Posts tagged “interview”

Steve interviewed by Tomer Sharon

steve-and-tomer

I was interviewed by Tomer Sharon (as part of his incredible series of interviews for It’s Our Research). Our conversation ranged from about why it’s hard for people to do user research, the collaboration between agency and clients, and how to think about organizational and stakeholder challenges as design problems.

The 22-minute video is embedded below.

Steve Portigal It's Our Research interview

Diane’s War Story: Interrupted Interview

Diane Loviglio, User Experience Researcher at Mozilla, has a story that reminds us our participants are part of larger systems that we don’t have insight into when we’re recruiting them.

We walk down a nondescript hallway, me and my team’s designer and engineer. It’s the first time the three of us have been in the field together. I’m confident and excited, but also a little nervous that our engineer will start asking off-topic questions like “How many lines of code did that take?” during the interview. We find the door of the gaming studio and we walk inside – straight into the kitchen. The walls are brightly painted, the plan is open, the kitchen is right in front of us, but there’s no reception area in sight. So now the three of us are just standing in the hustle and bustle of the studio and aren’t sure where to go next. We felt a little awkward. Eventually, I started to text our host, but she appeared before I finished typing the message.

Melissa (that’s what I’ll call her) warmly greets us. She had high energy, but you could also tell things were a little chaotic that day. She walks us 500 feet to one of their two conference rooms and then she goes to get her engineering counterpart, who we would also be talking to for the next 90 minutes.

We set up the Flip video camera and unpacked our notebooks and paper and markers for the drawing exercise at the end. Mike (that’s what I’ll call him) comes in with Melissa. He’s much more reserved than she is, which was expected, but we get started and things are going great. They are playing off each other well – they both had different perspectives on the subject we were studying and that was coming out very well in the interview.

55 minutes into the session, we are completely interrupted by an angry guy slamming the door open and barging into our conference room. He knew we were doing a private interview in there, because the walls were glass, but he barged in just the same. He starts yelling at Melissa and Mike – as if we wouldn’t pay attention unless he used his outdoor voice – “we’re meeting with [important company name] next door – let’s go!” Who the hell was this guy? And how obnoxious for him to walk in on our meeting without knocking or excusing himself. He didn’t even make eye contact with us.

Melissa was taken aback. This other meeting wasn’t even on her schedule, so she was a little confused, but she tried to handle it and excused herself to go talk to this lunatic. I stopped the Flip, and without prying into the details, tried to get a read on how important this meeting was and if we should start packing up to go. Mike just sat there silently, as if this behavior was completely normal and things would pass over soon. He didn’t have any kind of reaction to the incident at all. We told him we could finish this at another time if Melissa wasn’t free – maybe over the phone or email. He just shrugged. Melissa walked back into our formerly private room, was very apologetic and said that we could continue, but she was obviously distracted. She was under the impression that we would just be another 5 minutes and I told her that this was actually a 90 minute interview so we still had 30 minutes to go, but we could hurry and wrap it up in 15. She paused for a moment, and we thought “Okay, that’s our cue. We’ll leave and let you be.” But, Melissa said that Mike wasn’t needed in the meeting after all, and he offered to stay and talk with us. So we plopped back down and said, “Oh. That would be great.” Melissa apologized again for not realizing how long our meeting was supposed to be and promised to reply to questions over email instead. I gave her a hug as she left the room. She looked like she needed one. And, I gave her that sincere “Gosh, I hope you don’t get fired today” thank you. She left and went into the conference room adjacent to us and we heard the call begin, because the walls didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling.

With Melissa gone, we asked Mike the next question and realized we’d be spending probably no more than 10 more minutes with him. Not more than 1 minute later, as soon as we started to get comfortable again, the crazy guy comes back in and starts yelling at Mike! “We rescheduled this for you – we need you on this call. Now. If you don’t come, we can’t close this deal.” Okay, now we realized this was a bad situation. Mike casually said, “OK”, got up to leave, and asked us to email him the questions.

They just left us in the conference room, all alone. We packed up our stuff and awkwardly made our way to the front door, none of us saying a word. We walked down the nondescript hallways in silence, making faces at each other to share our mutual feeling of “what the hell was that?” but we kept our cool and made it out of the building. On the way back to the car, the only thing I could do was apologize profusely to my designer and engineer. “I’m so sorry guys, that has never happened to me before. I feel so icky. Oof, so sorry guys. Usually, my interviews are a lot more professional than that and people don’t come in yelling at the people you are interviewing.”

So, we spent the car ride back pretending to barge into each others’ interviews, laughing it off and trying to re-group for the rest of the day.

