Although we couldn’t make it down to Buenos Aires for Interaction South America, thanks to the magic of Skype I was able to present Designing the Problem at over the weekend.

Too often we assume that doing research with users means checking in with them to get feedback on the solution we’ve already outlined. But the biggest value from research is in uncovering the crucial details of the problem that people have; the problem that we should be solving.

As the design practices mature within companies, they need to play an active role in driving the creation of new and innovative solutions to the real unmet needs that people have. In part, driving towards this maturity means looking at one’s own culture and realizing the value of being open-minded and curious, not simply confident. This is a challenge to each of us personally and as leaders within our teams and communities.

Below you’ll find slides, audio and sketchnotes. I’ll repost when the video go up. Update: it’s here.

The talk is just over 40 minutes and there are two questions (which you can’t hear but which should be obvious enough from my response).


To download the audio Right-Click and Save As… (Windows) or Ctrl-Click (Mac)

Here is my huge head during the Q&A segment (image via Juan Marcos Ortiz)

Sketchnote by Kat Davis (click for full size)

Sketchnote by Thiago Esser

Interviewing Users is now available. Get your copy here!

It’s been seven months Interviewing Users came out! Below is a roundup of links to various bits connected with the book. I’ll republish this regularly with accumulated updates.

The Book

• Buy from Rosenfeld Media
• Buy from Amazon
• Foreword by Grant McCracken
• Excerpt from chapter 2
• The cover
• Acknowledgements
• FAQ
• Testimonials
• Images and diagrams

Reviews

• New: Web Designers’ Review of Books
• How To Interview Your Users And Get Useful Feedback by Garrett Moon, Founder of TodayMade
• Reviews on Goodreads
• QRCA (Qualitative Research Consultants Association) Views Magazine (PDF)
• Reviews on Amazon
• Why You Should Read ‘Interviewing Users’ by Steve Portigal

Interviews

• New: The eLearning Coach
• UX Magazine
• UX Matters
• UIE Book Corner (audio)
• 33 voices (audio) [summary slidedeck]
• UX Booth part 1, part 2
• Business 901 (audio)
• Huffington Post
• Ethnography Matters (and in Spanish)
• Interview with Denise Lee Yohn (audio)
• The User Experience podcast with Gerry Gaffney
• Steve speaks with Jared Spool about field research
• SpoolCast:
  Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Tips

Presentations

• IXDA Los Angeles/LA UX Meetup – slides, video, alternate video, tweetstream
• recording of O’Reilly webinar #1
• New: recording of O’Reilly webinar #2

Other

• New York book launch party
• San Francisco book launch party
• Answers to questions from readers of the Usabilla blog
• War Stories
• Susan Dray’s reflections on the impact of the War Stories

The lovely folks at UXLx have just posted the video from my talk earlier this year, Discover and act on insights about people.

Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

If you don’t see the video embedded above, you can view it here

Interaction designer David Hoard shares a story where even his best intentions are not sufficient to prevent a perplexing gaffe.

Researcher Chinami Inaishi and I were on a 10-day trip to Tokyo to interview kids and young adults about their video game use. It was 1995 and the console wars were in full effect. Chinami is Japanese, but had lived in the US for many years. So she was the perfect local guide to help me understand the cultural nuances we were witnessing. She also helped us navigate the nearly impossible house numbering system in Tokyo, where house 31 was next to number 6, which was next to 109. This echoed one theme of the trip: squeeze things in wherever you can find space for them. Every square inch will be utilized.

The visits were fascinating and enriching at each stop. We saw small beautiful homes with Western-style furniture next to Japanese Tatami rooms. We interviewed a young man with the smallest apartment ever, a tiny 8′ x 8′ space packed to the gills with Western-oriented magazines, blue jeans, skateboards, and a (unused) full-size surfboard. The kids were impressive, with their beautiful calligraphy work and exacting toy collections. In all cases, no square inch of space was unused, and that made me rethink the design we were considering. A low, wide game console was perhaps out, replaced by a slim vertical unit that could fit in one of their densely packed bookcases.

Before the trip, I had done my best to read up on Japanese culture and manners. There’s no way to learn a culture from a book or two – my goal was simply to avoid making a big mistake. I practiced and practiced the few phrases I would need (Chinami was doing simultaneous translation for 98% of it). I knew my two-handed business card presentation technique, and I nearly understood the rules for bowing.

