I started today by typing up all of the Post-it notes you saw in our recent blog post on Synthesis.

This activity created a 6-page Word document of bullet points.

The next part of the process is something I always find challenging: taking an incredibly detailed list of observations, particpant statements, hypotheses, and ideas; figuring out what the Big Ideas are (there’s a point in the process where many of them seem Big!), and putting those into a form that tells a cogent story.

First step: make a cup of tea.

Ok, then my next steps were:

• Categorize all those bullet points
• Synthesize those categories a bit further
• Write down in as short a paragraph as possible what I would tell someone who asked me, “what did you find out?”

Then I went into PowerPoint, which is what we use when we present findings to our clients. I’ll continue bouncing back and forth between Word and PowerPoint; each piece of software supports a different way of thinking and writing.

I dropped my synthesized categories into a presentation file, sifted all of the bullet points from my Word doc into the new categories, and then started carving and shaping it all so that it started to follow the paragraph I had written. (I’m mixing cooking and sculpting metaphors here.)

I printed out the presentation draft, and laid it out so I could see the whole thing at once.

Steve came back from a meeting and I asked him to read over what I’d printed out. He started writing notes on my printouts, pulling out what he saw as the biggest of the Big Ideas.

We talked about what he’d written, which led to an energetic discussion in which we really started to breathe life into this. Tomorrow, I’ll start the day by iterating the presentation draft based on our conversation.

Here’s some more articles, projects, websites, and other online ephemera that we’ve come across since we posted part 1.

• A series of humorous videos from Green Apple Books comparing the Kindle to a book
• Books and Browsers (audio link) – Dave Gray (IDEA2008)
  

  The book as a form factor has been around for about 2,000 years, since Julius Caesar first decided to fold up a scroll, accordion-style, and mark the pages for later reference. In 1455, Aldus Manutius was the first to publish the portable paperback, and it has remained relatively unchanged since. XPLANE Founder and Chairman Dave Gray explores several questions about the future of the book and the web browser.

• Sony has launched the latest salvo

  a sub-$300 touch-screen “Reader Touch Edition” and the $199 “Reader Pocket Edition,” which features a 5-inch display. The company is also lowering prices of ebooks. New releases and best-sellers will all be $9.99, matching Amazon’s price point for the first time.

• NPR Science Friday broadcast exploring Who Owns Your Digital Data?
• NPR on Amazon removing Orwell books
  

  Lynn, you cover books and publishing for NPR, so do you have a Kindle or an e-book Reader?

  LYNN NEARY: Actually, I don’t, Linda. In fact, my cubical at NPR and my night table at home are loaded down with good, old-fashioned books because even though I’ve actually seen the Kindle work and I’ve talked to a lot of people who love it, I still can’t imagine reading some of my favorite novels on the Kindle. What about you?

  WERTHEIMER: I love it. It’s especially nice for traveling. I really do not leave home without it. But I did have a very peculiar experience with Kindle. I was reading a book and all of a sudden, I was back at the beginning of the book. So I thought I’d punched some button somehow. But no, what I had was a book in two pieces.

• CHART OF THE DAY: Most People Still Have Never Seen A Kindle
  

  Some 40% of North Americans who responded to a Forrester Research survey in Q2 2009 had heard of, but had never seen, an e-reader. Another 17% had never heard of one. But ownership more than doubled year-over-year to 1.5%.

• A short piece from Steve Haber, who developed the Sony Reader

• Where there are bookshelves, there will be books!

  When Eddie Bernays, the father of modern publicity, was asked by a group of book publishers to increase book sales, he said, “Where there are bookshelves, there will be books.” And then he went on to convince architects, construction companies, and interior designers to install bookshelves in new homes. That helped to launch the modern day publishing and selling of books. (thanks to Joshua Treuhaft)

• Cathy Marshall’s publications about reading, interaction, electronic periodicals, and ebooks
• Smarter Books – Envisioning the uses & future of print, electronic, & new media books

  This site is dedicated to design thinking for re-envisioning books, publishing models, and the cognitive activity we call reading. The many markets and models for books and distribution are changing radically and continuously. We, authors and designers, need to share what we have learned and are doing to recreate the forms, meaning, and thinking of books of all kinds. Sponsored by Redesign Research

• The unbook is a concept originally developed by Jay Cross. The concept evolved based on discussions between Jay and Dave Gray
• The Diamond Age is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. The Primer in The Diamond Age is a complex and highly elaborate descendant of today’s hypertext.