Steve’s War Story: It’s All Going To Burn

My colleague and I showed up to learn about our research participant’s smart house. In the initial part of the interview, just trying to learn a bit about the family before we learned about the house, the participant (I’ll call him Jon) told me they home-schooled their kids. I was young and naive enough that I didn’t have a clue what other factors that typically signifies. When I asked about why they made that decision, Jon really snarled at me, I think because he was far more interested in showing me his gear than talking about his family, but I just explained that we wanted to learn about him as well. He told me that they didn’t support the school system and their attitude towards alternative lifestyles. That’s when I realized I was in an environment where the values were just really different than my own. Okay, no problem, that’s par for the course for the job. We spent a good long time after that checking out the details of a really incredible smart home system that he had built, cobbled, and coded together. Really incredible. Yet there was a constant theme of monitoring and control, of using the technology to check up on the kids from other rooms. Still, all good information. As we were getting to the reflective part of the interview, wrapping up or nearly so, Jon abruptly changed gears mid-explanation.

Jon: “Of course, none of this really matters because it’s all going to burn.”

Me + Colleague: [Puzzled silence]

Jon: “And now I have a question for you fellas: Have you accepted Christ as your savior?”

In my life in general, this is the sort of question I’m utterly unprepared for. In this interview, I knew it was coming, some part of my body was tense from the discussion of the rationale for home schooling, knowing that I was in a slightly vulnerable situation that was going to emerge at some point. So while I was dreading it all along, perhaps it came as some kind of relief. Watching the video later, I saw the most deadpan version of myself I’d ever seen: “…………Well…..perhaps that’s a question for another time.”

I was stuck, I couldn’t dishonor all the rapport-building and honest curiosity I’d been exhibiting for the past two hours, but now we were trapped. My colleague spluttered helplessly in an endless loop of reflecting back what Jon had said previously (“So…..it sounds like you’re saying…”). I kept waiting for my opening for the “Well, time to go!” but Jon really wanted to talk to us about what we should be doing and thinking, with respect to Christ. It seems this went on for a very long time, but we finally made it to the doorway. Jon asked us to wait, and went off to get something. We should have made a break for it, but we were ensnared by the requirements of politeness in our researcher role. He returned with some bible-related literature and exhorted us – in terms that would make the Glengarry Glen Ross salesmen proud – to follow up. Another eternity (if you will) and we were finally able to step away.

We made it to the car, drove a block and erupted in hysterical, gasping laughter. It was the laughter of relief, the kind of manic giggling you’d get from 10-year-olds who just got away from the angry shopkeeper. We had some choice words about Jon, once we were safe.

The experience was terribly uncomfortable; I could not find a way to follow my own values as a researcher and still protect myself from a conversation that was personally risky (as a Jew, I’ve had my share of proselytizing/Hell/Christ “discussions” and really don’t ever want to have one again). As a researcher, I am interested in and have respect for Jon’s views on his family, his home, education, and the afterlife. But as a person, I just don’t want to have to reveal my own beliefs or defend them, especially in this sort of setting.

This was more than 10 years ago, I wonder how I would handle it now.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] Shit Painted Gold – [Post-modern detachedly-ironic consumerism makes the brain work hard. We'll tell you these products are crap and that we've not added any value by changing the color, but we have transformed them nonetheless. So, we hope you'll be happy to pay a bit extra for them. Now, please exit through the gift shop.] Nothing looks fancier in your home, office or garbage than shit painted gold. these amazing one of a kind art pieces will legitimize your ability to say to people, "why yes, that shit IS gold" [Thanks, Jeannie Choe!]
  • [from julienorvaisas] What comes after One Day for Design? [AIGA] – [Along with many others, we participated and commented on the 1D4D experience. AIGA hints that they are analyzing conversations and data gathered that day to guide their very reinvention. Stay tuned…] On April 13, we reached out through the existing networks of several prolific tweeters who led exchanges on the future of design, the concerns of today’s designers and the opportunities for design communities…Together with our partners in this project, the independent branding collective VSA Partners, we are now synthesizing the comments and discussions generated through this event. We will share the results here as we summarize them and develop ways for AIGA to respond. In June, our national board and chapter leaders will review all of this research from the past year—including the results from “One Day”—and work with us to outline the next steps. This is the year that AIGA will pivot toward new forms of serving the profession and its members.
  • [from steve_portigal] Pink Tools for Women: Learn today, Teach tomorrow, Build forever. – [Had this one sitting around forever. Love the message of empowerment; I'm willing to buy the pink-as-brand and NOT pink-as-shallow-way-of-feminizing-design but what else are they doing (besides Tupperware business model) to make these products specifically for women?] Founded by three women deeply entrenched in do-it-yourself projects, Tomboy Tools was launched in 2000 as the dream-turned-reality of being able to provide women with hands-on education, high quality tools and a fun way to make a living from home. Our Mission Statement: To build confidence and empower women through education, quality tools and an independent business opportunity. Today, while our mission statement rings as true as ever, our slogan is shorter and more concise. Our slogan underscores the power of Tomboy Tools in the marketplace and the value we provide both to female customers seeking hands-on education with high quality tools and Home Consultants looking for a great career.
  • [from steve_portigal] Conversations With Bert: Andy Samberg [YouTube] – [As a fellow introvert, I recognize Bert's slight shift into a more deliberate and mannered "interview mode." While he's not quite Terry Gross (and has a way to go to do the type of interviewing that we do), this short clip is a good source for a number of interviewing techniques, mixing equally between "what to do" and "what not to do." I'll have to use this in my next workshop and ask people to make note of the ways that Bert is successful or unsuccessful as he asks open-ended questions, reveals his own perspectives, redirects the conversation, feeds back, acknowledges what Andy says, and asks follow-ups.] Sesame Street's Bert sits down with comedian and Saturday Night Live cast member, Andy Samberg, to talk about life, literature, cuisine and of course, socks.
  • [from julienorvaisas] Memories destroyed in a flash [The Independent] – [Nice discussion of pros and cons, and implications of the broad transition to digital photos. This cultural shift will have huge implications generationally.] Spend a few minutes watching a Facebook feed and you quickly see it is not just our viewing experience that has changed. The way we store and display our pictures has radically altered the nature and type of photograph we take. A high proportion of photos on social networking sites tend to be posed self-portraits, the telltale arm holding the camera often hoving into view at the side. The breadth and scope of the pictures we display has decreased. We've moved away from Sontag's idea of photos as being accessories to our memories, towards photos as a brag – a way of telling the world what fun we're having, and how good we look having it. "You can guess it's taken for the benefit of an audience: It's not necessarily better or worse – just different. It was never so much the case with your personal album."

