Axe is a perfume oops body spray targeted at young men. The whole thrust (if you will) of their positioning is that it will make young men amazingly irrestisble to women (see Love Potion No. 9

). Their ads, of course, feature many outlandish scenarios involving young guys having amazing encounters with hot young chicks. Last night I saw one where a guy is playing strip poker against three tasty things, and loses a round. So they take off their clothes. Okay, about what we expect.

And then the next ad was for Kraft Dinner.

A dorky guy is in a hot tub with a similar set of lithe vixens. One more gets in the water and exclaims in surprise as she sits down. She recoils and he lifts up to reveal a pot cooking up a meal of Kraft Dinner. Cue music, logo, announcer. And in the last second of the ad we see what we assume to be his bathing trunks – with Kraft Dinner logo on one leg – flop down onto a table. Implication – he’s now naked and scoring with said hot chicks after serving them up freshly prepared KD.

It’s one thing to sell fragrance that way, but macaroni and cheese? The juxtaposition from one ad to the next was jarring, to say the least.

Thanks to some great technical sleuthing and hacking, we’ve got some good improvements here on the blog
– an “email this post” link with every post
– an improved “tag cloud” off the right that links to other postings, rather than back to Technorati (who seem to have stopped indexing this blog 55 days ago)
– The blog title is now All This ChittahChattah rather than Portigal Consulting both on the page and in feeds
– I got rid of CoComment because it was (as others had suggested when I started using it) causing some problems. It was slow and was messing up pingbacks (i.e., posts here that refer to other posts here)

Please let me know if you see any weirdness or broken stuff that needs to be fixed!

Here is a link to a podcast page for my recent talk at Adaptive Path’s UXWeek.

Effective user research requires both observation and interviewing. When doing research we strive to get outside our own default expectations and perceptions, in order to better see the details of what we’re looking at, in other words, to understand the cultural context. This third component is the most crucial to innovation. Interesting things happen when we leave our homes and our comfort zone, perhaps in another country where business, language, food, and more is beyond our own frames of reference.

Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, offers expert tips in both observation and interviewing, and considers the challenges and opportunities in conducting research abroad. He believes that one way to better understand a different culture is to look at how things in your own culture are handled differently. He gives some examples of how some things are promoted differently in Japan than in the United States. He states that mundane observations reveal important cultural differences.

Here are the slides

I’ll be curious how others fare; I couldn’t get it to go past slide 6, although I could go to the end and page backwards. I’ve reported a bug and hope it gets fixed, but since it’s just been launched and getting some buzz, who knows. I re-uploaded and replaced it with a version that works. They are working on tracking down the problem with the last version.

The third episode of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip was entitled The Focus Group and opens with a test audience watching the end of last week’s episode of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Oh, but there are actually two different shows that share the same name – the show we are watching and the show being created in the show we are watching. See how I’ve managed to make it more confusing?

Anyway, a facilitator appears at the front of the auditorium and asks the audience to put back their dials in the seat pocket – I’m not sure we actually see their dials, but we’re meant to assume they have been using them – interest meters that they can indicate interest or engagement up or down in real time as they watched the show. The facilitator begins to ask what things they did not like about the show. But positive comments start coming from the group, so he pushes them to suggest what they did not like.

At this point, we move back behind the mirror where the executives are critiquing the technique of the focus group (though technically, is this really a focus group?) and the accuracy of the responses being given. And that’s the key to the whole show. The executives (later described as “them”) need the numbers to presumably drive the content of the show to what audiences are responding to (although there is some official hands-off policy between the management and the creatives, there is influence and manipulation that happens, hence the drama). The creatives need to be free from the constraints of the numbers so that they can perform and express themselves, and of course, no matter who intercedes to protect these creatives from this harmful data, other forces conspire to leak the data, and semi-chaos and semi-power-struggles ensue (sure, chaos and power struggles are happening anyway, but the interpretations of this date feed them).

In one pathos-filled scene, an actor/writer expresses grave concern that a sketch she championed (and acted in) “flatlined.” Others point that one guy in St. Louis and one guy in another city liked it. There’s a rant about all the shows that focus groups were negative about, including Seinfeld, and this sketch is compared to those shows that don’t work the same way, that take time to be appreciated and build an audience and that ultimately don’t ever appeal to everyone.

The show concludes with some big wins – the audience overall increased in this week’s broadcast – and some small wins – the focus group participants who liked this obscure sketch increased from 2 to 4, as one character confidently predicted.

It’s a great show about the creative process in a highly constrained corporate business. The abuse and misuse of research was entertaining and somewhat familiar. Indeed one character added a controversial question that produced controversial results specifically to goad another creative character to find within himself what he was about, and to have the fortitude to ignore that feedback. The whole episode serves as a reminder that what is truly innovative will often fail when looked at through a traditional lens.

Rep. Foley’s Explicit Messages are big news. But ask yourself this, based on what you’ve read so far. Were the inappropriate communications in email? Or IM? Or both? I really can’t tell. What I’ve seen is sloppy reporting, where a non-technical publication doesn’t bother to distinguish between very different technologies. It was a running joke when reporters kept calling Undercover a “chat room” or a “message board” or an “online forum” instead of a mailing list – you don’t expect much accuracy (or interest in accuracy) from entertainment reporters (I think one story in ’97 or so referred to me as Eve Portigal) and those technologies were somewhat newer back then. But now we’ve got front page coverage by hard-news journalists in all the top publications, presumably with fact-checkers and lawyers looking this stuff over.

