Posts tagged “deliverable”

This Week @ Portigal

Here’s the latest on our end

  • Infrastructure? Who needs it! After last week’s challenges (resolution still pending) on the water for our kitchen, today PG&E finally made good on their repeated promise to only offer intermittent power throughout the day. So we’re in and out, in cafes, and waiting hopefully for full service to return.
  • We’re taking last week’s flurry of Bay Area and Sacramento interviews and very rapidly turning that into a deliverable. We’re committed to finishing up this week (which is about as rapid as we’ve ever done something like this, admittedly with a bit of trepidation) but it looks like our client has some scheduling gremlins emerging at the last minute.
  • It’s San Francisco Design Week, a time to hang out at other firms, talking to our friends, and eating-and-drinking from their free and sumptuous spreads. Maybe we’ll see you around (we’ll be the ones with our mouths full).
  • We’re hiring!
  • I’m in some near-final stages with the book, focusing on the images, a lot of which I’m crowdsourcing from other research folks. Hooray, community!
  • Do you have a fieldwork War Story? Please share it with us!
  • We’re moving ahead on upcoming talks at CPSI, San Francisco/Bay Area ACM, and WebVisions Barcelona.
  • What we’re consuming: Stanley Park Noble Pilsner, Crunchie Bar, Hyperbole TV.

This Week @ Portigal

It’s one of those weeks where everyone comes back together after being away. Digging out of email, setting up meetings that have been on pause, and following up all those things that you pushed off several weeks ago, knowing there was impending travel.

  • What happened at UX Lx? What happened at the Phoenix Design Summit? We’ll be scrambling to find an opportunity to catch each other up on our travels, eatings, networkings, and work. Look for some blog posts as we share some bits and pieces.
  • It’s deliverable time. We’re putting the final touches on the findings from our gamer research and meeting with the team later this week to discuss the implications for their products.
  • What’s up next? As one project wraps, another kajillion are in various states of emergence. We’re writing proposals, revisiting year-old proposals, meeting with new prospects, going through corporate vendor approval processes.
  • We’ll be at the IXDA-SF event (“Designers with drinks”) later this week. Will you?

What we’re consuming: Game of Thrones, Phoenix Mountain Preserve, Ribadouro, Man or Muppet.

This week @ Portigal

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

This Week @ Portigal

People often ask us “Just what the heck are you people up to these days?” (Sometimes they just say “Wassup?” but we just figure they are stuck in another decade). We’ve been enjoying posts like the Weekending updates from our new friend Julian Bleecker and we’ve always wanted people to know that real people work here (not just ridiculously brilliant innovator-bots) so while this might be a bit of a departure for All This Chittah Chattah, let us welcome you to the first in what we intend to be a regular series of updates about what’s going on with our team!

  • We tore into the New Year with an off-site planning meeting to talk about where we want to head with our little team over this next year. While a change in venue meant we didn’t get to sample American Grilled Cheese Kitchen, we did enjoy a little Freedom From Choice cocktail to unwind from an intense day of future-envisioning
  • We’re kicking off a new project with a very tech-forward organization. We’ve been working this team in a training capacity to help them transform their marketing practice into a more user-centered approach, but now they’ve asked us to work with them to bring their professional and consumer customers more deeply into their culture
  • Two of the projects we wrapped up at the end of December come back to life briefly as we meet with more stakeholders to share results and discuss the business implications
  • We’ll be joining our office-mates at Bayley.Co for a Welcome Back soiree at Pacifica’s newly-reopened Moonraker


Good times!

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