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] Radio Johnny: Steve Portigal on UX Hong Kong [Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction] – [Very excited about UX Hong Kong, coming up in February] Steve discusses the need for all designers to take more time to understand the mountains of data we are forced to sift through before starting into our various processes and methodologies, including the implications of learning about the value of this data in the context of not just the user, but also our respective teammates. Steve also articulates the need for people to become comfortable with ambiguity and how a workshop setting provides a “new lens for looking at these tools”. "The more mature I feel I become as a professional, the more I feel I need to embrace certain kinds of ambiguity and go towards that; not knowing what the answer is. I think there is a lot of pressure on us in our professional lives to say, we’ve got some data, we did the process, and now we’ve got the answer…it can be very threatening to say, I don’t know what’s going to happen…"

Steve interviewed for “Innovative Solutions” book


My thoughts on understanding and designing in emerging countries has just been published in Apala Lahiri’s Innovative Solutions: What Designers Need to Know for Today’s Emerging Markets.

Q: When traveling through and experiencing emerging countries, do you feel that designing for users in these countries needs to be done with any different methods than those used when designing for users in developed countries?

A: The answer is yes, but there are two different cases: design by insiders and design by outsiders. Obviously design by outsiders needs to be handled very differently. As outsiders, we so clearly have no clue as to what is going on: how do you design personal grooming accessories for a society where someone might have trimming or cleaning done by the side of the road? That’s not to say that it can’t be done, but that simply exporting existing solutions, or making small localization tweaks is probably not going to be enough. I know that as recently as 2 years ago mobile phones in India were a shared household item (although I wonder if increased penetration is changing that); there are tremendous implications for the interface design (from login screens to privacy management). Existing Western models for pricing, usability, features, and so on won’t apply. So there’s a real effort that outsiders need to make to really get at those core differences. From the inside, I suspect that the designers are often not going to be designing for themselves (an approach I discourage, anyway), but for another class or culture within their own society; and while they’ve got a leg up on understanding their fellow citizens over us foreigners, there’s always going to be use cases, mental models, and meaning that is new to the designer. By the same token, for categories that are being imported from the developed world (i.e., mobile phones), the designer will have to do some cultural translation, say discovering that mobile phones are not shared among household members in the West. This is probably here more about an approach to design than an actual method, but once you’ve got the approach down, then the methods can follow easily.

An interview with Eric Ludlum of Core77


In 2009, Industrial Design supersite Core77 took the extraordinary step of launching its own product: the Dutch Master bicycle, made in New York City. While they had experimented with the Fila Blu Fom sneaker in 2006, this effort was marked by a more deliberate consideration for product design over mere cross-branding. I talked with Core77 partner Eric Ludlum about the Dutch Master effort and what it revealed. A condensed version of our conversation was published recently in Ambidextrous Magazine (view the PDF here) while the complete interview (which explores some other issues around craft production and craft consumption) is below.

