• Segmenting the Hendrix fan [NYTimes.com] – “We believe that there is a Jimi Hendrix fan out there at 99 cents and at $9 and at $20 — all the way across the spectrum,” Mr. Block said. “We want to make each fan an appropriate offering. Is the complete Jimi Hendrix on vinyl something every music fan would want? Absolutely not. Would there be a market for it? Absolutely.”
• Jerry Seinfeld on ideas [NYTimes.com] – Whatever happens to “The Marriage Ref,” Mr. Seinfeld said that he was out of ideas now. “Ideas are a terrible obligation,” he said. “Who needs something else to take care of? I have kids. I’d rather nurture them than another idea.”
• The Disposable Film Festival – In recent years a new kind of film has emerged: The Disposable Film. It has been made possible by new media (webcams, point and shoot digital cameras, cell phones, screen capture software, and one time use digital video cameras) and the rise of online distribution (YouTube, Google, MySpace, etc.). These films are often made quickly, casually, and sometimes even unintentionally. Everyone has become a Disposable Filmmaker: directors of Saturday night cell phone videos, actors under the eyes of security cameras, and narrators before their webcams. Let's face it – we live in an age of disposable film. Now it's time to do something creative with it.
• How to Kill Innovation: Keep Asking Questions – Scott Anthony [Harvard Business Review] – Resource-rich companies have the "luxury" of researching and researching problems. That can be a huge benefit in known markets where precision matters. But it can be a huge deficit in unknown markets where precision is impossible and attempts to create it through analysis are quixotic. Entrepreneurs don't have the luxury of asking "What about…" questions, and in disruptive circumstances that works in their favor.

  So what's the alternative? Substitute early action for never-ending analysis. Figure out the quickest, cheapest way to do something market-facing to start the iterative process that so frequently typifies innovation. Be prepared to make quick decisions, but have the driver of the decision be in-market data, not conceptual analysis. In other words, go small and learn. Pitch (or even sell) your idea to colleagues. Open up a kiosk in a shopping mall for a week. Create a quick-and-dirty website describing your idea. Be prepared to make quick decisions.

Tags: analysis, art, business, camera, channel, cheap, cinema, creative, creativity, design, development, digital, disposable, enterprise, evolve, fan, fanbase, festival, film, guitar, Hendrix, history, ideas, innovation, iterate, jimi, management, marketing, marriage, media, medium, mobile, movies, music, online, plan, pricepoint, prototype, rock, segmentation, seinfeld, show, strategy, television, test, try, tv, video, videos

• Klaus Kaasgaard: Why Designers Sometimes Make Me Cringe [interactions magazine] – [A response to Dan Formosa's piece about marketing research] There is no doubt that Formosa has been exposed to a lot of bad market research in his career. So have I. But I have also been exposed to a lot of bad design research, whether dealing with qualitative data or quantitative data. I cringe at both. And while we should point out when the emperor has no clothes in our daily work situations, it is not the bad research that defines a discipline. I have been exposed to both good market research and good design research as well and, more important, some of the most compelling and impactful research combined different research techniques for a more comprehensive and insightful outcome. That, I suppose, leads me to my conclusion.
• How many Kindles have really been sold? (And other interesting tidbits about ebooks) [Mobile Opportunity] – Some interesting numbers about the size and dynamics of the market: sales, usage, platforms, content. One highlight is the preferred device used to read ebooks
  -PC: 47%
  -Kindle: 32% (and rising in later waves of the survey)
  -iPhone: 11%
  -iPod Touch: 10%
  -Other smartphones (including Blackberry) 9%
  -Netbooks 9%
  -Sony Reader 8%
  -Barnes & Noble Nook 8%
• Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy [SF Chronicle] – Altruism is the whole idea behind the new charity, called the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy. It's the brainchild of Courtney Martin, a South of Market writer who dreamed up the idea four years ago in New York and has handed out a stack of her own $100 bills every year to select good-deed doers who agree to dream up unusual ways to use the dough. Jeremy Mende took a stack of cash to Union Square and offered pairs of strangers $1 apiece if they would have one-on-one conversations with each other. Then he videotaped the conversations and made a home movie. The strangers talked to each other about sex, fireworks, banana slugs, gin, orgasms and Marlon Brando. Some of the conversations were worth a lot more than $1. The best idea seemed to come from Martin's own mother. She used her $100 to buy 400 quarters and scatter them on a grammar school playground.
• R.J. Cutler: What I Learned From Anna Wintour [HuffPo] – Some principles of management from the director of The September Issue. We watched the film this week and highly recommend it. I thought about work as well; the film offers up lots of provocation around collaboration, artistic vision, managing teams of people, power, prototyping, and more.
  (via Kottke)

Tags: 100, amazon, books, business, change, charity, cnote, culture, cutler, design, digital, documentary, donation, ebooks, fashion, giving, industry, influence, iphone, Kaasgaard, Kindle, magazines, management, marketing, money, philanthropy, principles, publishing, reading, readingahead, research, sales, scam, society, storytelling, suspicion, trend, UX, vogue, wintour