We’d been through most of the visits, and so far so good. All of the sessions had gone fairly well, and we were learning a lot. But then I did something bad. Something wrong.

We had been visiting a house near the end of a train line, slightly out of the city-center. The session was over; it was time to pack up the camera and notes and head out. We were doing our now-normal goodbye ritual, trying to check off the right etiquette boxes. And then it happened: I misstepped. Near the front door, I stepped my sock foot just off the wood floor and onto the carpet. With one shoe on already. Unknown to me, I just violated an important manner about where you must be (and must not be) when putting your shoes back on when you leave.

Instantly the whole family erupted in hysterical laughter, with everyone pointing at me. Suddenly I was in a mayday situation, with my manners in a dangerous nosedive. Confused, I did my best to get my shoes on as Chinami pulled me out the door and onto the street. She was like a commando extricating someone from an international hotspot.

“What was that??” I asked, once we were out on the street.

Chinami informed me that laughter (apparently hysterical laughter) was how the Japanese cope with a faux-pas or embarrassing situation. Embarrassment was indeed what I created, and I felt it too. Intense embarrassment comes with a whole set of physical sensations. You’re flushed, addled, and dazed. You’ve got great regret, but it’s too late to fix it.

When we go out to do field research, we often feel we are going out to observe a strange species in its native habitat. We are the scientists, they are the creatures to be documented. We go to great lengths to help them feel comfortable with our scientist-like presence. We feel like we are the smart ones.

But guess what? The research participants are in their native habitat, and are experts on their own lives. We the researchers are the weird aliens. We’re the ones not getting their nuance. We’re the ones who are sometimes worthy of mockery.

But it’s all in a days work when you’re out doing research; you’ve got to be light on your feet. Every research session I’ve ever been on has been a dance to cover the material and sniff out insights right below the surface. All while you try to make everyone comfortable and keep the conversation flowing. It’s that dance that makes it exciting; just try to keep your toes in the right place.

It’s sunburn weather this week (well, today at least), perfect for zipping from place to place, which is indeed what we are doing

• It’s a busy fieldwork week, as we are going into the homes of (mostly young, mostly male) gamers to see what they’re doing and get their reactions to a prototype.
• No sooner do we finish fieldwork than our clients come to our office at the end of this week to help untangle the data and identify the key takeaways
• I’m putting the final details together my sold-out workshop (as well as a short talk) for User Experience Lisbon next week.
• We’ve launched a new series devoted to fieldwork War Stories.
• What we’re consuming: Frittle, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, scopa (the game), Scopa (the restaurant).

Last Friday we opened our doors to a few superheroic leaders from Silicon Valley firms for a morning discussion about championing user research within an organization (thus “Breakfast of Champions”). This event came hot on the heels of Steve’s recent webinar and provided a learning forum for us as consultants and for our guests, who shared insights and questions from the client perspective.

The discussion included trials and triumphs, questions about current challenges, and new frameworks to yield as tools for overcoming obstacles. We were impressed with the humility and willingness to share evident in the discussion as research champions from diverse departments, companies, and industries swapped war stories and provided each other with encouragement and new ideas.

I captured some of the conversation on our whiteboard. On the left side are successes, questions and ponderings in the middle, and current challenges on the right. See a bigger image here.

We covered a lot of ground during two hours so the list below is not exhaustive, but it does start to hint at the themes that came up.

• The importance of measuring, benchmarking, and storying research successes
• The value of taking non-researchers (especially skeptics and critics) into the field
• The challenge of confronting organizational paradigms and questioning sacred ‘truths’ when framing research questions
• Success with embedding research in the design process as opposed to making it a distinct, standalone project
• Overcoming obstacles of apathy with insights that are action-ready and and deliverables that are easy to share
• Thinking strategically about the relationship between quant and qual, and considering how they feed each other
• The value of research in corporate strategy and business solutions and the need to frame it as such
• The changing role of the consultant and research provider
• The importance of show and tell of research results to various groups, departments, etc.

This was our first time doing something like this and we’re looking forward to doing it again in the near future!

As part of the Rosenfeld Media UX Workshops Fall 2011 Tour, I’ll be leading a full-day workshop – Interviewing Users: Spinning Data into Gold.