Eric Ludlum: The Dutch Master project is a natural extension for Core and also myself. Having gone through the industrial design program at Pratt Institute, and then founding Core77, covering industrial design, with Stu Constantine and myself always being on the outside of the industry in terms of actually participating, but then covering it, watching it from the inside. The Dutch Master, and previous to the Dutch Master, the Blu Fom shoe have been our attempts at doing some product development and design.

In particular, the Dutch Master being more of a story than a product. Our background is as a magazine and place where design stories get told. So if there’s any kind of expertise we have it’s recognizing good stories and promoting them. With the Dutch Master, we actually got to write the story and promote it.

Steve Portigal: Was there an aspect of that with the story of the Blu Fom shoe?

EL: The Blu Fom was just a name, and actually, the concept behind it came from the model-making material designers used to use – mostly. There’s not too much use of it now, but the insulation foam that would be used to make the mock ups, either ergonomic models or actual look models of products. Definitely from my experience in school back in the mid-’90s, it was a staple of the process. With Core77, it was an insider take on industrial design. It was our insider wink-wink product. Very quintessential ID project. I think it was 2005 that we came out with it, and it had 300 pairs made by Fila. We worked with Phil Russo while he was there. Again, it really central to the story of it and the presentation on the web, pushing that out to other blogs, other web based media.

SP: So when you had this opportunity to write the story for Dutch Master, what is that story?

EL: With the Dutch Master, we wanted to take the starting point with New York City manufacturing. The interest level was there for a bicycle in Core77 because we’re all very interested in bicycling. A few of us actually commute by bike, so it was a natural product choice for us. But once we started getting down to the actual decision about what it was going to be and what the story was going to be, we were looking at New York City and the disappearance of manufacturing, and how really stunning it is to find something still made there.

That was the Worksman frame, and made in New York City for over 100 years. It formed the basis of the project. From there, it was like how do we create a product around it and extend the idea of New York City manufacturing and local production, as well as trying to be saleable. Hit some market price points that would make the project economically viable for us.

SP: That makes me think about who is the target customer. Did you have a sense of that?

EL: I guess there would be two. To some degree, we knew that the bike itself wouldn’t a real profit center for us. There’s the market of the consumer of ideas that’s out there on the Internet. In that case, it’s like a branding exercise for us. To be like, “Here is something we feel represents our nature as a company. Here is a way to communicate it to people.” There’s one market there, which is the much broader market. People consume that product by just seeing it.

Then the actual market for the bike itself: Through the process of developing the bike, the market started to move higher and higher based on this being a craft process where there’s a lot of skilled labor involved with actually producing it. It naturally tends to push the market price point higher. That informs the aesthetics of the products as well. Once you start moving into that higher rent neighborhood, it means that certain things are going to have to look a certain way. So inclusion of other accents on the bike, or an overall aesthetic that matches the rough luck look that you’d see out there in trendy restaurants or hotels.

SP: I had this reaction when I saw the bike, and I saw what it was selling for. I was surprised. I’m not a connoisseur of bikes. I haven’t shopped for a bike. I haven’t bought a new bike in a very, very long time, if ever. It wasn’t an informed perspective, but in general, I think of a bicycle as a commodity product. When I saw that it was more of an exclusive product, with some of what you’re describing it and at that price point, I was really surprised.

It makes me wonder in general about commodities going exclusive. Someone was telling me about heirloom chickens. I believe as a consumer that there’s more quality in those things. I wonder if you have any thoughts about this general movement towards many things being created at a level of – I’ve got to be careful with the word – I’ll call it exclusivity.

EL: Yeah, I think maybe in the case of the chicken as well, but definitely in the bike, the marketplace dictates where the opportunities lie for small run manufacturing or small run production. So the people who are very expert consumers of chickens or bikes, they are a tiny fraction of the overall market. They’re the ones who are willing to pay a premium, so now whatever your product is, it’s going to be a fairly low volume item, meaning that if you were going to have it as a sustainable business, the prices are going to have to have a fairly high margin, so you can keep going.

In the case of the bike, we’re doing them build-to-order, and putting them out there for sale on an ongoing basis. We want orders to trickle in a bit, so that production of the bicycle isn’t a chore that we hate because we’re squeaking just a little bit of profit out of it instead of other things we should be doing that would be making money. For it to be a viable product, it has to have some kind of ongoing benefit to the producer.

I don’t know about the gap between craft production and mass-market, how people would be able to bridge that, some kind of manufactured bespoke or semi-exclusive product. It seems like if the market really does kind of push you to one side or the other.

SP: You’re bringing the the producers frame in. I’m glad to get the benefit of your perspective on it because I think of it as a consumer in categories that I’m involved in as a consumer, like chickens or bikes or ice cream. You made an interesting point early on where you said that looking at what the manufacturing process was going to do to the cost, that then informs the design, the details, the trim, the materials, and so on. It has to be chosen in a way that supported the price point. Is that right?