  Unlike the very static version we are familiar with today, the Primer is fully interactive. It not only offers the reader an open-ended narrative, but it also changes to the reader’s demands, among many other features.

• Vogon Heavy Industries is proud to make the The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy available to Earth Internet users under licence from Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor.
• Visualization of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book
• Fore-edge painting – Pictures along the page edges, hidden behind gilt
• Exhaustive list of book terminology
• Digital Book 09, a conference put on by IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum)
• Wholesale eBook Sales Statistics

Synthesizing field data into well-articulated, data-driven patterns, themes, and opportunities is a big part of our work, but it’s an aspect that generally has less visibility than the fieldwork.

An essential early step in the synthesis process involves going back over the fieldwork sessions. An hour or two-hour interview creates an incredible amount of information. By going back into a record of the interview, we make sure not to leave anything significant behind.

We go through and make notes on interview transcripts (done by an outside service), watch videos of the sessions, and look over photographs, sketches, maps, and participatory design pieces.

Annotated interview transcript

We made a bulletin board of the people we met, so they’re ever-present while we’re working.

Yesterday we came together to share the points we’d each pulled out. We present each interview, like a case study, to the team. Sometimes it’s just us, and sometimes our clients join us for part of this process.

While one of us presented, the other captured the essence onto Post-its. We had a lot of discussion and debate while we did this, pulling together multiple viewpoints.

When we were done presenting the interviews, the board looked like this:

Our next step is to take these notes and start grouping them. We’ll look at different ways the information can be organized, and from there, will start refining our work and writing it up clearly and succinctly into a report.

As soon as possible after concluding fieldwork, we write a Topline Summary, in which we capture our first impressions and the ideas that are top-of-mind from being in the field.

We’re always careful to be clear about what the Topline is and isn’t. There’s synthesis that happens from the fieldwork experience itself (which the Topline captures), and synthesis that happens from working with the data (which we haven’t done yet).

In the Topline we go a step further than the field highlights and start to articulate some of the patterns we think are emerging, but these ideas may change once we do a detailed analysis and synthesis of the data we’ve gathered.

In a client project, we’ll have a discussion with the client team around the Topline Summary. We encourage members of the client team to come out in the field with us, and the Topline discussion is a great opportunity for everyone who did so to share their experiences and tell stories. The Topline discussion is also a good time for our clients to let us know if there are any specific directions they want us to pursue as we analyze and synthesize the data we’ve gathered.

We’ve now finished our fieldwork for Reading Ahead. We conducted six in-depth interviews, with photo diary and participatory design activities (more in our next few posts about these methods).

Here’s our Topline Summary:

Portigal Consulting: Reading Ahead Topline Summary

1. Reading is not just a solo activity; there are significant social/interpersonal aspects for many people

• Recommendations, book clubs, lending

• Books facilitate the interpersonal aspects of reading

  Can be easily lent or given away
  

  Given as gifts
  

  People can use a book together: parents and kids, showing someone a passage or illustrations, etc.

• Reading can be a big part of family life
  

  Childhood memories, passing books between generations, reading with one’s own children.

  Connection between home life and outside world (school)

2. Reading and Books are not always one and the same

• Erica buys some books because she likes them as objects. She knows she may not read all of them. “I love books. I almost like books more than reading.”

• Jeff says if you love to read, you’d like the Kindle. If you love books, you should try it out before you buy one

• The Kindle facilitates types of reading beyond books: blogs, articles, periodicals

3. Books do more than carry content

• Books engage the senses: they are tactile, visual objects, with specific characteristics like smell and weight
  

  Become carriers of specific memories

  Develop a patina that carries meaning

  An inscribed book becomes a record of an event, interaction, relationship

• There is an art/collector aspect to books (which is absent in the Kindle)
  

  First editions

  Signed copies

  Galley proofs

  Typography

  Pictures and illustrations

  Quality of paper, printing, etc.