• chat roulette – a short film by Casey Neistat – Chatroulette is a emergent online phenomena, connecting random people via webcams. Casey acts as participant-observer, experimenting with the service and observing what happens, as well as reflecting on his own feelings about the experience and ruminating about the implications.
• The worst Olympic uniform [Rob Walker] – If there’s a more pure example of conformity trumping practicality, I can’t think of it. Oh, wait, sure I can: Phony-holed jeans. For years the hollow claims of every marketing guru who insists that consumers “demand authenticity” has been neatly debunked by the success of the high-end “distressed” denim phenomenon. Buying jeans whose wear-and-tear is implemented by far-flung factory workers and machinery, according to specific standards devised and overseen by layers of corporate design-management — and in fact paying extra for such jeans, and pretending that this somehow signals rebel style — is a capitulation to simulacra-culture so Xtreme it would make Debord giggle and Baudrillard weep. Or vice versa. Whatevs.

Tags: authenticity, chat, chatroulette, documentary, film, jeans, murketing, olympic, sociology, storytelling, uniform

After embarking on a customer research process (see Focus grouping the future), Devo (yes, the band) is now running a color survey. Surveys? What’s not to love! While we encourage you to check it out (if for no other reason than the satisfying UI, one of the best we’ve ever seen in an online survey), we’ve picked a few choice questions as a teaser. My Devo color is red. What’s yours?

Also see some fave survey posts from the past

• Survey Revenge
• The space between yes and no as a local indicator
• Son of Survey Madness
• Bad Survey Design. Please Stop!

Tags: devo, survey

• Pediatricians call for a choke-proof hot dog [USATODAY.com] – The American Academy of Pediatricswould like to see foods such as hot dogs "redesigned" so their size, shape and texture make them less likely to lodge in a youngster's throat. More than 10,000 children under 14 go to the emergency room each year after choking on food, and up to 77 die, says the new policy statement, published online today in Pediatrics. About 17% of food-related asphyxiations are caused by hot dogs.

  "If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child's airway, it would be a hot dog," says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. "I'm a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they're wedged in, it's almost impossible."

Tags: airway, children, chocking, design, food, hotdog, pediatrics, shape, warning, wiener

Many thanks to our friends at Bolt|Peters for hosting an energizing User Research Friday last week! Dan and I heard a recurring theme of research and creativity, both in method and mindset. Dan noted that several people spoke about research and creativity as though they were separate, and that combining them was somehow novel. But research done well, from framing the problem through storytelling, is creative by nature!

In particular I was struck by how Michal Migurski of Stamen (see his annotated slides here and video here) framed his discussion on their creative visualizations of information streams for Digg Labs and the Twitter Track for the Olympics (to name just a couple) as research-free, when we saw their work as a terrific illustration of a pretty standard method: Using stimulus (in this case the visualizations themselves) to do rapid prototyping based on immediate user feedback, all as a way to guide development. He even talked about Digg Labs as a “wide-open playing ground” for this kind of cycle of experimentation.

One of many visualizations on Digg Labs

NBC Olympics Real Time Twitter Tracker

Even beyond that, Migurski implied that Stamen’s visualizations have become research tools that help people to understand, navigate and make use of vast swathes of data, such as the journalist who keeps the Digg example up on his screen as a snapshot of what’s got buzz. So Stamen’s gorgeous visualizations are really a product of research as well as possibly a nascent research method. If their creation doesn’t feel to Migurski like deliberate research methods are being employed that may be because it’s just so embedded in their process. I’d argue that’s the best kind of research: an integral part of the process.

Now, terms like “User Research” are slippery, but I do object to his definition:

“User research, to me, is an attempt to mitigate and control astonishment by determining what an audience believes or expects, and where possible delivering on that belief and expectation. User research promises stability and predictable outcomes, and I think that we’re at a curve in the road where the idea of stability is just not all that interesting.”

This sounds like the objectives of conventional focus group or usability testing, not the front-end discovery methods that are at the core of our discipline. Our goal is not simply to determine what consumers believe or expect and then use those observations as marching orders, but to creatively synthesize these discoveries into insights about what people need and value, in order to drive the development of experiences and products that delight and (why not!) astonish.

Overall, the content at URF10 left us hungry for more discussion about how creative research methods are used as a set of inputs and methods that complement and inform design and business strategy at many stages of the development process.

Finally, a tip of the hat to presenter Ed Langstroth of Volkswagen for telling us about the “Party Mode” button (which turns up the bass in the back of the vehicle) on the new Toyota 4-Runner:

For more User Research Friday goodness, check out Steve’s 2008 User Research Friday presentation: Research and Design: Ships in the Night? (slides, audio, and video here) and the subsequent articles in interactions: Part I and Part II .

Tags: bolt peters, Consumer Insights, creativity, digg labs, ed langstroth, interactions, Migurski, party mode, prototyping, Stamen, twitter, URF, user experience, user research, user research friday, UX

While we “delivered” our project’s results in an earlier post, in our client engagements we often have the experience of revisiting the same material for another audience. We might deliver a 3-hour interactive presentation with our core team, and then come back weeks later and share the highlights with their management team. And while we might panic at compressing the 3 hours into (say) one hour, it’s a really powerful editing activity when forced to do that. What is the core of the story? What do people need to know about? What have we learned in giving the presentation already? What has changed since then?