EL: Yeah, definitely.

SP: So if you’re going to choose to do it in a small manufacturing way, it needs to be done in a way that is beneficial to the producer, and then the sort of details of the design have to send a specific message to the consumer. So you create a coherent story. I hate to bring up chickens again, but kind of a chicken and egg between the whole set of decisions. I guess it comes from choosing to be small manufacturing.

EL: Yeah. As an example, perhaps sports cars or other performance related products. Maybe like high-end electronics. The aesthetic becomes one of communicating that added performance, as an exclusivity or surplus of its abilities. I think that’s something that mass manufacturing picks up on and imitates in the mid-market, like in vehicles, for instance.

SP: There’s a look to an organic farmers’ market. You go into your grocery store, you can find some of those visual cues being replicated.

EL: Right now, it is a trend and will have a life cycle within the marketplace. It starts out as a fringe kind of happening, and then it will move, be adopted, and make its way through. I don’t know if we’re seeing that too much with actual consumer products, but we definitely see it with things like the chocolates or the craft brewing, like micro brews with the larger breweries. Budweiser or Michelob, even though they don’t replicate the taste of craft beers, they’re replicating the packaging and coloration.

SP: I read an article in the New Yorker about the craft brewing movement. They pointed out that micro brewing and craft brewing are actually very different. The scale of micro brewing is enormous relative to scale of craft brewing. You had mass breweries, and you had this micro‚Äëbrewery emerge that entered the public consciousness. That lasted for a while, and now you’ve got this even smaller business able to compete in some way for shelf space and for mind share. That wasn’t possible before.

EL: In that example, micro brews came out at a time when Internet wasn’t around. I feel that the Internet is what has helped drive a lot of the craft – the reemergence of interest in craft across the board. Just from DIY stuff that you see on the web to organizing small social groups or craft fairs or whatever. It seems like it really is the marketing or the communications, essentially. It’s the thing that has changed, where as even in the ’80s when you wanted to make alternative beer, if you wanted to continue to do it and make money off of it, you’d have to scale to a certain size to make it viable. Perhaps now, maybe the ethos of it has come around.

If you can just get by and consider “craft” as a profession and make enough money to support yourself with it, it’s a worthwhile thing to do with your time. Maybe it has gone hand in hand with the actual development of the communication channels that would allow you to sell your product or distribute it to a smaller set of stores or venues has gone hand in hand with emergence of that as a respectable or viable or attractive lifestyle.

SP: One of the threads I wanted to explore with this in the fact that we’re in a recession right now. Lots and lots of ink is being spilled about people giving up on this, not buying new stocks. They’re buying more Spam, or whatever it is we think people are doing.

At the same time, we’re learning about heirloom chickens and Core77 is putting out a higher priced bicycle, for example. Do you see any relationship between those two kinds of forces or events?

EL: With us and the Dutch Master, we knew that it wasn’t going to be a blockbuster for us. It wasn’t going to make a bunch of money. We’re doing it for the sake of doing it, being driven by the impulse to create. The economic climate, that contributed to that. If you’ve got a lack of options to really be productive economically, it is counter intuitive, but there’s a little less pressure for us to measure projects economically. Maybe it’s slightly defeatist, but I guess when it comes back to the value system, if the economic value system is being downplayed for companies or individuals within a certain economic time, you look for other value systems that can justify what you’re doing. In the case of the Dutch Master, the first audience that I mentioned that would consume the idea, if part of the idea was that a web magazine could produce a bike, why not. In a way, it’s an empowering idea. Creating things isn’t solely the domain of big companies or companies that have a focus on producing things. It’s just the idea that we’re pushing forward to that first audience – these things are possible. If you can put together a story behind it, you can probably do it on an individual level.

In our case, it’s throwing support behind the value system of craft, which is basically producing. There is value in making things by hand or just for the sake of producing. A form of expression via product. In our case the economic times have lead us to measure this project in those terms. A large part of it is not economic, it’s more ideas that it represents. I think in the case of crafts on the web, or with industrial design or furniture design, and people who are students or fresh out of school people who end up making projects that aren’t necessarily going to be produced ever, but will go out onto the blogosphere and get a fair amount of publicity, they’re being paid in “ego bucks.” Their idea is receiving some kind of play, not necessarily a direct relationship to some benefit to them in the future, either job offers or having their objects picked up. It’s rewarding itself because they do have this new venue that wasn’t there ten years ago. The web allows their ideas to receive some kind of feedback. It allows them to gather some momentum and enthusiasm from the audience. There’s certainly a part in Dutch Master of getting positive feedback. That’s just encouraging that there’s some kind of payment and producing something that people like. It’s untethered from economic – or the marketplace.