• Books say something about a person
  

  Others can see what you’re reading; like clothes, etc., this carries meaning

  “Looking at someone’s bookshelves when you go to their house” (Jeff)

  When people give books as gifts they are deliberately communicating something about the relationship, the event, themselves, and the recipient

• Books can create a physical record of someone’s reading activity
  

  Chris used to line up all the books he had read to get a sense of accomplishment

  Annotations, bookmarks, tags all convey the reader’s personal history with that book

4. Books are easily shared

• Pass them along to others

• Donate to library

• Sell or buy at used book store

• Borrow from the library rather than purchasing
  

5. How books are stored and organized carries meaning

• Emotion, sense of pride, expression of personality, record of engagement

• Erica organizes her books by how the content/type of book feels to her: “dusty” classics, modern classics, etc.

• Julie’s extensive shelves are organized alphabetically to reinforce the idea of library
  

6. Libraries and bookstores provide specific experiences

• As a little girl, Erica visited different libraries with her Mom. This was their daily activity, and Erica retains strong and specific memories

• Julie and her housemate recreated a library atmosphere in their home

  A quiet, comfortable space

  Good lighting

  Alphabetized bookshelves

  A unified décor

• For Jeff and others, spending time browsing in a bookstore represents having leisure time
  

7. The Kindle

• For people whose love of reading is bound up in their love of books, the Kindle loses much of the reading experience; it is only a content carrier

• Julie has a history of wanting to read on electronic devices as well as from printed books, so to her, the Kindle is a big evolutionary step from her old Palm, the iPhone, etc.

• For Erica, the Kindle signifies “computer,” so it does not let her “unplug” from the fast-paced connected lifestyle that books provide a refuge from

• Several people described the kinetics of page-turning as an important aspect of reading books that is absent in the Kindle

• Books afford ways of navigating content that the Kindle does not: flipping, comparing non-sequential pages, looking at the recipes at the end of each chapter, etc.

• Peter finds it frustrating that when he buys a Kindle book from Amazon, he can’t share it. When he started working in an environment where people were passing books around, he went back to reading printed books
  

8. Participant ideation about the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future”

• NOTE: The first thing a number of the participants said when asked about what the “book of the future” could be and do was that it’s pretty hard to improve on the book-it works very well the way it is. In addition to all the qualities already mentioned, books are
  

  Instant on-off
  

  Durable

  But people did have ideas. Here are some of them:

• Interactive
  

  Put yourself in the story

  Leave the story for more information

  Choose from alternate endings, versions

• Size-shifting

  Able to morph from bigger size for reading to smaller for transporting

• Retain the book form while adding functionality

  Book form with replaceable content: a merging of book and device, with a cover, and page-turning but content is not fixed-it can be many different books

  Books that contain hyperlinks, electronic annotations, multimedia, etc.

• Privacy

  Hide what you’re reading from others, hide annotations, hide your personal book list and lend your device to someone (with content for them)

• Projecting

  A device that projects words that float above it, so that the reader doesn’t have to hold the device in their hands

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Our interview with Julie (not her real name) was the last session in the fieldwork for this project.

Julie and her housemate have an amazing library in their San Leandro home, with three walls of alphabetized floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. With the bookshelves and quiet ambiance of the space, being in this part of their home feels just like being a library.

The whole downstairs of their house has been optimized for reading; they have great lighting, and comfortable sofas big enough for two people to stretch out on simultaneously.

Of the six people we met, Julie was the person who most seemed to have integrated printed book and Kindle reading. For Julie, reading a book and reading on the Kindle are both equally positive experiences; in fact, she will sometimes go back and forth between a printed book and the Kindle version of the same book, depending on whether she is at home, traveling, etc.

