Join for me on March 13th for a UXPA International webinar.

We Already Knew That: When Research Findings Fail to Land

Sometimes when we share research findings, we hear back, “We already knew that.” In this talk, I’ll examine why that happens, and what we can do about it. Sometimes, it’s a cognitive bias, called hindsight bias and also known as the “knew it all along” phenomenon. But there are other causes and we can adjust our approach to research to try and limit this all-too-common challenge.

Register here; all webinars listed here.

I recently presented Stop Solving Problems! as part of the CEDIM Innovation Talk series. The 40 minute video is embedded below, and on YouTube here.

The old maxim says we should “Find a need and fill it;” while at a one level that is certainly true, even in this era of fetishized disruption, organizations seem to easily fall in love with the idea of being in the problem-solving business.

In this webinar, Steve reviews a number of different mindsets for creating products and services, consider their benefits and risks, and challenge you to go beyond a fixing mentality.

It’s another busy week here at Portigal as we are aflurry with a webinar, a kickoff, and a retreat:

• Steve will be giving his virtual seminar Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization tomorrow!
• We are kicking off a new project with a compressed timeline so we are ready to hit the ground running.
• Tamara will be cultivating her creative spirit at The Journey retreat in Oregon and offering two workshops.
• What we’re consuming: Gherkin’s Sandwich Shop, Morimoto and inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity.

On April 17 I’ll be presenting a UIE webinar about Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization. Sign up here!

To the delight of UX designers everywhere, organizations today increasingly conduct user-centered research methods like surveys, focus groups, and usability testing.

But what can we learn beyond the office environment? Isn’t user observation among the most powerful UX design research techniques we can do?

Yes! So Steve Portigal will describe the techniques, processes, and discussion points you can use to make it happen in your organization. And once you find out how to quell cultural or budgetary resistance to fieldwork, then you can create more analytical designs that make users jump for joy.

You’ll gain user insight before you need it.

• Identify opportunities to learn about users
• Conduct specialized interviews beyond just “talking to people”

Advocate for the adoption of contextual research

You’ll become a change agent in your organization.

• Understand how markets and processes relate to one another
• Discuss benefits and drawbacks for both stakeholders and users

Maximize the organizational impact of any research you do

You’ll start to establish research agendas from the get-go.

• Integrate synthesis and analysis in any approved project
• Create research outputs that are relevant to your stakeholders

Engage the rest of the organization in contextual research

You’ll make your process and outputs more visible.

• Tackle entrenched belief structures with hands-on techniques
• Involve teams in identifying patterns and themes

Please sign up here. If you can’t make the scheduled time, you can also get a recording of the event.

Some relevant articles I’ve seen lately that might relate to this topic are
How to tell managers they’re wrong about UX research and Organizational Challenges for UX Professionals

We were here last week, working hard on exactly the same things we were working hard on the week before, so while we could have simply done a copy-paste-post, we took a week off from This-Week-@ing. But it’s Monday again and we’re back, baby!

• We’re editing (and more to the point – rendering) video, getting our decks in a row, all to wrap up an in-depth and exciting study. We’ll be following up this week’s presentation with a creative workshop as well
• I’m getting the final slides together for my upcoming webinar, Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization. This is some new material that I’m very excited about. Have you signed up yet?
• Party time! Excellent! I’ll be checking out the book launch party for Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job
• I’m sitting on a pile of helpful, challenging, provocative, and encouraging notes from reviewers who are helping me with my book; it’s time to start editing and rewriting!
• Conference proposals to go out, acceptance (or not) for other conference proposals to come back, article outline to be shopped around, article copy to be crafted
• What we’re consuming: Imagine: How Creativity Works, The Taste of Others

I’ll be presenting my webinar User Research Analysis: You’ve Done All This Research, Now What on Thursday, April 7. This webinar is based on a workshop that I’ve led in Savannah, Atlanta, Hong Kong, Portland, Vancouver, and San Francisco, among other many other places. I’m always hearing from people who are interested but who aren’t in those cities at those times, but with a webinar, anyone anywhere can participate. I’ve adapted the workshop to suit the webinar format and added a bunch of new content based on what I’ve observed working (or not working) in the workshops, not to mention some of the latest techniques we’re using in our work.