SP: A lot of the projects highlighted on Core77 are things that might fall under the label of bottom of the pyramid, really amazing design solutions where somebody takes materials that are worth nothing and solves some incredible problem through a real clever use of design. You guys have highlighted many of those stories. I don’t know what the price of the Nano car in India is, but it’s some manufacturing and design revolution that will create change in that society by producing this affordable vehicle. It makes me wonder about could Core77 create a story around a bicycle or something else. A $49.00 bicycle that has a story, showcases a different set of design values that you guys also champion.

EL: Certainly. In that case, there’d be a different starting point for us. The starting point we took with the Dutch Master, which was the local manufacturing in New York. Our price point was predestined to creep higher and higher. Resetting it to the starting point of a rural Indian manufacturer and their capability, whether it’s metal forming or some other natural resource that is readily available that could be packaged into something, that would definitely lead into an entirely different product.

The story is that the first audience for that would be the same. Ultimately, with the Dutch Master, the story we were trying to tell to our audience, which we always focus on more of the insider aspect of our total audience. So the people who are actually involved in the design that we really want to speak to. I think the Dutch Master might have been one of trying to show that we have some affinity for the values of craft versus the values of mass-market manufacturing, whereas in the case of that project, more of a humanitarian aspect, it would be communicating to the audience that it’s a worthwhile application of design. I think both of those ideas are generally accepted already. It doesn’t need too much pushing from us, either of them. I guess if we do have any thought leadership role within the industry, it would probably be more on that side, the humanitarian side. So perhaps for the next project.

SP: I’m so interested in this idea of a story as a starting point. It’s not what I expected. I think about my own consumer perspective, say being in a grocery store and seeing 28 different kinds of eggs that are 99 cents or $1.29. Next to that on the shelf are eggs that are $7.00. They’re markedly different. When I look at A versus B, the producer of B has some explanation for me about why this thing is better. So my assumption is always that these are the best eggs possible. They’re healthier. They taste better. The chickens aren’t abused. They’re heirloom chickens. The thing you get for paying four or five X of the commodity solution is better. You’re going to experience that. That’s not the point you’re coming from. It’s been really clear that you’re not really thinking about it in terms of those things. You’re starting with a story and a vision for what you want to put out there.

EL: Yeah, I think that it’s the result of who we are as an organization. We’re a magazine. Stories are our strength. For some other organization it would actually be the manufacturing knowledge or the design skills of that. I think it’s the nature of the organization. We try to be self aware our own abilities, what we could actually pull off. Actually make something interesting out of it. Those people who are focused on the ten-cent price difference with their eggs, their organizational capabilities are distribution, efficiencies, or whatever else. Obviously, we’re in a position to just launch things, but they’re not essential to our core business. They have to have some revenue generating aspect to them, but the storytelling aspect, since we’re in the business of generating editorial, if they do have a strong story to them, it could come out of the editorial budget if we’re looking at it that way. The product development is the development of a story, which would then be told in the magazine.

I think I suffer and we suffer at Core77 from the solipsistic tendencies of designers in general. We want to make stuff because we want to make stuff. Your initial response to the bike with the price point and the use of our social capital in support of a cause being misdirected as you point out in your example of with India. We sometimes don’t tend to measure things along that kind of good of the whole, where as maybe we’re just focused on what is going to make our day-to-day more interesting, and what is going to maintain our interest level in something. Given that Core77 is a collection of people, Allan being a definite advocate of the green humanitarian side of things, but perhaps not being involved in the manufacture of something, like with the Dutch Master, this came from a different place. than the editorial face of the organization. It’s just a different thing. If it seems a little perhaps trite in its origin, I think that possibly it is.

Note: Since this interview was conducted, Core77 has alluded to plans to open a retail space in Portland, OR. I can’t wait to see how the ideas Eric was talking about do or don’t manifest in the new store.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • SpoolCast: Steve Portigal’s Deep Dive Interviewing Tips Revisited [UIE Brain Sparks] – Getting out into the world and actually interacting with real people who use, or potentially could use, your product or service is incredibly valuable. We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal, principal of Portigal Consulting, to conduct the UIE Virtual Seminar, “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind”
    Steve’s specialty is informing design decisions by getting on the ground and speaking directly with customers. And sharing how you can do the same. Today, we release the interview Jared Spool conducted with Steve after his seminar, following up with a number of additional audience questions.

Julie, in conversation

Dan Soltzberg: Welcome! Talk a little about what drew you to Portigal Consulting..

Julie Norvaisas: I have been really impressed by the way Steve has built his business over the years, with a lot of integrity, and his own very active brand. so when I saw that there was an opening, it was really exciting. The Bay Area has always been really attractive to me, so it was a real convergence of opportunity!

