Steve did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in the UX Community on Slack (transcript).

• I had an epic week in New York City last week: happy hour with the Brooklyn UX folks, lunch at Etsy, a visit to General Assembly, the NASDAQ ProDesign conference, hanging out at the SVA Products of Design studio and a few meals with friends. But I’m glad to be back in the warmer climes of home and digging into my work here.
• My first priority this week is get the details finalized for my full-up workshop on soft skills, next week at Interaction 15. ‘m also doing this workshop in May at Enterprise UX in San Antonio.
• I’m not only leading a workshop at Enterprise UX, I’m also a “theme leader” for the Insight at Scale track. Today we have our first meeting together to look more closely at what each of the speakers intend to cover.
• Last week on Dollars to Donuts I spoke with Nancy Frisbherg of Financial Engines. If the production works out (I’m cautiously pessimistic at this point in the week) we’ll have another one on Wednesday. Meanwhile, you can find them all on iTunes and Stitcher.
• I’ve got a couple of projects in the sales process, others in the bureaucracy of internal purchasing departments. It’s a pretty good range of interesting collaborations and I’m just trying to be patient!
• I’m teaching a workshop on improv, in the interaction design program at CCA on Friday.
• I’m speaking about Beating the Blank Page at The Design Writing Summit on February 12 in San Francisco.
• I’ll be one of several panelists at UX Careers 2015: Where is the field headed and how do you stay current?, February 28 in San Francisco.
• I’ve been doing a doodle every day since January 1 and intend to go for 100 days. You can see the results here.
• Ten years gone: From February 2005 – Evite: effectiveness, semiotics, and etiquette, Extraordinary Ordinary Guy In Japan: How Do Things Change in Here?, Tony’s collections.
• What we’re consuming: Doughnut Plant, ramen, Dim Sum Go Go, Coney Island Mermaid Pilsner, Beecher’s “World’s Best” Mac & Cheese.

My guest today is Nancy Frishberg, the manager of user research at Financial Engines. We discuss recruiting participants in an enterprise setting (where users are customers of your customers), finding the generative in the evaluative and how to think about collaborative workspace as entirely separate from reporting structure.

Everybody in the organization should be interested in user research and care about what our users think and have opinions based in fact, and just not see their own experience as one facet of many people’s experiences. – Nancy Frishberg

Show Links

• Nancy Frishberg
• Follow Nancy on Twitter
• Financial Engines
• Salesforce
• User Research Council
• Fitts’s Law
• General Assembly User Experience Design training

Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes.

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It’s been a while since I posted short snippets around links I’ve found fascinating, and while that means these stories don’t come out of this week’s news, I think they are all are provocative and worth being aware of.

Marketers change pronunciation in ads to attract shoppers [CBC] – The value of the Z as a cultural indicator when selling products in Canada. Canadian companies remind of their status by highlighting the “zed” while some American companies will create a Canadian-specific ad, replacing “zee: with “zed” (depending on the product and it’s meaning – and cost)

Because cars are so closely tied to image and identity, it’s very important to get that identity correct when speaking to Canadian car buyers. But in the end, it all comes down to dollars and cents. If the product is low-end and utilitarian, marketers will go cheap and run the U.S. product name, commercial and pronunciation in both countries.

But when there’s a risk of offending the identity of Canadian buyers of big ticket items, marketers will spend the extra loonies to do a custom version for Canada.

Threat of Death Makes People Go Shopping [Inkfish] – Here’s a finding that we really don’t want to see in the wrong hands!

