therefore I am a cosmetics company
  I’m sure we’ve all seen tons of examples of this. Blog entries about a product, celebrity, service, brand etc. are found in Google by people who somehow manage to massively misinterpret the post as some sort of conduit to the producer or person themselves

• PeterMe starts a discussion of our cancelled IA Summit Vega$ presentation
  None of us involved had felt like blogging about it; the failure felt like ours, but with time and some airing, the loss of the event is a loss that is shared by all. We’re all moving on, but it’s worth a quick look back to acknowledge a great idea for a workshop.
• Another branding reframe – Metamucil is for health
  Sure. Colas are nutritious. Fried chicken is healthy, and now laxatives make you beautiful.
• Plural of antenna is antennae – how do you pronounce it?
  Oops, in the Debbie Millman interview I said “anTENay” but it’s “anTENee”. Live and learn?

My latest podcast/broadcast is up at Core77, a conversation with Debbie Millman of Sterling Brands and the Design Matters radio talk show.

We talk about strategy, cultural anthropology, consulting, synthesis, and some other stuff as well. Check it out.

Tags: audio, branding, broadcast, consulting, core77, debbie millman, design matters, interview, podcast, sterling brands, strategy, synthesis

The tainted pet food story gets worse.

Menu Foods told the FDA it received the first complaints of kidney failure and deaths among cats and dogs from pet owners on Feb. 20. It began new tests on Feb. 27. During those tests, the company fed its product to 40 to 50 dogs and cats, and seven of those animals died.

I think the horror this induces is a clue to our naivete about how stuff is made. This story brings up the recent food-supply fears (i.e., spinach, green onions), with the added pathos of beloved pets innocently suffering and dying. So what does the company do when safety concerns are raised? Well, nothing for SEVEN DAYS (while people around North America are feeding their beloved pets), and then takes some of their own animals (perhaps not-so-beloved) and gives the food to them and then waits to see how many die (meanwhile, people around North America continue to feed their beloved pets this stuff).

It’s easy (see?) to cast the company as callous and heartless and incompetent – and maybe they are; the twist of giving potentially deadly food to more animals as a way to test its safety is wrenching. But then one has to ask, how do they normally product test their pet food before putting it on the market? Presumably by feeding it to animals and seeing what happens.

Yet another backstage aspect of product development that we don’t know and don’t want to know. Every time you scoop some Kibbles-n-Grits Extra Chunky Sauce into Rover’s bowl, how many other animals died to ensure that he’s not going to?

Tags: animal testing, beloved, cat, cat food, dog, dog food, harm, menu foods, pet, pet food, poison, product testing, safety, tainted

This comment in the bad survey design thread got me thinking further about where/when/what to do with surveys. It’s not my primary tool so some of these reflections take me a little longer than someone who makes their living as a quantitative researcher, for example.

A tiny new restaurant opened in our tiny town of Montara – the Montara Bistro. I dropped by yesterday to pick up a menu and saw that they are already looking for customer feedback.

So to some folks, this is a survey. But it’s next to useless.

Why? Their questions are not too bad, but they are conversational questions, and should be presented that way. They are the basis of a conversation. Handing someone a sheet of paper (with no room to fill in any response) and asking them for essays is ineffective. It’s not fair. These are the questions they want answers to, but sometimes you have to ask a series of questions to get that information. And you can’t decide ahead of time which questions to ask. You have to ask a question, listen to the response, and then choose your next one. You can’t do that on a piece of paper. You need to have real people talking to each other and exploring the issues that way.

Not to mention that the restaurant has been open for a day or two, and there’s a presumption of an in-depth relationship that hasn’t really been built yet. What do I think of the Bistro Vision? Ummm, I don’t care.

I love what this artifact tells you about the company; that they really want to get a dialog going. They don’t have the tools in place to do it yet. Maybe it’s backed up by the way they interact with customers who come in; I don’t know. But this won’t work at all.

And I think this sort of inquiry is what a lot of design students are doing; identifying some open-ended (i.e., requires the respondent to write sentences) questions and sending them out by email. Some people will respond. Some may even write a lot. But you can’t follow up unless you send out another email. And then it’s just a conversation.

As with everything you “send out” who it gets sent to is a factor. Sending something to 3 friends is a very different approach than something that is quantitative in nature.

Look at this artifact from a recent project (created by our partners, not us):

This contained 31 questions, only a few open-ended ones. There’s randomization where needed (so you can filter out order-effects, where the first or last item might be picked more frequently in a list), and a large enough sample so that results can be processed to lead to conclusions – comparisons between different factors (this is the stats part I’ve been talking about).

Attitude toward technology meets Age
Purchase habits meets Region (with Age)
Stores shopped meets Region (with Age)
etc.

Tons of work and tons of math goes into creating tables (that then get interpreted) like

As Paul Hogan (sorta) said “That’s not a survey, now that’s a survey!”

I hope this brings a bit more clarity to the discussion.

Tags: conversations, customer feedback, customer research, design research, discussion, field methods, input, interviewing, Montara, quantitative research, survey, user research

A number of months ago we had an unfortunate experience at the usually stupendous local restaurant, Cafe Gibraltar. Our reservation, made long in advance for dinner with out-of-town visitors, evaporated. The error was theirs but I was made to feel as if I was somehow in the wrong, and it really created some awkwardness on what was supposed to be a special dinner.

I wrote a letter about it and didn’t hear back until recently. But wow, what a response!

Some times we make mistakes, as is human, but not properly dealing with our mistakes is unacceptable. We are only as good as those who represent us.

Seemed a good time to post a great apology after Sunday’s NYT piece about the Southwest employee who is in charge of writing apology letters to passengers – the “senior manager of proactive customer communications.”

Tags: apologies, cafe gibraltar, caring, customer service, customers, dining, feedback, mea culpa, passion, responsive, restaurant

• Magritte at Whole Foods
  Brilliant observation by Antonella Pavese

• How To Take Pictures Inside Stores Without Getting Caught (the Consumerist)
  Without getting into the issues of ethical practice, this is a not-uncommon challenge in user research.
• Lorem ipsum – is that Spanish?
  Funny/sad to see this mistake happen with something that shipped. We showed a prototype newsletter in some in-home research a few years ago; one person flipped to the back, filled with “greeked” text and said “oh, good idea to use both languages”

LinkedIn was down for maintenance this evening and this is who announced this on their home page.

Who the heck is that? I have never seen him or anything wizardly on that site. Seems a bit of a leap?

Tags: brand, cousin oliver, linkedIn, mascot, social networking, wizard