DS: What would you say your brand as a researcher or consultant is about?

JN: My brand is about humane collaboration. It’s about not using consult-y words or being intimidating or too intellectual. The process that I enjoy participating in is gentle; everybody is comfortable coming together and sharing ideas and they feel safe doing that. And as much as I want to bring insight and enlightenment I want to guide people to have their own insight and enlightenment, especially clients, so that they have more ownership of the end results. They lived it, they believed it, they discovered it themselves!

DS: What do you like the most about the kind of work that we do?

JN: I love being proven wrong. I love it when my assumptions are completely off and my own biases are exposed. I love it when I am able to go into someone’s home and learn something that is not only insightful, but human. That not only makes me think about the project and the project objectives in a different way, but also about people. You can’t judge a book by its cover is the oldest cliché, but I think we all do. I know that I do, and I love that my job gives me the opportunity to challenge that on a regular basis.

Another thing that’s so fascinating about the work we do is that human beings are wired to fix and solve and improve and evolve things. So all the companies that we work with are putting things out in the world and once they are out in the world people are starting to work with them, fix them, identify what’s wrong with them, discover their own needs that are adjacent, use them in different ways, work-arounds, whatever you want to call it. We get to identify that process of evolution and bring it back to clients; this is what you intended vs. this is what’s happening in the real world.

DS: Do things make you mad or irritate you, things in the built world?

JN: One of the things that we all have to contend with is the fact that on just about every research project that I’ve done, one of the conclusions is that people are overwhelmed by how many choices they have. I don’t care if it’s a service, technology, shoes, toothbrushes, it doesn’t matter. Consumers are overwhelmed. And our job is to help our clients bring more to the marketplace. That is a challenge we face as participants in the design process, and we can work with our clients to communicate that it’s not enough to just bring something new to the market. It has to be a compelling enough offering to eliminate other things from the marketplace. It’s something we can conceivably do to help society and help the planet.

DS: And sometimes it’s about helping them redefine what “more” means. More isn’t necessarily more in number. It might mean better, or more focused. There’s so many directions you can go with that.

JN: How do you feel about another person coming on to the firm?

DS: It’s cool to get an injection from outside. For the same reason it’s nice for our clients to hire us to come in and get that external perspective, it’s great to have that happening in the firm as well. We’re both excited to see what you bring in terms of approaches to doing things, methodologies, and different perspectives.

Interview edited and condensed by Dan, Steve, and Julie

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Waldo Hunt, 88, dies; repopularized pop-up books in 1960s – "He was such an important publisher of pop-up books who really advanced them technically. The pop-up designers who worked for him were amazing creative engineers," said Cynthia Burlingham, director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum of UCLA.

    The first golden age of movable books began in the late 1800s, when European publishers crafted elaborate books for children, and ended with the onset of World War I. With Mr. Hunt's epiphany, the second golden age was about to begin.

    "I knew I'd found the magic key," Mr. Hunt said. "No one was doing pop-ups in this country. No one could afford to make them here. They had to be done by hand, and labor was too expensive."

    He started Graphics International, and produced a series of pop-up ads featuring zoo scenes as part of a magazine campaign for Wrigley's gum. Soon, his company was creating pop-up table decorations and greeting cards for Hallmark.

  • Electronic Popable Books from MIT – Electronic popables integrate paper-based electronic sensors that allow amazing interactivity — turning on lights and moving images at the touch of a finger. Will it catch on or will the line between printing on paper and electronic media become so blurred that consumers will opt to watch the story on a screen?
  • StoryCorps: National Day of Listening – On the day after Thanksgiving, set aside one hour to record a conversation with someone important to you. You can interview anyone you choose: an older relative, a friend, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood.

    You can preserve the interview using recording equipment readily available in most homes, such as cell phones, tape recorders, computers, or even pen and paper. Our free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide is easy to use and will prepare you and your interview partner to record a memorable conversation, no matter which recording method you choose.

    Make a yearly tradition of listening to and preserving a loved one’s story. The stories you collect will become treasured keepsakes that grow more valuable with each passing generation.
    (via BoingBoing)

  • London 2009 – a set on Flickr – My London pictures from our recent visit
  • Every year, The Harris Poll asks a cross-section of adults whether they think about 20 leading industries do a good or a bad job of serving their consumers. – Note that the cable industry regularly appears on this poll as doing a bad job.
  • Time Warner insincerely and manipulatively asks customers to "vote" if it should "get tough" or "roll over" – Facing expiring deals with a number of key programmers, the nation's second-largest cable operator is launching a Web site, rolloverorgettough.com, which it says is designed to give its subscribers a voice in what it calls unfair price demands by content suppliers. Time Warner says those who operate broadcast and cable networks are asking for "incredible price hikes," as much as 300%. Customers will be able to vote on whether the operator rolls over, or should get tough, about price increases.

