In addition to our in-person fieldwork, we often ask research participants to do some kind of task on their own. In past projects, these assignments have included a range of activities, from workbooks and journals with specific daily prompts, to fairly open-ended photo diaries.

For Reading Ahead, we asked people to do a short photo diary, and send us five or so digital pictures (before the interview session) that would help us get a sense of how reading fits into their lives.

Diaries like this accomplish several things. They give us access to a person’s world beyond what we might be able to get in just a face-to-face meeting. We’re able to see what they do in more locations, at more different times, and in more situations.

We probably won’t be there to see someone actually reading in bed before they go to sleep at night, but they might well ask a family member to take a picture of it for their photo diary, as Tracy did for this project.

Diaries also help us build rapport more quickly with the people we’re meeting, by giving us a common set of stories to begin the conversation with. There’s often a bit of back and forth dialogue between us and the participants during the assignment as well, which helps us establish a relationship.

Having some shared knowledge and possibly interaction prior to the interview means that when we are face-to-face, we can jump right in with that person at a deeper level, which can free up time in the interview session for exploring more areas of the research topic.

When you look at the pictures people sent us for this project, you’ll see that they’ve responded in a variety of ways. Some focused on objects, some took pictures of other people, and some photographed themselves or had other people photograph them. It’s useful to see the different ways people interpret the topic area, and the connections they draw. It helps us understand how each person sees the world, and can point us to additional lines of inquiry.

Below are the photo diaries for Reading Ahead.

Erica

Peter

Tracy

Julie

Tracy and her younger son thinking about possibilities for books and reading devices

Our fieldwork sessions often include a piece in which we ask participants to brainstorm and fantasize about the future.

In an earlier post, we talked about the simple models we were building for the Reading Ahead interviews.

Book and device models for participatory design activity

We wanted to put something in people’s hands to help them show us what the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future” could be and do. (This fieldwork approach borrows from participatory design.)

We’ve had clients come out in the field with us and say after an interview, “That person didn’t give us any ideas,” so it’s important to clarify that we don’t expect this kind of activity to directly produce marketable ideas. Rather, it gives people another mode for expressing themselves, and it’s great for helping them communicate things which may not always be easy to verbalize, like:

• Their desires
• What they think should exist
• What problems they are trying to solve
• What seems acceptable and what seems outlandish to them
• Preferences and in what ways they would like something to be different

Chris uses the device model to help express his thoughts about navigation

Often for us, the very act of making the props for an activity suggests new ways of using them. In this case, while making a blank cover for the “future book” model, we realized that we could also make a blank inner page spread.

Holding the “book of the future” model

As it turned out, this meant that when we were done with the sessions, people had created very nice book models for us, with a cover and inner spread.

Erica’s “telescoping shopping bag” book with digital annotations, hyperlinks, and built-in dictionary

Part of the preparation for each interview session was to get the models ready with new blank paper. Here I am on the trunk of my car, prepping the models before an interview in San Francisco.

Now that the fieldwork is done, we have a great collection of models made by the people we interviewed.

Artifacts from participants’ “future book” ideation

The last section (copied below) of our Topline Summary synthesizes some of what we gleaned from this part of the fieldwork. These are just quick hits; we’ll develop any themes and recommendations that come out of these activities much further in the analysis and synthesis phase of the project.

Excerpt from Topline Summary: Participant ideation about the “book of the future” and “reading device of the future”

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

Instant on-off

Durable

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

Put yourself in the story

Leave the story for more information

Choose from alternate endings, versions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s our Topline Summary:

Portigal Consulting: Reading Ahead Topline Summary

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

• Recommendations, book clubs, lending

• Books facilitate the interpersonal aspects of reading

  Can be easily lent or given away
  

  Given as gifts
  

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

• Reading can be a big part of family life
  

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

  Connection between home life and outside world (school)

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

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

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

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

3. Books do more than carry content

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

  Become carriers of specific memories

  Develop a patina that carries meaning

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

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

  First editions

  Signed copies

  Galley proofs

  Typography

  Pictures and illustrations

  Quality of paper, printing, etc.

• Books say something about a person
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Books are easily shared

• Pass them along to others

• Donate to library

• Sell or buy at used book store

• Borrow from the library rather than purchasing
  

5. How books are stored and organized carries meaning

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

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

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

6. Libraries and bookstores provide specific experiences

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

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

  A quiet, comfortable space

  Good lighting

  Alphabetized bookshelves

  A unified décor

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

7. The Kindle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Instant on-off
  

  Durable

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

• Interactive
  

  Put yourself in the story

  Leave the story for more information

  Choose from alternate endings, versions

• Size-shifting

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

• Retain the book form while adding functionality

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

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

• Privacy

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

• Projecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demonstrating a business presentation on the Kindle

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

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

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

Chris (not his real name) is a software engineer in his early thirties. He lives in an apartment in Mountain View with his wife and their small dog. They moved here a couple of months ago, after returning from an extended stay in Europe.

