• Did you see that? Tapping into your super-noticing power
  My workshop at the upcoming Design Research Conference @ IIT Institute of Design in September
• interactions magazine: Hold Your Horses by Steve Portigal
  teaser for my latest column, about the creative aspects of uncovering insights and the need for time to gestate and reflect

My fourth interactions column, Hold Your Horses, has just been published. I talk about the creative process of uncovering insights and the need for gestation and reflection time.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity

Tags: acm, article, column, creativity, insights, interactions, magazine, reflection, user research, whitepaper

• Sharper Image – the brand consumers know and love for aspirational products that don’t deliver
  Another firm has bought the rights to the brand and plans to resurrect it before it’s gone cold. Not as retail stores, but as, well, a brand, for other companies to put on products in other retail stores.

I liked this article about the creative process of Ben Burtt, the sound designer who designed the sounds for the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, and now Pixar’s WALL-E. The whole piece is great, but I especially liked this bit, which is analogous to what we talk about for noticing…keeping that Spidey sense active and then figuring out what it means later.

So he continues to gather sound, even though he’s not always sure where it will end up. He recalls the last thing he recorded, just days before the interview, while walking from the sound-mix room to his office. As he passed a closet, he noticed some floor panels missing.

“I could hear this great humming – something was wrong with the air conditioning down there,” Burtt says. “Some fans were running and they were rattling and buzzing. I just stuck my microphone down there and recorded. I’m not sure what, but it will definitely be used for something in the future.”

Tags: audio, ben burtt, movies, noticing, pixar, sound, sound design, sound effects, wall-e

Two favorite topics – groceries and stories – collide when the NYT profiles a Cleveland-area grocery chain

“One of the things Whole Foods taught us is the need to tell stories” about our products, Mr. Heinen said. In fact, Heinen’s has 50 stories that it trains employees to tell customers about its meat, produce, baked goods and other items.

This month, Whole Foods took another step forward on this front, designating one employee from each store as a “value guru.” Those employees now give regular tours highlighting sales, local and seasonal items and popular selections from its private label brand.

With all the scaremongering over Americans not taking vacations this summer, perhaps the Whole Foods tour will be substituting?

Tags: groceries, retail, shopping, store, storytelling, whole foods

Like Adam Richardson, I’m fed up with “Indentured Advertude.” Shortly after his post appeared, I returned to my Orlando hotel room and found that housekeeping had left my TV remote like this:

In order to get to the controls, I have to remove it from the sleeve. Like other forcing functions I’ve written about it creates some mindfulness that drives a desired behavior; in this case it’s not in my interest at all. You must engage with this ad before you can perform another task. The service being advertised has no connection to watching TV or using the remote; it’s just there to get in your way.

Tags: adam richardson, advertising, blue man group, control, forcing function, hotel, remote, remote control, television, tv

I had to email iTunes the other day about an issue with my account. I composed and sent my message using their web-based contact system, and a little message box popped up.

The message said that since there was a chance iTunes’ response to my inquiry might end up in my Spam box, a test message would be sent within 15 minutes. If I didn’t get the test message, I was given several steps to take, including adding the iTunes email address to my contacts so that the real message would get through.

I’ve never had a site pre-troubleshoot like this for me, and I thought it was a really elegant and collaborative way of making sure I got the communication I was asking for. Nice job on this one, Apple.

It’s interesting to see workaround strategies like this evolving when things like spam filters–conceived as solutions–become problems.

Tags: apple, customer service, email, itunes, problems, solutions, spam, test message, workaround

• Interama – a planned Miami theme park that took 25 years to not get built
  1951 to 1975, the promise of a gateway for the Americas captured the imagination of local planners, famous architects, five U.S. presidents. It became a massive boondoggle that drained millions in public money. All that materialized was cleared land.

Orlando airport, June 2008

A touch screen looks like any other monitor; designers have not created anything in the physical form that denotes interactivity. It falls to the content (what is on the screen) and the context (where is the screen placed) to invite people to touch. In this case, they’ve chosen to add an external static sign to indicate what you should do.

This is in an airport, so informational rather than advertising content might be a more natural draw for interacting (seriously, an interactive menu experience?) and having this thing sitting near an escalator doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s not a place to linger.

Here we have another example of post-design, fixing a problem in the original design by adding on another piece. Seeing that added instructional text made me wonder how we typically know that a screen is one that we can touch and interact with. It’s an interesting opportunity for the hardware manufacturers to create some visual language that can help with that invitation.

Tags: advertising, airport, bezel, chilis, interact, orlando, post-design, screen, touchscreen

• How graphic designers do user research?
  From the SF AIGA: “In May we asked you to tell us the feature you liked best on the newly redesigned AIGA SF website…” Umm, leading questions anyone?

I guess the post-9/11 passion for preserving the notion of hero is over. Even if Krispy Kreme is intending to be wry here (though that’s not really their tone) there was still a time in recent memory when that wouldn’t have been acceptable either.

Previous donut-y blogging here.

Tags: 911, donuts, dozen, hero, krispy kreme, share, upsell

• Serious leisure
  The systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is substantial, interesting, and fulfilling. The adjective “serious” embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness.

I’m seeing a lot of these lately on rear windows of minivans and similar larger family-sized vehicles: icons that represent every member of the household (including pets).

Seems like a new example of personalization; an untapped bit of car real estate, and a new message to publish (who are the – writ rough – people in our household).

I wonder if this is more common among Hispanics and/or the churchgoing. Any ideas? Do you have one of these? Where did you hear about it? Where did you get it?

Tags: auto, automotive, avatar, car, family, group, icon, identity, members, minivan, personalization, representation, vehicle, window

• Foreclosure Finder Tours
  Bus tour of foreclosed homes
• Foreclosured Homes Bus Tours in Sonoma County, California
  Sign up for our next bus tour of repo houses. You will be taken on a tour of 8-10 houses, get connected to highly professional real estate and loan agents, learn all about the foreclosure buying process from the experts.Refreshments!

• Exxon Will Sell Off Some Gas Stations
  They will sell off the 820 U.S. gasoline stations they operate and the land owned under 1,400 additional franchise stations but hopes to keep selling brands of gas by getting company distributors to acquire the stations.
• MySpace will redesign, streamline its site
  In the past, users have complained that MySpace can feel too busy, with flashing banner ads and too many elements crowded onto one page. The new look will simplify the ways members can personalize their page.
• Katrina refrigerator
  The many refrigerators that were destroyed or rendered unusable during Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita and their aftermath. Many were made into temporary folk art.