    "You're our customers, so help us decide what to do. We're just one company, but there are millions of you. Together, we just might be able to make a difference in what America pays for its favorite entertainment."

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Meet The New Authenticity – an older post here about a topic recently revisited in my interactions column – One package had a label with a jagged edge, meant to suggest torn paper. It didn’t look like real torn paper, it looked like a manufactured torn edge. Some people really liked it, but one person called it as unacceptably fake. He pointed to another packaging label that he had purchased, as this one had a more realistic-looking torn edge, where the paper was frayed and small threads and fibers were visible.

    He was very clear that both of these edge treatments were done by machine; that no paper was torn by hand. The vernacular of the jagged paper was completely unacceptable. The more realistic (as he imagined it) frayed edge was the right way to do it.

    It’s a bit of a post-modern take on authenticity, where it’s more of aesthetic that supports suspension-of-disbelief, rather than some extremely absolutely True and Real version. What does the way it looks let me comfortably accept into my reality?

Reading Ahead: Research Findings

Reading ahead logo with space above

(Updated to include slideshow with synchronized audio track)

We’re very excited today to be posting our findings from the Reading Ahead research project.

Lots more in the deck below, but here’s the executive summary

  • Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
  • The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
  • Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
  • There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading

We sat down yesterday in the office and recorded ourselves delivering these findings, very much the way we would deliver them to one of our clients.

Usually, we deliver findings like these to a client team in a half day session, and there’s lots of dialogue, but we tried to keep it brief here to help you get through it. (The presentation lasts an hour and twenty minutes.)

It’s been a great project, and we’ve really appreciated hearing from people along the way. We welcome further comments and questions, and look forward to continuing the dialogue around this work.


Audio

Reading Ahead: Managing recruiting

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There’s always something new in every project. Often we encounter a bit of process that we may not know how to best manage it. So we’ll make our best plan and see what happens. We learn as we go and ultimately have a better way for dealing with it next time.

In a regular client project, we write a screener and work with a recruiting company who finds potential research participants, screens them, and schedules them. Every day they email us an updated spreadsheet (or as they call it “grid”) with responses to screener questions, scheduled times, locations, and contact info. It still ends up requiring a significant amount of project management effort on our end, because questions will arise, schedules will shift, people will cancel, client travel must be arranged, etc. etc.

For Reading Ahead, we did all of the recruiting ourselves. Although we’ve done this before, this may be the first time since the rise of social media: we put the word out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, email to friends, and here on All This ChittahChattah.

While Dan lead the effort, we both used our own networks, and so we got responses in a number of channels, sent to either or both of us, including:

  • @ replies on Twitter
  • direct messages on Twitter
  • Comments on Facebook posts
  • Messages on Facebook
  • Emails (directly to either of us, or forwarded from friends, and friends-of-friends

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A private dialog on Facebook

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Comments on a Facebook status update. Note that Dan is able to jump in and make contact directly

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Direct Messages in Twitter

Some people were potential participants, some were referrers to other potential participants, and some were both. And given the range of platforms we were using, with their associated restrictions (and unclear social protocols), we had to scramble to figure out who could and should communicate with who to follow up and get to the point where we could see if the people in question were right for the study. We didn’t expect this to happen, and eventually Dan’s inbox and/or his Word document were no longer efficient, and as some participants were scheduled or in negotiation to be scheduled, he ended up with this schedule cum worksheet:

schedule

Being split across the two of us and these different media, eventually we were interacting with people for whom we had to check our notes to trace back how we had connected to them, which was great for our sample, since it meant we weren’t seeing a group of people we already knew.

It was further complicated when we had finished our fieldwork and wanted to go back to everyone who offered help close the loop with them, thanking them for help. Technically, and protocol-wise, it took some work (who are the people we need to follow up with? Who follows up with them? What media do they use), basically going through each instance one-by one.

twitter2

We haven’t figured out what we’ll do next time; we won’t forget the challenges we’ve had but there’s just not time or need right now to plan for the future. If I had to guess, I’d imagine a Google Spreadsheet that includes where we got people from, who owns the contact, whether they are participant-candidate or referrer, etc.). Despite being very pessimistic about the demands of recruiting, we still underestimated the time and complexity required for this project.

Reading Ahead: Looking for the story

Reading ahead logo with space above

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.

Portigal-Consulting_synth10

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.

Portigal-Consulting_synth11

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.

Reading Ahead: Analysis and Synthesis

Reading ahead logo with space above

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.

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Annotated interview transcript

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

Portigal-Consulting_synth1

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.

Portigal-Consulting_synth2w

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.

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

Portigal-Consulting_synth4w

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.

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