• [from steve_portigal] Lessons Learned in 10 Years on the Tech Beat [NYTimes.com] – [David Pogue with an insightful summary of consumer technology: adoption, production, integration. Read the whole piece!] Things Don’t Replace Things; They Just Splinter. I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to keep hearing pundits say that some product is the “iPhone killer” or the “Kindle killer.”TV was supposed to kill radio. The DVD was supposed to kill the Cineplex. Instant coffee was supposed to replace fresh-brewed. But here’s the thing: it never happens. There will be both iPhones and Android phones. There will be both satellite radio and AM/FM. There will be both printed books and e-books. Things don’t replace things; they just add on….Some Concepts’ Time May Never Come. The same “breakthrough” ideas keep surfacing — and bombing, year after year. Nobody wants videophones! Teenagers do not want “communicators” that do nothing but send text messages, either. And give it up on the stripped-down kitchen “Internet appliances” Nobody has ever bought one, and nobody ever will.

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

• [from steve_portigal] Mobile Mandate: Tribute to Cultural Connectors [design mind] – [frogdesign's Kate Canales and Lauren Serota adventure in Zambia revealed some crucial truths about accessing other cultures. As much as I'm advocate for having my mind blown as an outsider, the importance of the bridge – the people who can help you make sense of it all – is paramount] As we traveled with her, she grew to truly understand why we were there and could see we were missing pieces. She found opportunities to fill those gaps, taking time to explain things to us and immerse us in the culture..We were reminded that if you are open to it, you can learn as much from insightful people like Lister as you can through days of fielding. More than that, she might have been our most powerful in-field synthesis tool. A sounding board for questions, validations, curiosities and stories. There's not much better than having multiple observations tied together in an understandable way by someone native to the culture.

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This upsell screen from united.com is my nominee for Most Egregious Use of The Word “Only” 2010.

• [from julienorvaisas] Yes Men Attack Apple, Advertising Special "Conflict-Free" iPhone [Fast Company] – [I blogged earlier this month about the increasing but not-always-pleasant transparency emerging around the ingredients and manufacturing practices that enable our beloved gadgets. Well, the Yes Men have taken hold of the idea. Their fake web site raises some good questions. What do we do, now that we know?] The Yes Men, the group of clever activist/designer pranksters, struck again this week–or tried to. Their target this time? Apple. They launched a website that was a spitting image for Apple's, and professed to be announcing a new product: the iPhone4CF. 'CF' stood for conflict-free, and the site promised that the new phone was exactly like the normal iPhone 4, only it didn't source its minerals from conflict-ridden regions like the Democratic Republic of Congo, thereby fueling atrocities there. The Yes Men has taken on some very big targets in the past–Chevron, the US Chamber of Commerce–but they seem to have met their match in Apple.

Eminem, interviewed recently in Rolling Stone magazine, reveals just a bit of his creative process, linked to a childhood impulse. While his “compulsion” isn’t one we all share, it evokes other behaviors from that time in our lives. Nice that Marshall has managed to use his to inform, if not define, his art.

How do you go about putting together a verse?
Even as a kid, I always wanted the most words to rhyme. Say I saw a word like “transcendalistic tendencies.” I would write it out on a piece of paper – trans-cend-a-list-tic ten-den-cies – and underneath, I’d line up a word with each syllable: and bend all mystic sentence trees. Even if it didn’t make sense, that’s the kind of drill I would do to practice. To this day, I still want as many words as possible in a sentence to rhyme.

Also important is the idea of a simple activity that will help you develop your creative muscles, an idea I explored in Skill Building for Design Innovators

I also enjoyed this insight about Eminem’s approach because it reminded me of some fun fieldwork a few years ago, where we met a young rapper who demonstrated his process for us, flowing from using looped music to freestyle against, a workbook where he’d write up a ton of lines, picking and choosing based on what worked when rapped aloud.

Sometimes I’ll write a song in just one sit down and it’s perfect, I don’t even touch it. For me, like I’ll feel good about it. Sometimes it’s just crap, and that’s fine, because I feel like you get out the crap and then you can pull the little gems out of it. Or even if it’s just one paragraph of a song I wrote, I’ll take that and piece it into other songs. In this case, I would sit down and open a file and then I’d just listen through it, see if there’s anything worth keeping.

His process (which developed into some exciting design implications for our client’s products) became a bit of a meme around the office, eventually becoming iconified thusly:

See thoughts on creativity, previously from Jack White and Will.i.am.

• [from steve_portigal] You’re Reading That Book Too? Marry Me: How Young People and Online Dating Services Look for Love Matches Based on Reading Habits or Artistic Pursuits [WSJ.com] – [As we spend time on social networks announcing what we "like" this seems an obvious extension] alikewise.com, a free dating site that matches singles based on books and has amassed 4,000 users, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, since it launched in July. The site facilitates matchmaking by notifying users when someone adds a book of the same title or genre….The focus on matching people based on what they've read (or what they'd like to read) could change the online dating lexicon from "she's hot" to "she's interesting."…But are books really a Rorschach test for compatibility? Dennis Palumbo, a psychotherapist and author of the novel "Mirror Image," believes people in their 20s and 30s are too concerned with shared interests, as evidenced by the growing number of niche dating sites. "As we get older, we want a kind, caring person who cares how we feel," he says. Not necessarily someone who has read "The Cornish Trilogy." [via Springwise]

• [from steve_portigal] Start-Ups Follow Twitter, and Become Neighbors [NYTimes.com] – [The supposed demand to be co-located in the same office building as Twitter, hoping for some f2f meatspace benefits from proximity to a virtual powerhouse] And so he snagged an office at 795 Folsom, Twitter’s headquarters in the SoMa neighborhood. There, he has been stalking executives on — where else? — Twitter, to see who is to visit Twitter’s offices. When he finds out, he pounces and “hijacks the meeting,” he said, by asking them to swing by his company, Klout. By doing that, he has met Robert Scoble, the influential technology blogger, and Steve Rubel, director of insights for the digital division of Edelman, the big public relations firm, and has spotted Kanye West in the lobby on his way to Twitter. Through elevator and lobby run-ins, he has also forged a close enough relationship with Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, that Mr. Costolo is helping Klout raise venture capital. “Now I have his cellphone, and I text him,” Mr. Fernandez said.
• [from steve_portigal] User-centered Innovation in Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class [SF Chronicle] – [The article mostly focuses on a specific innovative design – a low-cost incubator-type-solution for Nepal; but the most quotable bits were towards the end, where they discuss the operating framework of this class.] About to start its eighth year in January, the class has completed about 60 projects for 15 partner organizations in 10 countries. It brings together students from different academic backgrounds…They all have one goal in common: to design products for the poor and to treat them as customers rather than handing them our leftovers and castoffs. "We are trying to figure out what they want and need," said Jim Patell, the Stanford professor who leads the class. "It is not our job to tell them what they want."

• [from steve_portigal] a new analog take on the book [Influxinsights] – [In our Reading Ahead project we encouraged designers and publishers to consider the possibilities for design in the traditional book, and not just focus on what digital can bring. So this was exciting to see!] These are reactions to a radical new book design from Visual Editions, a UK based publisher with a new take on the reading experience. The book is "Tree of Codes" and it's author Jonathan Safran Foer's experiment to cut-in, using die-cuts to his favorite book, "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schultz.