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.

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.

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.

• The Product Is You, No. 12 – Rob Walker does a series of advertisements that reveal a customer segmentation and the associated characteristics. Similar vein to my postings about personas leaking outside the enterprise
• Please vote for our SXSW panel "Culture Kicks Our Ass: How To Kick Back" – 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, so please vote for this panel from Steve Portigal and D. P. Haine, of Obvious Design.

  We’ll explore the different cultural challenges that breakthrough products must overcome: emergent usage behaviors that are impossible to predict, a global customer base and cultural barriers inside the corporation that suffocate innovation. We’ll also share best practices for addressing each challenge.

• Please vote for our SXSW panel "FAIL: When User Research Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong" – 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, so please vote for this panel from
  Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting
  Nate Bolt, Bolt|Peters
  Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio
  Aviva Rosenstein, Ask.com
  Mark Trammell, Digg

  Best practices for user research are not hard to come by, but experience is the ideal way to develop mastery. And with experience inevitably comes failure. Embarrassing, awkward, hilarious failure that gives the gift of self-improvement. We’ll share our own unvarnished examples and what they taught us.

• Do programmers still buy printed books? | Zen and the Art of Programming – Likewise, when I’m holding a book or have it open on my desk, I’m in “book reading mode”, which makes it far easier to immerse myself in it. This means that I’m focused on the task and can proceed quickly. The only context switch that happens is between the book and the editor/shell, if it’s the kind of book that warrants typing along. If you are reading a book in a browser tab, it’s very easy to think, “I’ll just check my email for a second”, or introduce similar distractions. I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect.

  When I buy a physical copy of a book, I feel psychologically more obliged to at least try to get through it. Online I experience a paradox of choice of sort. With hundreds of interesting books available there in front of me, I’m more inclined to excessively multitask, and end up checking out different books while I should still be reading the current one.

  (Thanks @onwardparam and @chirag_mehta)

• New study suggests people from different cultures read facial expressions differently – East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.
  They were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

  The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

  (via Design-Emotion.com)

• OneMillionGiraffes.com – fascinating to look at how a simple exercise can be tackled in so many different ways – My friend, Jørgen, doesn't believe I can collect one million giraffes by 2011. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. So far I've got 76.870 giraffes, so I need 923.130 more! And I have 503 days left to get them.
• See my giraffe – Will it be one in a million?

Here’s some more articles, projects, websites, and other online ephemera that we’ve come across since we posted part 1.

• A series of humorous videos from Green Apple Books comparing the Kindle to a book
• Books and Browsers (audio link) – Dave Gray (IDEA2008)
  

  The book as a form factor has been around for about 2,000 years, since Julius Caesar first decided to fold up a scroll, accordion-style, and mark the pages for later reference. In 1455, Aldus Manutius was the first to publish the portable paperback, and it has remained relatively unchanged since. XPLANE Founder and Chairman Dave Gray explores several questions about the future of the book and the web browser.

• Sony has launched the latest salvo

  a sub-$300 touch-screen “Reader Touch Edition” and the $199 “Reader Pocket Edition,” which features a 5-inch display. The company is also lowering prices of ebooks. New releases and best-sellers will all be $9.99, matching Amazon’s price point for the first time.

• NPR Science Friday broadcast exploring Who Owns Your Digital Data?
• NPR on Amazon removing Orwell books
  

  Lynn, you cover books and publishing for NPR, so do you have a Kindle or an e-book Reader?

  LYNN NEARY: Actually, I don’t, Linda. In fact, my cubical at NPR and my night table at home are loaded down with good, old-fashioned books because even though I’ve actually seen the Kindle work and I’ve talked to a lot of people who love it, I still can’t imagine reading some of my favorite novels on the Kindle. What about you?

  WERTHEIMER: I love it. It’s especially nice for traveling. I really do not leave home without it. But I did have a very peculiar experience with Kindle. I was reading a book and all of a sudden, I was back at the beginning of the book. So I thought I’d punched some button somehow. But no, what I had was a book in two pieces.

• CHART OF THE DAY: Most People Still Have Never Seen A Kindle
  

  Some 40% of North Americans who responded to a Forrester Research survey in Q2 2009 had heard of, but had never seen, an e-reader. Another 17% had never heard of one. But ownership more than doubled year-over-year to 1.5%.

• A short piece from Steve Haber, who developed the Sony Reader

• Where there are bookshelves, there will be books!