You can choose up to 3 workshops, including ones from Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug. Early registration (with a decent discount) ends September 9.

Bonus: the event will held at the amazing Seattle Central Library!

I hope to see you there!

I’ll be presenting a full-day workshop on Immersive Field Research Techniques at User Interface 16 this November in Boston.

Registration gives you

• Two full-day workshops: The UI16 experts will dive deep and get to the nitty-gritty details that make any designer into a pro.
• One day of short talks: This is where you’ll discover the latest UX ideas and techniques from each of our expert speakers. Don’t forget Jared Spool’s entertaining and educational keynote.
• Complete conference materials: We’ll send you the PDFs of every session and workshop just before you leave for the conference. Then you can focus on insights and not note-taking.
• Recordings of the short talks: The benefits keeping coming after the conference. Through the recordings, you can relive every short talk at your office with your entire team.

Right now they are offering 100 registrations at a sneak-preview price of $1349. They are (as of this posting) down to 79 sneak-spots, after that it goes up $300.

I hope to see you there!

I spoke at SXSW recently about the interviewing process in user research. As I’ve been working on a book about this topic the timing was great for me.

While we know, from a very young age, how to ask questions, the skill of getting the right information from users is surprisingly complex and nuanced. This session will focus on getting past the obvious shallow information into the deeper, more subtle, yet crucial, insights. If you are going to the effort to meet with users in order to improve your designs, it’s essential that you know how to get the best information and not leave insights behind. Being great in “field work” involves understanding and accepting your interviewee’s world view, and being open to what they need to tell you (in addition to what you already know you want to learn). We’ll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types. This session will explore other contextual research methods that can be built on top of interviewing in a seamless way. We’ll also suggest practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills and how to engage others in your organization successfully in the interviewing experience.

Slides

Audio

Presentation (45 minutes + 15 minutes Q&A):

To download the audio Right-Click and Save As… (Windows) or Ctrl-Click (Mac).

Also see

• The Rosenfeld Media page for my book in progress The Art and Craft of User Research Interviewing
• Slides and audio from last year’s presentation at SXSW

All of us here at Portigal Consulting participated in Bolt | Peters’ mostly-annual User Research Friday conference (URF10) last week. URF is a conference designed to be

A full-day conference all about user research! This time it’s also two optional half-day workshops on advanced research techniques you can choose from on the preceding day. There has been an explosion of apps and services to conduct research over the past year, and so this year’s theme is “Vendor Circus.” We’ll bring user research experts together for advanced discussion, beverages, relaxed learning, and heavy socializing.

Steve and Julie also co-led an aforementioned half-day workshop on the preceding Thursday (you can read more about that here).

Friday’s line-up of presentations was interspersed with just the right amount of mingling and networking. Thoughts were provoked! Here, in no particular order, are some of them:

Steve sez
I’ve been part of “user research” type events for well over a decade, but on Friday I finally felt that our field has reached a point of maturity where events like these are effective venues to address some of the issues we’re facing. I saw a remarkable absence of posturing, very few “Gaze upon our perfect case study!” presentations, and none of the “Here’s why we can’t do research in my organization” whining. The best presentations of the day were those that explicitly raised (and often didn’t answer) questions that we should be thinking about. They brought out a certain collective humility that I found refreshing and compelling. Of course, organizers Nate and Cyd helped set the right tone through their deliberate planning to make that possible.

Julie goes on
The day featured great pacing and a spectrum of perspectives and styles of presentation. And cake-pops. I enjoyed the tension between the group’s characterizations of User Research as sometimes highly qualitative and sometimes very technology-driven/quantitative. Both camps were represented without bias. Nice! I guess we can all just get along. Several conversations I had touched on the challenge of selling the value of qualitative, consumer-based insights in a world increasingly influenced by complex tools that derive assertive analytics. Why do numbers seem to have more credibility than stories? Naturally, this seems counter-intuitive to me. Jared Spool gave some compelling ammo in his discussion of the importance of inference as a step in the analysis process of quantitative data. From a methodology standpoint, Dana Chisnell’s simple but provocative observation will stick with me: when research requires people to “pretend” to do something it exposes its flaws.

