But user research, at least as we conceive and practice it, is a different animal altogether. Testing relies on existing objects or realities and measures response against them. User research for design and innovation observes, examines, imagines and inspires. Here are just a few things that good user research can do.

• Broaden the scope. Instead of asking people what they think of these newfangled eBooks, we took a deeper look, to understand how reading is changing and what people value. This led to actionable, inspirational design insights such as, “Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity. And, “There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading.” (Read about Portigal Consulting’s Reading Ahead project here)
• Discover meaning. Design Continuum explored the car rental experience with a group of Harvard Business Students recently to discover opportunities for improvement and innovation along numerous touch-points throughout the journey, inspiring students to envision altogether new experiences beyond the typical drudgery of current practice. (Description of event on Design Continuum’s blog here)
• Shift perspective. Wells Fargo engaged with a small number of customers to understand that consumers’ experiences and world views are fundamentally different from the internal company view. This shed a whole lot of light on how to improve communications and experiences across internal organizational silos. (Excerpt from a Forrester white paper on this project here)

Alex Faaborg of Firefox channeled Don Norman’s take on design approaches during a recent ZURBSoapbox event,

There are two distinct approaches to design. One focuses on user-research to find out what people need/want. This approach is exemplified by Microsoft and is used mostly to mitigate risk. The downside of this ‘user testing’ model is that users can lead you astray. For example, if you ask everyone what their favorite color is the average will be gray. The second tries to bring a specific vision to life and an impression of the user they want to have. This approach is exemplified by Apple and can result in huge success or failure.

Now, while Faaborg mostly touts the second more glorious path, he does acknowledge “If designers don’t know what they’re doing it could be a disaster.”

How will designers “know” what they’re doing? Or, in this heroic design model, is there room only for psychic, infallible, savant designers who do just somehow “know?” Where does this leave the consumer, or “user,” or, as they are also known, people?

We believe that including people in the process of designing products for people is a good idea, and serves to drive great design and business concept development rather than preventing it.

I saw this Kurt Cobain-branded Converse All-Star recently on the bargain racks at Ross. I laughed, I cried.

Detail of another shoe in “The Kurt Cobain Collection,” from the Converse website

Seattlest had a pithy take on it:

Kurt Cobain shaped the country’s rock music landscape while wearing Converse sneaks. He blithely, angrily altered Seattle’s future, ripped a hole for the city on the map of pop culture, all while wearing Converse. He went nuts on stage. He whispered and screamed. He played the shit out of guitars. He shot up and nodded off in the shoes.

Kurt killed himself while wearing Converse. The shoes were prominent in the image that famously documented his death. Naturally, then, Converse will begin selling Kurt Cobain-”inspired” shoes this May. It is, apparently, the “Converse Century,” after all. What better way to celebrate?

The full piece here.

Alternative scale: instead of showing weight, this scale tells a person what to eat.

The knit footie below uses the heat generated by an Apple power adapter to warm the toes.

And finally, this living lamp produces a soft, ambient glow using cells from a Chinese hamster enriched with firefly genes.

Check out Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine. Here’s a teaser

Wonder what the conversation is like at someone else’s shop? Ever wanted to go backstage at a design firm? We asked Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas, and Dan Soltzberg of Portigal Consulting to sit down and share what they’re talking about. Here’s their open mike/chin-wag/theory slam.

Dan: I envisioned sitting down here to have this conversation and trying to figure out what we’re really talking about. So I pulled this statement out of some notes Steve wrote the other day: “The Analog Human; The Digital Machine.” I thought that was really provocative, so I wanted to start by asking you to say a little more about this idea?

Steve: I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?

Julie: There’s another aspect of that that I find really fascinating too: that you’re just talking about it in this dichotomy like there’s “us,” and then there’s “people.” Well, we’re people, right? We’re people trying to understand people and trying to create these scientific methods of doing it is just—I think you’re absolutely right—a conceit, and we often kind of remove ourselves from the situation. And I think empathy is a much more powerful tool than science in that case.

Meanwhile, here’s a few links we’ve come across in the past few days that pick up on some of the themes we explore in our dialog.

• How Different Cultures Shape the Brain [Newsweek]
  
• Human Culture as an Evolutionary Force [New York Times]
• An “Emotional Marketing Value (EMV)” calculator for advertising copy
• Matt Cottan’s Interaction|10 presentation about Heirloom Electronics
• Can Neuromarketing Improve Campbell’s Soup? [Liquid Agency Brand Exchange]

While preparing dinner the other day I noticed this pasta packaging

I’ll bet my pasta can kick your pasta’s ass at meeting needs!

The pasta packaging’s need-shouting put me in mind of this terrific skewering of an exaggerated marketing-department-generated need statement from what is possibly the best review of anything ever, John Phillip’s review of the 2002 Cadillac Escalade EXT for Car and Driver magazine (not found on the Car and Driver site anymore, but full text can be found here):

“Cadillac’s brand manager says, ‘Cadillac research showed that there was a real need for the EXT.’ A real need for a Cadillac pickup? Really? If so, then here are a few things that I really need: An air-conditioned front yard. Iguana-skin patio furniture. Stigmata. Mint-flavored Drano. Gold-plated roof gutters. A 190-hp MerCruiser SaladShooter. A dog with a collapsible tail. An office desk that converts into a Hovercraft. Chrome slacks. A lifetime subscription to Extreme Fidgeting. A third arm. A fourth wife. A smokeless Cuban Robusto. Reusable Kleenex.”

Along those lines but even more ridiculous, here’s another example from a recent post on the blog Sociological Images (CNN Reports on High-Tech Blow-up Doll like it’s an iPad – NSFW!) about a robot sex doll profiled on CNN. The author of the post deconstructs CNN’s interview with the inventor of this product, adding her own interpretation.

“‘There’s a tremendous need for this kind of product,’ said [inventor,] Hines…Translation: Sex dolls are like food stamps and day care; their existence fulfills an important and tremendous need.  What?  You don’t have one?   How do you live!?”

While the pasta claims may be over the top, my noodles did at least meet the need of filling my belly. If we recall Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we know that there is, well, a hierarchy of needs from survival to enlightenment. But the Escalade EXT and the robot doll challenge the fundamental notion of need altogether. Or at least over-dramatize it. Do these products (or 100 calorie Oreo snack packs or scoop-free automatic litter boxes or even iPhones) really exist because we need them? When marketers make such claims do they believe that people really do feel that they need these things? Or that they will if they hear them say it? When we, as researchers, use need statements at the front end of the development process, do we always believe them?

Maybe our introduction of (and insistence on) the need statement at the beginning of the process trickles down, and we’re all convincing each other that people really NEED the things we’re designing. Perhaps we could consider a different word to describe the “need” for objects and experiences such as massive gas-guzzling pick-up trucks and robotic sex dolls. “Want” works for me.

See also: Personas Leaking Outside the Enterprise

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!

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 .