  When Eddie Bernays, the father of modern publicity, was asked by a group of book publishers to increase book sales, he said, “Where there are bookshelves, there will be books.” And then he went on to convince architects, construction companies, and interior designers to install bookshelves in new homes. That helped to launch the modern day publishing and selling of books. (thanks to Joshua Treuhaft)

• Cathy Marshall’s publications about reading, interaction, electronic periodicals, and ebooks
• Smarter Books – Envisioning the uses & future of print, electronic, & new media books

  This site is dedicated to design thinking for re-envisioning books, publishing models, and the cognitive activity we call reading. The many markets and models for books and distribution are changing radically and continuously. We, authors and designers, need to share what we have learned and are doing to recreate the forms, meaning, and thinking of books of all kinds. Sponsored by Redesign Research

• The unbook is a concept originally developed by Jay Cross. The concept evolved based on discussions between Jay and Dave Gray
• The Diamond Age is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. The Primer in The Diamond Age is a complex and highly elaborate descendant of today’s hypertext.

  Unlike the very static version we are familiar with today, the Primer is fully interactive. It not only offers the reader an open-ended narrative, but it also changes to the reader’s demands, among many other features.

• Vogon Heavy Industries is proud to make the The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy available to Earth Internet users under licence from Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor.
• Visualization of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book
• Fore-edge painting – Pictures along the page edges, hidden behind gilt
• Exhaustive list of book terminology
• Digital Book 09, a conference put on by IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum)
• Wholesale eBook Sales Statistics

As of this writing there are only 3 1 spots remaining for my EPIC 2009 workshop Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities, September 1 in Chicago.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of ethnography in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. How can designers and researchers work with ethnographic data to create new things for business to do?

Participants in this workshop will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.

You can check out slides and audio from an abbreviated version at BayCHI

or come to the abbreviated version at Web 2.0 New York, November 17.

• Shoddy Pear Analytics study of Twitter content – This is really bad research, but it's topical so it'll get press.

  Bad research #1: When creating content categories for your analysis, don't be so dismissive. They established a category for this analysis called "pointless babble" so obviously they have a strong point of view of the value of that content and it's hardly unbiased research.

  Bad research #2: Understand that Twitter (or any social, conversational medium) is a system. It's not an independent set of messages, it's a multifaceted conversation. Where's the analysis to look at the interrelationships and dependencies between "I am eating a sandwich" and "here's a great news story to check out"? That's much more difficult, mathematically, and to even consider that would require deeper insight than Pear showed here.

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.

Annotated interview transcript

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

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.

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.

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

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.

• Optimal Microwaving with Fitt's μλ-Number – I had an idea to blog about this myself, funny that someone else did. I try to enter microwave times that require minimal thought (or "mental operator" as they say in Fitt's Law): "2:22" is about as good as "2:00" when reheating and is provably faster. It obviously doesn't add a lot of time savings to your day, but it's been one of those little habits I've observed in myself. It's funny how math education, our money, and the way we tell time and structure our day conditions us to favor certain types of numbers, even when our interfaces don't.

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

It looks to be a busy time between now and the end of the year, with a lot of exciting opportunities. Some details still TBD; I’ll update with links when we get ’em. Meanwhile, if you’re going to be at any of these presentations, please let me know!

• An Introduction to User Research – CCA’s Design MBA Program – San Francisco, August 27
• Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities – EPIC 2009 – Chicago, Sep. 1
• Understanding Cultural Context – IxDA Chicago @ DePaul University – Sep. 1 (RSVP here)
• “Yes, and” for Better Design/Design Research – IDSA Project Infusion – Miami, Sep. 24
• We’ve Done All This Research: Now What? – Nokia Design Speaker Series – Sep. 30
• Reading Ahead: Considering The Book’s Future in the iPod Era – UC Berkeley Center for New Media and School of Information – Sep. 30
• Design Research Workshop – Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Product Design – Nov. 5
• Tasarƒ±ma ƒ?lham ve Veri Saƒülamak ƒ??ßin Etnografik Ara?ütƒ±rma (Ethnographic Research for Inspiring and Informing Design) – International Istanbul Industrial Design Summit – Nov. 6-7
• Guest lecture in Chris Fahey’s Interaction Design Fundamentals – School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design – New York, Nov. 16
• We’ve Done All This Research: Now What? – Web 2.0 Expo – New York, Nov. 17
• Yes, My Iguana Loves to Cha-Cha: Improv, Creativity and Collaboration – IxDA NYC (SOLD OUT!) – New York, Nov. 19
• Design Research Presentation – Pratt Institute – New York, Nov. 19
• Getting Generative: User Research Applied to Business Decisions – School of Visual Arts – New York, Nov. 20