Use the promotion code PORTIGAL when you register and get free lifetime access to the webinar that you can share with everyone in your organization. (A $40 value.) If you can’t make the webinar when it happens (time zone challenges? conflicting meetings?) you can use this code when register and watch it later at your convenience.

Check out a quick preview, below

Also available: last year’s UIE Virtual Seminar on Deep Dive Interviewing Techniques.

On April 7, I’ll be presenting a UIE Virtual Seminar called User Research Analysis Techniques: You’ve Done All This Research, Now What?. Sign up here!

Steve will explain synthesis, or how you turn field data into insights. Simply put, Synthesis is an iterative approach to sense-making. Steve will show you that it’s about both the experience you have as a researcher gathering that data AND the rigor of processing that data. You’ll learn the steps and types of output and deliverables that we produce as we go through the process.

Steve will help you explore ideation, where turning insights into solutions actually happens. Here’s where your hard work pays off! Ideation is about creating a wide-range of possible solutions across a wider set of areas than you can act on.

Oh, and if there’s really no such thing as a bad idea, how do you benefit from the ones that feel like they are? Steve will show you the power of “bad ideas ” and how they help you get unstuck.

Check out a quick preview, below

Also available: last year’s UIE Virtual Seminar on Deep Dive Interviewing Techniques.

• Virtual Seminar: Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets by Steve Portigal [IxDA Munich] – “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind”, Steve Portigal’s virtual seminar will be shown in our next meeting. The seminar lasts 90 minutes and it will be followed by a discussion. June 30th 7 p.m., IDEO, Hochbrückenstraße 6, 80331 Munich
• IndieReader – For Self-Published Books and the Readers Who Love Them – IndieReader is a venue for you to find and purchase books published and produced by the people who wrote them. Think of these books like handmade goods, produced in small numbers, instead of the mass-marketed stuff you'd find at a super store. And every book on the IndieReader site is reviewed prior to acceptance, guaranteeing that you'll find the "cream-of-the-indie crop". Why is this so important? Because today more than ever, almost everything we produce gets co-opted by corporate culture, turned into a business model, reformulated and churned out like soap with the simple intent to appeal to as many people as possible. In a world where almost everything is packaged by committee, IndieReader offers you books with a single voice: the writer's own.
• The Expanding Definition of Craft Beer [NYTimes.com] – In a world where Nabisco sells “artisan” Wheat Thins, the designation of Samuel Adams as a craft beer seems perfectly fair. But the Boston Beer Company, the brewery that was founded in 1984 and makes Sam Adams, is on the verge of outgrowing its coveted craft status — at least according to the Brewers Association, a national trade group that defines craft brewers in part as producing fewer than two million barrels a year. The federal government defines small brewers similarly, imposing a lower excise tax on those that stay under the two-million-barrel threshold. Mr. Koch predicted that Boston Beer would surpass the two-million mark by 2012. But help may be on the way: John Kerry introduced a bill last month that would increase the yearly production limit for small brewers to six million barrels.
• Icing, a meme drinking game with Smirnoff Ice [NYTimes.com] – The premise of the game is simple: hand a friend a sugary Smirnoff Ice malt beverage and he has to drink it on one knee, all at once — unless he is carrying a bottle himself, in which case the attacker must drink both bottles. Amid suspicion that the trend is an elaborate viral marketing campaign by Smirnoff, which the company has denied, new icing photos are posted daily on various blogs, Twitter and Facebook — including scenes from graduations and weddings — and sent directly to a Web site, BrosIcingBros.com. The game has exposed the mercurial line between guerrilla advertising and genuine social media trends, raising questions about how young consumers can know when they have co-opted a brand for their own purposes, and when that brand has co-opted them.
• Rethink the Book project from Berlin University of the Art – In cooperation with the schoolbook publisher Cornelsen Verlag a student group of the „New Media Studio Class” experimented with the digital possibilities to think anew the book as media. They linked the book by visual codes with methods of "Augmented Reality". They embeded sensor technology for new forms of interaction and used new methods of production engineering like "laser cutting" to model the book as an object or to publish personalized schoolbooks. In the exhibition they show several prototypes like electronic origami paper or an interactive periodic table.
  (via @cora_l)

