Watch Steve on Good Morning UX

Thanks to Rafael Burity and Rodrigo Lemes for having me as a guest on Good Morning UX. The one-hour episode is embedded below and can also be found on the episode home page and YouTube.

Are we really doing research? With Steve Portigal - Good Morning UX

We usually have this life training to ask questions, but it doesn’t make us researchers, to be honest. Especially when we are talking about learning from users, customers, stakeholders, etc.

As designers and researchers, we have this kind of “power” to help companies to avoid mistakes, bad ideas, and guesses. It has been becoming a huge differential in the industry of digital products, but to really take advantage of this ability is important to have some points in perspective.

This show will pass through some questions like:

Are we doing research well with a real impact on the business?

How a designer can be prepared to do it in the real world, in a short time but with quality?

Is there a difference between leaders with research or design backgrounds?

For this, we invited Steve Portigal a researcher who has interviewed hundreds of people and with a huge experience working in telecommunications, banking, media, energy, and e-commerce industries. He is the author of some important books and host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast. He helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights.

Listen to Steve on The Informed Life

Thanks to Jorge Arango for a great conversation on The Informed Life podcast. The half-hour episode is embedded below, available at the podcast site, and wherever you get yer podcasts. The episode page also has a transcript.

And I have found, over the last few years, that in addition to providing tactics and kind of mindsets and sort of, “here’s what I advise and recommend for you to be successful in doing this work.” In these interactions that we have in kind of these feedback sessions, the role that I’m often playing is in giving people confidence and being able to say, “oh, the thing that you are describing is very common.” Because I think people have some experience, it feels weird, and they’re like, “well, I’ve screwed this up.” And so I’m working hard to give people confidence and say… to affirm their experience, to validate the uncertainty and struggle they felt in it. And then maybe say, “yeah, here’s a thing that you can try,” or, ” you know, there are tactics to kind of address this.”

But they need the confidence as much as they need the tactics. Because they might get to those tactics on their own, but if they feel like, “this is not the right way to do it, I’m screwing this up,” because it is a weird thing, because you may find yourself feeling like you’re screwing up when you actually are succeeding, because you’re dealing with the absolute uncertainty of another person who you don’t know, who you’re spending time trying to get to know a little bit… it’s entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable. And so, all the ways that we expect ourselves to be successful is to be controlling for all that uncertainty, but it’s inherently uncontrollable to some extent.

So yeah, the more you do it, the more you either make mistakes or feel uncertain about an experience that you’re having and reflect on it, whether it’s through listening to a podcast where people are talking about this or reading a book, or, working with someone who’s more experienced, who can reflect back to you. Those are all ways that we do become more confident with these sort of… surprising or unexpected aspects of what the nature of the work is.

We say we value innovation and creativity…but do we?

It shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone reading this that the uncertainty of something new and innovative creates a feeling of risk, and can discourage the pursuit of a creative option.

Some research from 2012 (The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas) delves into that further.

“Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most.”

Via the New York Times,

“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” said Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Agony was another one.”

A new study shows how people unfavorably evaluate others who are described as being creative. It appears that even the mention of their creativity (as opposed to experiencing it directly) was sufficient to cause a negative assessment of the creative person.

Like many biases, being aware of their existence can be a first step to addressing them, but like many biases, their baked-in nature can make for a significant challenge to overcome.

Watch Steve on The Service Design Show

Thanks to Marc Fonteijn for having me back on The Service Design Show. The one-hour episode is embedded below and can also be found on YouTube.

User research - what to do when your company doesn't get it / Steve Portigal / Episode #127

Everything in service design starts with user research. But as you’ve probably experienced often it’s challenging to get the time and resources to do proper research.

And when research is already being done by an organisation it’s often not the type of research that we’d like to see.

It can be frustrating to see that user research isn’t making the difference you know it can.

So what does it take to push user research beyond it’s current limitations?

Author and industry icon, Steve Portigal has been thinking about this topic for some time now.

I invited Steve (back) on the Show to share his thinking and together explore what it takes to take user research to the next level.

And also ask the question: What is that next level in the first place?

Without proper user research you can’t do good service design. So it’s our job to make it more relevant and impactful.

This episode will show you how.

Listen to Steve on the Nodes of Design Podcast

Thanks to Ravi Tej for having me on the Nodes of Design podcast. The 35-minute episode is embedded below and can also be found on the podcast site.

In this episode, Steve shared wonderful insights on user interviews and why we do user interviews in design; we then discussed the framework of interviews using which we can gain great insights from users and few tips on actively listening and note-taking during interviews. In the latter part, Steve recommended five do’s and don’ts that designers/researchers must avoid while doing user interviews

Video of my Delta CX AMA

I recently did an Ask Me Anything session organized by Debbie Levitt of Delta CX. The video is now online.