For Reading Ahead, we’ve been sharing this work with friends at Adobe, Blurb, UC Berkeley, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. And that’s given us a chance to revisit the presentation. We’ve refreshed it visually, focused the core message, and expanded it to include some things that came out since our initial research was conducted (i.e., Amazon’s advertising campaign for the Kindle and the launch of the Nook). We haven’t recorded a new narration (check out the full deliverable if you want that), but you can see how we’ve focused our story in this presentation.

Tags: books, ebooks, presentation, reading, Reading Ahead, synthesis

• DEVO – Focus Group Testing the Future [YouTube] – Filled with brilliantly sarcastic soundbites, this is definitely pushing on post-modernism/post-irony. DEVO doing focus group testing (or so they say) on every aspect of their 2010 offering (brand, logotype, instrumentation, clothing). Interesting also to see how this appears in the press with varying amounts of the irony removed.
• Theater Preshow Announcements Take Aim at Cellphones [NYTimes.com] – In a production of “Our Town” the director, David Cromer, who played the Stage Manager, took a minimal approach because he wanted to stay true to Thornton Wilder’s desire to forgo conventional theatrics. “In that show we had this issue, which is that there was to be no theater technology. The whole act of my entrance was that you were supposed to think it was someone from the theater,” Mr. Cromer explained. “We didn’t want the Stage Manager to come out and say, ‘Please turn your cellphones off,’ because that would be rewriting Wilder.” Instead Mr. Cromer simply held up a cellphone upon entering at the beginning of each act and then turned it off and put it away, casually showing the audience what to do without talking about it. “The first time I was watching another actor take over in the show as the Stage Manager,” Mr. Cromer said, “he came out, held his cellphone in the air, and the woman next to me said, ‘Oh, someone lost their cellphone.’ ”

Tags: advertising, audience, behavior, brand, cellphone, commentary, devo, devolution, humor, influence, irony, marketing, model, mother, music, norms, persuasion, product, qualitative, quiet, research, ringing, sarcasm, signal, silence, society, testing, theater, theatre

• Glamtini Events: Where Girls of All Ages GLAM IT UP – Party packages include hair, makeup, nails, dress-up accessories to glam it up, and a 15-minute photo shoot. Check out the "party photos" and the video at http://blip.tv/file/1714995/
• Adobe and Wired Introduce a New Digital Magazine Experience [YouTube] – A strong emphasis on digital (i.e., touch, pan-scroll, non-linear) navigation, with a lesser impact on the actual content.

Tags: adobe, birthday, experience, female, girls, glam, glamour, glamtinii, interactive, kids, magazine, makeup, navigation, party, publishing, reading, readingahead, tween, video, wired

Intersting recent ad for Lucky Jeans

Two details of the ad:

I am impressed how the overall aesthetic of the ad just oozes authenticity. There’s real craft and attention to detail, leading to a strong sense of quality. But all these details they are calling out are examples of manufactured fakery: making new jeans look like worn jeans. They’ve taken inauthenticity to such a level of quality that it becomes authentic in its own way!

For more on this theme, see my recent interactions column with Stokes Jones, On Authenticity

Tags: advertisement, authenticity, clothing, denim, design, details, fake, inauthenticity, jeans, lucky, pants

• Famous user figures in the history of HCI [Pasta&Vinegar] – Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that it is important to keep them in mind.

Tags: archetypes, characters, classic, design, history, personas

• Oprah’s No Phone Zone – Creating Behavioral Change By Asking People to Publicly Pledge – If you think you have the cell phone, texting and driving thing down…you do not. Sign our pledge to make your car a No Phone Zone and pass it on. You could save a life—maybe even yours. I pledge to make my car a No Phone Zone. Beginning right now, I will do my part to help put an end to distracted driving by pledging the safest driving behavior I can commit to:
  (x) I will not text while I am driving
  (x) I will not text while driving and will use only handsfree calling if I need to speak on the phone while I am driving.
  (x) I will not text or use my phone while I am driving. If I need to use my phone, I will pull over to the side of the road.

Tags: distracted, driving, influence, norm, oprah, persuasion, phone, pledge, safety, texting

• Dan Formosa on Why Marketing Research Makes Us Cringe [interactions magazine] – In a bigger picture, design research needs to expand its techniques to more fully understand the potential of design. It’s bad enough that some of these marketing-based methods continue to be practiced in a rote manner in the field of marketing. (Delving into technical discussions involving both logics and statistics can bring many people, in marketing and design, far from their comfort level.) But blindly applying marketing methods to design creates a double whammy that should be avoided at all costs.

Tags: consumers, customers, design, insight, research

• Design and Designed Failures: From Observing Failures To Provoking Them [SlideShare] – Slides from Nicolas Nova's provocative Interaction|10 presentation. Observing failures is a great design research technique, but what about creating them as a more in-depth and deliberate design research technique?

Tags: design, fail, failure, interaction, ixd10, liftlab, product, UX