• Remixing Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets [Things On Top] – This remix of tweets from “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets”, a UIE virtual seminar by Steve Portigal, gives you some of the answers. I missed out on Steve’s webinar, unfortunately, and decided to check out what others had tweeted about it using the hashtag #uievs. Luckily, there had been lots of activity and discussion, and I felt that Twitter provided me with quite a comprehensive summary of Steve’s stunning insights in to interview techniques. For my own sake and for future reference, I decided to compile that Twitter timeline in to a short document.
• Remembrance of Candy Bars Past [WSJ.com] – These companies are the face of what the candy industry in America used to be. Each city or region had its own factories, and people could actually see and smell the place where their favorite sweets were made. Regional candies are a dying breed. Today, there are perhaps a dozen such concerns left in America. The rest have been swallowed up, or put out of business, by the massive consolidation that has shaped the modern confectionery industry. Thousands of candy bars have disappeared along the road to consolidation, including such recent delicacies as the peanut butter-and-chocolate pods known as Oompahs, the treacherously chewy Bit-o-Choc, the glorious, nougat-and-caramel-filled Milkshake, and the Bar None, an ingenious marriage of peanuts and wafers dipped in chocolate. Also gone (but not forgotten) is the curiously alluring Marathon Bar, a braided rope of chocolate and caramel whose wrapper featured a ruler on the back.

On January 28th, I’ll be presenting a UIE Virtual Seminar on Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets. Sign up here!

You”ll learn how to ask great interview questions and take your user research to the next level. You’ll see that the best information comes from what Steve calls “breathing their air”-getting out of YOUR environment and into THEIR environment. Empathy brings about the best understanding. In this not-to-miss-seminar, you’ll get:

• How to prepare your Field Guide: the complete overview of interviewing questions and other techniques that go beyond the spoken interrogative.
• An understanding of how to build rapport with your users through listening, and the many ways to do that effectively.
• How to work with varying levels of experience and expertise, in your user community, and even within your own team.
• Techniques to use when any opportunity presents itself, even those chance encounters with users.
• Lots of great examples. The good, the bad, and yes, the ugly.

This seminar will provide techniques for your design team getting them to a solid understanding of your customers’ and users’ needs. You’ll come away with techniques and tools you’ll want to put to use right away. Once you do, you’ll see immediate benefits and better designs as a result.

Check out a quick preview of the session, and register here. Use promotion code CHITTAHCHATTAH to get lifetime free access to the recording after the fact (normally a separate cost).

The 2008 documentary Tyson by James Toback is a compelling and revealing work. From a technical perspective, it’s a fun watch because Toback experiments with visual fragmenting and layered storytelling styles. In terms of subject matter, one would be hard-pressed to find a juicier, more tabloid-soaked figure to focus on, especially for those of us who came of age in the 80s. I walked away from the film with a much more nuanced and complex, though still ambivalent, view of Mike Tyson as a powerhouse boxer, as a convergent cultural figure, and, finally, as a very complicated human being.

But there was one moment that stood out, and it hammered home the incredible power of a simple interviewing technique: silence. At one point about mid-way through the film, Tyson was yammering in a very straightforward way about the fact that his desire to box and dominate stemmed from his being bullied as a young boy (predictable!). Toback must have sensed something simmering just below the surface, because when Tyson finished this train of thought Toback just let it sit. And sit. And sit. As the audience sits. And sits. Until Tyson looks back up with a completely different expression, almost with a different personality, and bares the real, brutal truth. It’s a moment when time kind of stops; I gasped out loud. It’s this kind of thrilling moment that we experience in our best interviews, when the person (“consumer!”) goes beyond just citing facts or recounting stories, to communicating to us, and our clients, something surprising, something of real value and meaning.