While some of the people we met described the Kindle as less-than-satisfying compared to a printed book, Julie has a long history of reading on electronic devices, and finds the Kindle a big step forward.

In the following clip, Julie talks about how her electronic reading has evolved, from her first Palm Pilot up to her current Kindle 2:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Jeff (not his real name) is in the midst of a big remodeling project at home so we met with him in his Silicon Valley office. He was the second Kindle user we saw in our fieldwork, and had a lot of positive things to say about reading on the device.

Jeff says that he’s not a “flipper” but does tend to be reading 3-4 books at a time, as well as newspapers and blogs. These various pieces of content require differing levels of attention and serve different moods, and Jeff likes that on the Kindle he can have all of this material at his fingertips, especially when he’s doing a lot of traveling.

Jeff uses his Kindle for not only for personal reading but for work as well, and sometimes publishes documents he needs to read to the Kindle. He and his team have also experimented with using the Kindle as a platform for delivering presentations.

Demonstrating a business presentation on the Kindle

Jeff says one of the things he feels Amazon has done really well is to develop the “device ecosystem.” Between his job, the remodel, and a household that includes 4 kids and several dogs, cats, and chickens, Jeff is extremely busy, and he likes the ease and efficiency of the book-buying experience the Kindle supports.

In the following clip, Jeff tells some quick stories about using his Kindle to buy reading materials:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Peter (not his real name), the first Kindle user we’ve interviewed, works in web production. When describing himself, he says,”I like gadgets.”

We met with him at his home in Vallejo. He describes doing several types of reading: instructional reading to expand his knowledge about topics of interest like photography, fiction as a “form of engagement with a piece of art,” and non-fiction as a way to vicariously experience other places and lifestyles.

Peter’s had his Kindle for a couple of years. He says when he first got it (as a gift from his partner), it “got him” buying books right away, and he used it almost exclusively for around a year.

He says serious limitations of the Kindle are that you can’t have two books open at once (if you’re using a reference book, etc.), that it is unable to “capture” the act of flipping through a book looking for a passage, and that it still doesn’t create the same quality of experience as “the whiteness of paper” and crisp black text.

When I ask Peter if he has any emotions about his Kindle, he calls it “neutral.”

The biggest frustration for Peter is that he can’t share Kindle books.

In the clip below, Peter tells the story of how this desire to share led him back to printed books:

Starting any project means we inevitably come across any number of articles that pertain to the topic or the themes that emerge from the research and synthesis.

Sometimes we’ll dedicate some time at the beginning to collect articles and summarize ’em, but more often we’ll just do a quick scan and opportunistically look for issues to inform our recruiting and planning for fieldwork.

Here’s what we’re reading now (and we’ll do a part 2 if and when we find more articles of interest):

• Kindle and the Future of Reading – Nicholson Baker in the New Yorker
  
• NPR Books: July 7, 2008 – “A challenge for amazon’s Kindle e-reader: how does it stand up to a visit to a pool?”
• Hotels Offering eBooks as Amenities – jk OnTheRun (also this from the same site)
• Amazon Taps Its Inner Apple – Adam L. Penenberg in Fast Company
  
• Barnes & Noble unveils largest ebookstore
• Some Thoughts on the Anthology – A Working Library
  

  Among the many complaints made about the shift from reading on paper to reading on screen, perhaps the most common-and most difficult to counter-is that we are moving from a medium that requires concentration to one that sows distraction into every syllable. This complaint assumes that the act of flitting from one reading to the next is necessarily inferior; but what if that were not always the case?