When they left the US for Europe, the couple got rid of many of their possessions, including their books. Now that they’ve settled in again, Chris says he’s still trying to keep from accumulating too much stuff, and has been buying fewer books and using the library more.

Chris says he used to focus more than he does now on finishing books as a form of accomplishment. He described how he used to line up the books he had finished in a row, so he could see a physical record of his reading.

Chris reads a lot of technical books. Since he uses many of these as reference materials, often annotating and bookmarking them, he generally finds it useful to own them in print, rather than borrowing them from the library or using PDF versions.

One of Chris’ bookmarked reference books

Chris showed us the various ways he navigates through printed books, including “flipping” and going back and forth between non-sequential pages.

In the following clip, he talks about the flexible navigation afforded by printed books:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erica (not her real name) is 28 and lives by herself in an apartment in San Francisco. She described growing up without a lot of money but in a house where there were “walls of bookshelves.” When she and her Mom had free days, they would visit different libraries, and Erica still remembers physical details from some of these places.

She had been planning to open a cookbook store, until the recent economic slump. She’s working now as an office manager at a software startup and regrouping.

Erica talked about buying certain books just because she likes them as objects: “I love books. I almost like books more than reading.”

She says that lately she’s really been noticing how “the computer lifestyle has seeped in so deeply,” which she feels is making her attention span shorter. She says that on the computer, “everything is fast,” and that books are a way to “unplug” and slow down.

Erica has different types of books for different weather, moods, and reading situations. On public transit, she reads books that can be easily stopped and started; something she says is difficult to do with complex works.

In the clip below, Erica talks about how she organizes her bookshelf by feeling:

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

Here is the first of these highlights for Reading Ahead.

We met with Tracy (not her real name) and her two sons at their home in a suburb of Santa Cruz. Tracy is a stay-at-home mom and part-time massage therapist, and is going back to school in the fall to get an MA in Occupational Therapy.

Reading is a big part of her family’s life. She reads every night with her sons (including a two-hour Harry Potter session the night before), and told us she does different voices for each character in the stories.

Reading has always been important to Tracy, and she showed us several books from her own childhood that she keeps on her shelves–including one that her father had when he was a child. She also talked about sharing book recommendations with her Mom and her friends.

Childhood books

In addition to a regular set of reading rituals with the kids, Tracy reads on her own, which she describes as: “My way of getting completely unplugged.”

Tracy and her boys make a weekly trip to the library, which usually culminates in a big spread of books on the living room floor.

Back from the library

I asked them to show us what this is like. Watching the boys comb through the pile to choose a book, I was struck by how physical their interaction with the books was.

There was also an interesting family moment where I asked about a book Tracy mentioned (Tacky, a children’s story about an iconoclastic penguin), and all three spontaneously recited the names of Tacky’s friends in perfect unison.

Here’s a short clip from that part of the interview:

• David Lynch's Interview Project – Reminds me a bit of Robert Frank's "The Americans" where Lynch is interviewing to Frank's photography; Lynch goes around the US and finds people and interviews them. My modest dream is to make time to watch these regularly.
  (via Waxy.org)

I was interviewed recently for What insight is ethnography delivering? (PDF). It’s a pretty clear piece, and I think we show well in it. Lots of tidbits but the closest thing to controversy is this:

Portigal accepts that while there needs to be conditions, such as a ban on any logos being worn by the accompanying client, and an agreement to undertake some basic workshop training to introduce them to the principles of field work, he is happy to bring along a member of the client’s team. “It’s the 80/20 rule: we ask 80% questions, you ask 20%. It takes them a couple of practices and then I think they can make a really valuable contribution.”

However, for O’Brien, the very thought of having a non-team member accompany out in the field is a non-issue. “We simply don’t believe in it,” he says. “The fewer people, the better. If you start crowding a room out, how is the participant going to feel comfortable? In fact, we have even lost jobs over it.”

It took me many years to come around to this way of thinking, but as our work has become more about facilitating our clients to take action and less about handing off insights, it seems right on for us. I’d love to hear what you think!

My latest Core77 Broadcast is up; I speak with Will Tschumy and Chris Bernard who recently joined Microsoft as User-Experience Evangelists. Steve says check it out.

My latest podcast/broadcast is up at Core77, a conversation with Debbie Millman of Sterling Brands and the Design Matters radio talk show.

We talk about strategy, cultural anthropology, consulting, synthesis, and some other stuff as well. Check it out.

Core77 Broadcasts is off to a great start. I’ve got two interviews posted, another one scheduled for next week, and a couple of others I’m working to try and schedule.

But who should I be talking with? Be as specific as you can be (i.e., give me some names, or even introductions). We’ve got a lot of “names” but that’s not a requirement by any means. People with interesting stories to tell that somehow connect to design, business, culture, marketing, advertising, product development, and so on.

Suggestions definitely appreciated!

Core77 has launched a broadcast series and the first entry is an interview I did with improv expert Chris Miller of LifePlays.

Check it out!

The Broadcasts will soon be turned into an official iTunes/podcast/RSS whatever thingie, and I’ll also post the link at that point so you can subscribe and get all the auditory goodness as it happens.