If you liked this interview tip, you’ll love this: Steve will be talking about his interviewing secrets at the UIE virtual seminar on the 28th of this month!

• Forrester’s 2010 Customer Experience Rankings [Customer Experience Matters] – # Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. Most of the top rated companies on the list are retailers. Hotels also grabbed three of the top 20 spots. Interestingly, three financial services firms also cracked the top 20: credit unions, SunTrust Bank, and Vanguard.
  # Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. The bottom 11 companies on the list came from only four industries: five health insurance plans (United Healthcare, Medicaid, Anthem, and CIGNA), three ISPs (Charter Communications, Comcast, and Qwest), two TV service providers (Charter Communications and Comcast), and one credit card provider (HSBC).
• Can Design Change Behavior? [Stanford School of Engineering] – Because behavior can be influenced—not just observed—it provides an important opportunity for tackling complex challenges such as sustainability. That opportunity is perhaps best addressed with design…With this outlook, Banerjee says he is excited to be one of the principal investigators in a new project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in which he is working with other Stanford professors who have expertise in behavioral sciences, communications, human-computer interaction, and behavioral economics. The team aims to create interventions that influence behavior to bring about significant reductions in energy use. But what designers understand well is that people are “predictably irrational” and influenced by emotional as well as rational criteria, Banerjee says.
• The Art of Asking the Question [UIE Brain Sparks] – Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

  Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen—integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

  Update: Use promotion code CHITTAHCHATTAH to get lifetime free access to the recording after the fact (normally a separate cost)

On January 28, I’ll be presenting a UIE Virtual Seminar entitled Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets.

Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen-integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

I’ve also put together this quick preview to get you more of a sense of what I’m going to cover.

Sign up here for this informative event!

Update: Use promotion code CHITTAHCHATTAH to get lifetime free access to the recording after the fact (normally a separate cost)

I signed up for a webinar but was unable to attend. But I got a copy of the presentation, and although I’m sure it made a lot more sense when the presenter was explaining it, I had to laugh at this screen

The source is Productscan, so one can assume it has something to do with the success of new product introductions. But a product launch and an idea are not the same, are they? And how are they using innovative vs. not-so-innovative? And what’s the vertical axis, exactly?

Today we “attended” a webinar about innovation in services. The talk was to create some buzz for an upcoming IIR/PDMA conference about Service Innovation Design and Development and was presented by Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight.

The slides and recorded audio may be forthcoming (although there was a lot of technical problems that really took away from the whole experience) but in the meantime, they’ve got a very detailed report from a study of the service innovation process available as a PDF here. The first few pages will give you a reasonable overview of the talk.

Some tidbits and thoughts:

1. Services are the dominant economic force in developed countries, but the buzz/mindshare/process is around the creation of products.

2. Some of the service companies described were surprising: i.e., Wal-Mart, Home Depot. Is retail a service business? Not in the same way banking is (although it’s interesting that they call their offerings products). Not in the same way hospitality is, either. Maybe this is a commonly understood distinction but it wasn’t clear to me.

Is software a service? If it comes in a box (i.e., Adobe Illustrator)? What if it’s on the web (i.e., Google Docs)? What if it’s tied to a product (i.e., iTunes)? Or resident on a device (i.e., Windows CE)?

3. The IHIP framework dates back to 1978 and is the classic articulation of what differentiates services from goods. IHIP stands for inseparability, heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability.

• Inseparability – Unlike a product which can be taken home after purchase and used later, services are consumed in the same time and place where they are purchased.
• Heterogeneity – Although each product produced can be identical, the experience of interacting with a service is always going to be different from customer to customer.
• Intangibility – You can see and touch a product before you buy it; you can’t experience a service experience until you experience it.
• Perishability – You can count how many products you have on hand; you can’t taken inventory of a service.