• Possible ou probable? – Video of a future scenario for the book itself
• Amazon’s Orwellian deletion of Kindle books- Boing Boing
• Universities Turn to Kindle Sometimes To Save Paper – NYT Green Inc. blog
• Jeff Bezos on NPR’s On Point
• NPR Books: June 26, 2008 – “Chinese fiction writers are using the Internet as a way to reach and entertain their readership”
• Comparison of eBook devices (also here)
• Devices from Wikipedia
  

  Prominent examples include:
  * Plastic Logic (2010)[8]
  * txtr by the German start-up txtr (to be presented in the Oct 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair)[9][10]
  * Cybook Opus by Bookeen (August 2009)
  * Readius foldable eBook reader by Polymer Vision (Will never release due to bankrupt)[11]
  * COOL-ER ereader by Interread (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 SW by iRex (2009)
  * Kindle 2 by Amazon (2009)
  * Sony Reader PRS-700 by Sony (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 by iRex (2008)
  * Sony Reader PRS-505 by Sony (2007/8)
  * Kindle by Amazon (2007)
  * Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)
  * Hanlin eReader by Jinke (distributed as “Lbook” in Estonia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine as “BeBook” in Europe; also distributed by Pixelar) (2007)
  * Wattpad (2006) for Mobile Java devices and other mobile phones
  * Sony Reader PRS-500 by Sony (2006)
  * iLiad by iRex (2006)
  * Librié by Sony (2004)

• iPhone as eReader – Lexcycle
  

  Lexcycle today announced that more than 2 million users have downloaded Stanza, the popular electronic book reader application for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch, since it was launched one year ago. Stanza’s award-winning reading experience, which features customizable formatting, searching, library management and over-the-air book downloads on demand, has led to more than 12 million book downloads.
  These milestones highlight that many people are quite comfortable reading full length books via Stanza on their iPhones and iPod touch.

• Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader? – ReadWriteWeb
• Why Apple’s iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product – Seeking Alpha

People always ask us, “how do you find the people for your projects?”

Figuring out how to identify appropriate people to interview for a project is all-important. For Reading Ahead, we know we need people who are active readers. What constitutes an “active reader?” We’re defining it as people who read books at least three times a week, in multiple locations. We want people who are engaged in the behavior at a level where they will have lots of experiences from which to draw. We also know that we want to look at how people’s behavior changes/doesn’t change/is supported by/is influenced when reading books in print vs. reading eBooks using a device.

When we have established the criteria for participating in the research, we typically use a specialized recruiting company to find people. We write a screener, which has a series of specific questions to identify people who meet our criteria.

Screener excerpt, Reading Ahead project, 2009

Finding the right people can be quite complex, and for some projects, we’ve written screeners that are more than 10 pages long. If we’re looking for people who do activities X and Y, in locations 1, 2, and 3, but have never done activity Z-well, you get the idea!

In this project, the criteria are simpler, and we’ll be doing our own recruiting. In fact, if you’re in the Bay Area and an avid reader or Kindle user, let us know and maybe we can talk with you!

Update: We put together a representative screener that is formal enough to be given to a recruiting firm, even though we aren’t doing that for Reading Ahead. You can download it here.

We’re very excited here at Portigal Consulting to announce the start of a new self-funded project–Reading Ahead.

In Reading Ahead, we’ll be exploring the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective–what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and beyond.

Over the course of the project, we’ll be blogging both about how we work and what we see and learn.

Steve Portigal (left) and Dan Soltzberg, project kickoff, July 27, 2009

Understanding our client
One of the first steps in any project is figuring out what the project is really about. So the first piece of research we do is often focused on our client.

As we work with our clients to establish the scope and approach of a project, we also interview key stakeholders in their organization to better understand what they know and what they need to know. (This doesn’t always map to what they think they know and what they think they need to know, and it’s important to suss out the differences.) These interviews help us understand the dynamics of the team and the organizational culture.

In this case, we’re our own client, so we sat down and asked each other some fundamental questions

• What is it we want to know that we don’t know now?
  
• What are we going to do with what we learn?
  
• What are the people, places, things, behaviors, etc. that we think we want to focus on.
  
• How broadly or tightly do we want to draw the scope of the exploration (at least at the outset-this can change as the project moves forward). In this case, to what extent might we want to be looking at bigger categories like content, entertainment, free time?

The way we answer these project definition questions will have a huge affect on how the work unfolds. As in most projects, we’ll be looking for the sweet spot that is constrained enough to give the project a clear focus but open enough to leave room for the unexpected.