Wyatt burbles
The highlight for me was Dana Chisnell’s presentation, which reminded me to check myself before I wreck someone else’s user experience- specifically, pointing to something I would call “legacy metaphors” (although I’ve just learned they are actually called skeuomorphs), which are things like the “cc:” and “bcc:” fields on an email, the 12 key configuration on mobile phones, or the clicking sound when you take a picture on a digital camera. These conventions, appropriated from the analog world, may be a step forward in aiding adoption of the new and unfamiliar, but the question Dana threw out to the audience (and I’m paraphrasing here) is, “Are we really helping people, or are we propagating some archaic interaction convention because it’s easier than figuring out a better one?”

Our friends at Bolt | Peters hosted their (mostly) annual User Research Friday event last week, bringing together practitioners from the client-side as well as consultants to share stories and discuss best practices. Some of our takeaways from the day are here.

The day before the conference, Steve and Julie co-led a sold-out workshop titled “We’ve Done All This Research- Now What?” for a group of 20 enthusiastic researchers and designers.

Julie and Steve in action

The purpose of the workshop was to practice the process of moving from the data and observations we gather in fieldwork toward opportunities and ultimately to ideas.

We framed this as a research project to inform a neighborhood redevelopment/gentrification effort. Before the workshop, participants first wandered their own neighborhoods…

Thanks to Nick Leggett from Zazz for this aerial shot from their Seattle offices

Noe Valley scene (a San Francisco neighborhood) captured by Julie

…and then when we got together, they the explored neighborhood surrounding Bolt | Peters for more data.

This machine shop just down the street from Bolt | Peters has been there for decades

6th street buzzes, about two blocks from the conference

Break-out groups took the synthesis tasks to heart and, in a very short period of time, collaboratively surfaced promising opportunities and strategies and solutions to address them.

We were humbled by the gentle empathy and creativity of the folks in the room. The morning served as an inspiring reminder of just how much progress a handful of smart, dedicated people can make on seemingly-intractable problems in a very short period of time.

More amazing photos, observations, output, and thoughtful commentary can be seen on the blog we created for the workshop.

The workshop slides are below.

See previously: Steve Portigal’s presentation from User Research Friday 2008

We believe in the power of transparency at many different levels. We regularly advise our clients to leverage transparency as a design strategy. Over the years, our research repeatedly shows that people are more comfortable when they know where their stuff comes from, what’s in it, and who’s making it, and that this comfort leads to good things like loyalty, brand affinity, adoption.

Transparency around gadgets is getting some attention these days. Some of the spotlight has been focused on

• Experiences of employees at Foxconn, the factory involved with manufacturing iPhones. See Wired’s recent, Where the Workers to Made your iPhone Sleep at Night
• The economic implications of China withholding rare earth minerals critical in the manufacture of technology. Last week the BBC had a piece on it: Rare earth minerals shortage feared by US and EU
• Recent watchdog-group and legislative efforts in California to disclose radiation emissions for various phone models at the point of sale

While our shiny devices have made our individual worlds more transparent through features such as GPS, augmented reality and user reviews, the devices themselves still feel magical. Their origins and inner workings are utterly mysterious. As our relationships with these devices deepen, as a culture we are becoming more interested in what we’re consuming.

Take a look at how transparency feels in this much lower-tech analog: gourmet cupcakes. At a cupcake shop in San Diego, ingredients were featured rather than hidden because of a refrigerator malfunction. The backstage became front-and-center, as Steve talks about here.

As a customer, it felt great to have a window into the process, in a kind of “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!” way. Gourmet cupcakes are made of the same things we use at home! Wholesome! Recognizable! Comforting! Trustworthy. When I took a bite of the finished product my enjoyment was subtly enhanced by knowing what I was sinking my teeth into.

Transparency as a policy is risky in some cases, of course. Knowing more about my cupcake felt good; finding out about what’s inside my iPhone is not producing those same reassuring feelings!

The conference lineup is chosen partially based on input (i.e., voting) from the community. Even if you don’t attend, you still have a voice about what the discourse should be in our various fields. Not to mention, it’s a great way to support us! Visit each of the two talks below and click on the “thumbs up” icon. Add your thoughts, or comments as well!

Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users

While we know, from a very young age, how to ask questions, the skill of getting the right information from users is surprisingly complex and nuanced. This session will focus on getting past the obvious shallow information into the deeper, more subtle, yet crucial, insights. If you are going to the effort to meet with users in order to improve your designs, it’s essential that you know how to get the best information and not leave insights behind. Being great in “field work” involves understanding and accepting your interviewee’s world view, and being open to what they need to tell you (in addition to what you already know you want to learn). We’ll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types. This session will explore other contextual research methods that can be built on top of interviewing in a seamless way. We’ll also suggest practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills and how to engage others in your organization successfully in the interviewing experience.

For more on interviewing, you can check out our UIE Virtual Seminar and the follow-up podcast we did with Jared Spool.

Mommy, Where Do Good Products Come From? (with Gretchen Anderson)

Business case studies are the ultimate in reductionism: A complex business activity rooted in a specific context of people, company culture, time, and place is boiled down to a few key ideas. Consultants, designers, students, and people who read Malcolm Gladwell are especially prone to this form of simplification. While these simplified stories can be helpful as touchstones, we just need to remember that they are often apocryphal archetypes more than investigative summaries. Or people confuse the terms innovation and invention; looking for breakthrough ideas sends companies into a frenzied search for “new” things not great or disruptive things. In this session, we will explore some different pathways to creating great product ideas. As designers and researchers, we’re experienced enough to know that design research isn’t the only approach or even always the best approach (a point of view that Don Norman vehemently argued in recent writings). For instance, design research wouldn’t be sufficient to create a disruptive innovation like Gowalla. We’ll outline a framework that looks at different approaches to idea generation, including corporate competencies and culture, customer needs and cultural context, and technological innovation.

For more on this topic, you can check out our interactions column Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff (PDF). Also, listen to Steve and Gretchen in conversation about the speed of innovation.

Thanks for your votes!

Also see:

• From SXSW2010, slides and audio for UX Process Improved: Integrating User Insight (with Aviva Rosenstein)
• My pictures from Austin and SXSW
• My thoughts on advertising and messaging at SXSW2010

At SXSW last month, I presented UX Process Improved: Integrating User Insight with Aviva Rosenstein. I’m posting the slides and audio here.

Listen to audio:

To download the audio Right-Click and Save As… (Windows) or Ctrl-Click (Mac)

Lately we’ve been hearing and responding to a lot of chatter in the only-boring-stodgy-Microsoft-types-do-research vein, with language that essentially boils all user research down to testing tools that hinder the creative design process (see Don Norman hates research, Michal Migurski comes out against it).

But user research, at least as we conceive and practice it, is a different animal altogether. Testing relies on existing objects or realities and measures response against them. User research for design and innovation observes, examines, imagines and inspires. Here are just a few things that good user research can do.

• Broaden the scope. Instead of asking people what they think of these newfangled eBooks, we took a deeper look, to understand how reading is changing and what people value. This led to actionable, inspirational design insights such as, “Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity. And, “There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading.” (Read about Portigal Consulting’s Reading Ahead project here)
• Discover meaning. Design Continuum explored the car rental experience with a group of Harvard Business Students recently to discover opportunities for improvement and innovation along numerous touch-points throughout the journey, inspiring students to envision altogether new experiences beyond the typical drudgery of current practice. (Description of event on Design Continuum’s blog here)
• Shift perspective. Wells Fargo engaged with a small number of customers to understand that consumers’ experiences and world views are fundamentally different from the internal company view. This shed a whole lot of light on how to improve communications and experiences across internal organizational silos. (Excerpt from a Forrester white paper on this project here)

Alex Faaborg of Firefox channeled Don Norman’s take on design approaches during a recent ZURBSoapbox event,

There are two distinct approaches to design. One focuses on user-research to find out what people need/want. This approach is exemplified by Microsoft and is used mostly to mitigate risk. The downside of this ‘user testing’ model is that users can lead you astray. For example, if you ask everyone what their favorite color is the average will be gray. The second tries to bring a specific vision to life and an impression of the user they want to have. This approach is exemplified by Apple and can result in huge success or failure.

Now, while Faaborg mostly touts the second more glorious path, he does acknowledge “If designers don’t know what they’re doing it could be a disaster.”

How will designers “know” what they’re doing? Or, in this heroic design model, is there room only for psychic, infallible, savant designers who do just somehow “know?” Where does this leave the consumer, or “user,” or, as they are also known, people?

We believe that including people in the process of designing products for people is a good idea, and serves to drive great design and business concept development rather than preventing it.