Don’t these sort of details matter?

Normal is defined by context.

Bruce Sterling gave a talk at CCA last Tuesday. Part of the talk came from Shaping Things (although he didn’t mention SPIMES directly), but much of it was fresh, presumably influenced by his visit that same afternoon to the scenario planners and futurists at the Global Business Network.

I’ve since finished reading Shaping Things and hope to write up something about it before too long, but meanwhile my notes from the talk are posted at Core77.

The day of the talk I was at MarCamp and had to rush to get to CCA in time to hopefully eat and get a seat (after getting lost on Stanford campus and ending up in the back of a crowded and hot room for the Antonelli talk the day before, I was trying to plan). I walked into the school’s cafe thinking I’d grab something and wolf it down and then go to the auditorium. And there’s Bruce Sterling sitting quietly at a table working on his laptop. He looks up and sees me and as I walk over to re-introduce myself (we met once at an IDSA West event where I had recommended him as the keynote) he seems to know who I am and invites me to sit down. And then another man joins us, and Sterling introduces me to Rudy Rucker, telling him how great my blog is. Rucker gets out a pen and paper to write the details down, Sterling tells him to Google me, and I just hand him a business card.

I then start saying really stupid things to Rudy Rucker; remembering that I read one of his books many years ago but I can’t remember what it is (since figuring out that it was probably Wetware). I don’t know why I did that; it’s not like anyone ever wants to hear that sort of thing even when it’s expressed non-moronically. It’s funny now, I guess. They showed me pictures from some crazy vault in the basement of the building that the Global Business Network is in, discussed Web 2.0, asked me to save seats and so on. I see someone else had a slightly similar experience.

Eventually I went in to get seats (though being early meant I had plenty of choice) and looked up Rudy Rucker online, only to realize that I had purchased a few of his books recently! I gave up on one; and am currently about 10% through another, on my bedside table at home. Moron-forehead slap number 2. When Rucker showed up he asked if I could drive him to the train station afterwards, and mentioned he was going to write a story about giant ants with Bruce Sterling (who was sitting and writing away on his laptop, wordsmithing, I presume, the talk he was about to give). Sitting behind us was Brenda Laurel, newly at CCA, but of course I didn’t realize that until afterwards. What a big evening of famous people that I can act like a clueless goofball in front of…it’s all blog fodder, I guess.

Sterling’s talk was entertaining and provocative. His ability to craft phrases for a verbal presentation is unique, and he manages this semi-sarcastic riffing drawl that brings his written prose back into the realm of the spoken. This lets him rant about some techno-groovy possibility and use geeky phrases about “bluetooth-enabled devices crawling through our skin” (not an actual phrase he used) that don’t thunder demandingly but almost mock the idea while still wildly considering the possibility real and even necessary. It’s engaging as hell, sneaking ideas past your defenses with a dry cloaking device.

And maybe that’s why he’s been a Visionary-in-Residence at Art Center – it’s not that his ideas are entirely clear or convincing or that his logic follows simply and persuasively, but he takes on you and a ride and you may notice that you are off the road sometimes, but you’re still along for the ride. [I hope someone is counting the fallen metaphors here].

Rucker ended up sticking around and not riding in the new RX8, and I finally got to eat my dinner sandwhich when I got home later that evening!

A slideshow of photos from the day, running on a TV monitor at the end of the day

Check out a PDF of my talking points from my session at MarCamp/

It was a fun day, met some new people, met some others I’d heard of but never actually met, saw some familiar friendly faces as well. Some good discussions, some not as good. I was frankly really pleased with the session I ran; I talked for a bit and then turned it over to the group to discuss and we had great people who were smart, experienced, opinionated and articulate. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Indeed, some of the themes were echoed throughout the other sessions I was in.

My thoughts on the Paola Antonelli talk at Stanford are posted on Core77.

Not included in that writeup is my rant about how ridiculous un-navigable Stanford campus is. I’ve been there dozens of times over the years but we still got lost trying to find the building we wanted (and their fancy Internet map website isn’t at all usable, giving you a tiny little window), relying on directions posted on the Stanford site (that proved to be inaccurate). There’s no signage or other wayfinding. Buildings are joined together in a way that makes it hard to see where the “next” building is; an entrance may or may not exist, with small letting on that door (which is 40 feet and up stairs from the pathway) indicating the name of the building and the building number.

We got lost even retracing our steps back to the car afterwards. The campus is poorly lit and every building looks the same; there’s no visual cues to figure out where you came from.

Like so many other things, it’s designed for the people that are already there. It’s not designed for newcomers or even regular occasional visitors such as myself.

I’m officiating (? for lack of a better term) at The Bay Area’s Best

Please come out to celebrate the impact the Bay Area industrial design community had in the 2006 IDSA & Business Week Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). Out of 1,494 entries submitted from 29 countries, Bay Area firms, corporations and individuals won 16 of the 108 awards given. That is 15% of all of the awards given out internationally.

7:00 – 8:00
Tunes/ DJs Ric-Tic Soul 66 and Super Mod 67, spinning genuine 1960’s and early 70’s Soul, Motown, R&B, and Funk.
Moves/ Authentic 60’s style Go-Go dancers
Drinks/ Cocktails
Eats/ Tapas

8:00 – 9:00
Door prizes and award presentation by Steve Portigal

9:00 – 11:00
Music dance drink