23 Mar 2021: Office Hours/AMA, special guest Steve Portigal

We went for about 75 minutes and talked about learning to balance all different pressures when leading an interview, encouraging teams to support the need for research, helping teams to act on user research findings, and a lot more. Check it out!

What you asked/What they heard

In this video from 2016, basketball player Taurean Prince, in a post-game press conference, responds to a question about the team’s rebound performance with an explanation of how rebounds work.


I can’t tell from this clip if there’s an actual miscommunication or if Prince is being intentional, and for my purposes here, I don’t suppose it really matters.

It’s not uncommon to ask a question and get an answer to a different question, and while it can throw the conversation off, it can be a visceral reminder that we have different basic assumptions and that we need to work to overcome those, to bridge that gaps. Those miscommunications are awkward but they invite us to make the effort to realign.

The other day I met with a group over Zoom. As happens on video meetings, people adjust their video to communicate something about themselves, manage their privacy, etc. One person stood right in front of a heavily blurred background. Another was in front of a block of color with their company logo in the corner. Another person was clearly in a garage converted to a home office, and one person was in front of (what I assumed was) a painted scene, perhaps from some artwork. We each took turns introducing ourselves.

When we got to the person with the painted scene, I asked a followup question: “Can I ask about your background?”

They proceeded to describe a bit of their educational experience and how it led to the nickname that they go by nowadays.

My question should have been “Can I ask about your Zoom background?” but what they heard was “Can I ask about your personal background?” Given the nature of a video-platform-mediated conversation, I had forgotten that what they are showing of themselves doesn’t actually match how they see themselves (e.g, if they have turned off self-view, they aren’t even seeing that painted scene themselves).

I was mortified because the question they heard might have been too personal, perhaps asking them to explain or justify an unconventional nickname. I’m curious, of course, but I also have no right to start asking personal questions in the first few minutes of meeting someone! This is not how I want to start off our relationship!

I laughed in embarrassment, and tried to create a teaching moment, modeled by me and my own mistake, but even explaining that I asked the question poorly, the other person felt apologetic for misunderstanding me! Perhaps we established some rapport through this misunderstanding, if I’m idealistic I can imagine that we both worked together to find our shared space of understanding after this mistake (my mistake, for sure!).

The answer, by the way, is that what I assumed was “art” was an image from a video game. Of course video games can be art!

How Garfield Helped Me Make Peace With a Culture in Decline

I really enjoyed this thoughtful (and gentle) analysis (NYT, Archive.is) of Garfield, brands, culture, consistency, and nostalgia. Despite the proliferation of arch/snark Garfield remixes, the author considers them authentically.

Little did I know that iteration would become the dominant model of 21st-century entertainment: beloved intellectual property endlessly spun off, rebooted and crossed over; culture not as a series of works but as a constellation of reliable draws. It is true that I am getting older, but it is also true that culture can get worse: less surprising, more reliant on references and brands, familiar to the point of revulsion. I worry that I have witnessed these changes in my short lifetime, although I cannot really know. As a hedge against uncertainty, Garfield variants offer a course of conditioning.

Listen to Steve on the Enterprise Product Leadership Podcast



Thanks to Daniel Elizalde for having me on the Enterprise Product Leadership podcast to talk about user research, especially in enterprise and industrial organizations. The audio (51 min) is embedded above, and available on the episode page.

We discuss the complexities of doing user research in a B2B context, the challenges of getting access to users, the need to understand customers’ pain (as opposed to only focusing on usability), and how to influence your organization to conduct more research. Steve also shares his advice on how to build a practice that encourages ongoing user research.

Topics

  • Steve’s career background and the work he does today as an experienced user researcher
  • What a user researcher does and why it is important
  • Invaluable tips for user researchers
  • Why companies struggle to understand their customers’ challenges
  • How a company can become more user-centered
  • How to enable a culture that empowers everyone
  • Why you may want to bring on a user researcher or an external expert
  • The nuances of being a team player and contributing to the success of the company
  • How to challenge baseline assumptions to move forward and grow as a company
  • The differences between B2C and B2B user research
  • The challenges of user research (and how to overcome them)
  • Why user research is not only incredibly invaluable but needs to be figured out for your company
  • Why culture is critical to research
  • How to support leaders in helping transform the organization’s mindset into a customer-centric culture
  • Proactive vs. reactive research

Tips

  • Keep in mind user-research is a skill. You can read about it, take classes, listen to podcasts, but you also have to practice.
  • Practice can include: knowing when to do research, knowing what research to do, how to go about actually doing the research, learning how to leverage the research that you’ve done, and learning how to help others understand the research.
  • And be sure to give yourself the chance to get better. All of this takes time. Be compassionate and understand that research is not just binary; there are many, many facets of it.

Series

About Steve