Nothing says “Let’s hit the outlet mall” like nearly being wiped out by a rocket. A study of both Americans and terrorized Israelis suggests that certain people respond to the threat of death by going shopping. Because if it’s your time to go, you may as well be wearing the latest from Forever 21 Michigan State University marketing professor Ayalla Ruvio and her colleagues performed two studies of potential shoppers. The first took place in Israel. Questionnaires were handed out at a community center in a town just one kilometer from the Gaza Strip, during six months of daily rocket attacks there in 2007. The same surveys were distributed in a second town farther from the fighting, where residents were aware of the violence but not in direct danger. The questionnaires were meant to ferret out a few different answers about people. Did they experience post-traumatic symptoms such as nightmares or memory loss? Did they cope with negative feelings by buying things? How often did they return from a shopping trip with items they hadn’t meant to purchase? Other questions assessed how materialistic the subjects were-did they place a lot of value on owning nice things? Israelis who were experiencing daily rocket attacks, unsurprisingly, reported more post-traumatic stress. People who felt more stress admitted to more compulsive or impulsive shopping behaviors. And both these effects (feeling stress and going shopping) were stronger in more materialistic people. For their second study, the researchers used a group of 855 American subjects, meant to be demographically representative of the U.S. population overall. Subjects filled out an online survey that measured their materialism, shopping habits, and how much they thought about their own death, as well as other factors. Once again, for people who were more materialistic, there was a relationship between fear of death and impulse buying.

Because the more materialistic Israelis experienced more stress, the researchers think “materialism makes bad events even worse.” And when materialistic people feel threatened, they buy things they don’t really want (or maybe can’t afford). The findings don’t only apply to people living in the Middle East. Events that make people fear for their lives can include car accidents, assaults, and natural disasters. Yet Ruvio puts a positive spin on the ubiquity of trauma. “This presents an opportunity for both manufacturers of impulse items and the retailers that sell these products,” she writes. When a severe storm or a military crisis is brewing, she suggests stores put their high-profit-margin items up front where impulse shoppers will see them.

While retailers may be able to benefit from people’s crises, shoppers themselves won’t. Previous research, Ruvio writes, shows that “most materialistic individuals derive little satisfaction from their consumption activities.” So much for retail therapy.

Weird T-Shirts Designed To Confuse Facebook’s Auto-Tagging [Wired Design] – The space where conceptual art meets technology can be interesting, where working solutions can be produced to comment on the problem without fully solving it, and yet point the way to a possible future where those problems are addressed this way.

How to fight back? Just buy one of Simone C. Niquille’s “REALFACE Glamoflage” T-shirts, a series of bizarre, visage-covered garments designed specifically to give Facebook’s facial recognition software the runaround.

Niquille dreamed up the shirts as part of her master’s thesis in graphic design at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. FaceValue, as the thesis is titled, imagines new design solutions for the near-future, mining the ripe intersection of privacy, pattern recognition and biometrics. The shirts, custom-printed for around $65, are one of three such imaginings–a tongue-halfway-in-cheek tool for pushing back against the emerging trends of ubiquitous, computer-aided recognition. Covered in distorted faces of celebrity impersonators, they’re designed to keep Facebook’s algorithms guessing about what–or more accurately who–they’re looking at.

“I was interested in the T-shirt as a mundane commodity,” Niquille explains. “An article of clothing that in most cases does not need much consideration in the morning in front of the closet…I was interested in creating a tool for privacy protection that wouldn’t require much time to think in the morning, an accessory that would seamlessly fit in your existing everyday. No adaption period needed.”

Promoting Health With Enticing Photos of Fruits and Vegetables [NYT] – Bolthouse Farms created a fanciful website that visualizes food-related social media content.

“It’s not that I don’t have an Oreo every once in a while,” Mr. Putman said. “We just want folks to understand that beautiful carrots have badge value the same way peanut butter, chocolate pie does.” Having badge value means something is interesting enough to deserve a hashtag.

Bitcoin Beauties promotes use of currency by women [SFGate] – If this provides empowerment to someone, then that’s great. But I don’t understand this at all. It seems like Trending Topic + Nekkid Ladies = something.

The company’s slogan is “Beauty, Brains, Bitcoin.” Its logo is a sketch of two voluptuous, nude women, posing pin-up style beside the stylized bitcoin “B.” The company website, yet to be completed, is now a photo collage of women, some topless, silhouetted against a beach sunset. Blincoe refers to members as “our beauties.” For Blincoe, there is urgency in staking a claim for women in the highly lucrative world of bitcoin, a crypto currency that by many accounts has the potential to shape the future of how transactions take place and currency flows online. For now, the main function of Bitcoin Beauties is hosting a small-but-growing weekly gathering where women talk bitcoin.

The Anti-Digit Dialing League [Orange Crate Art] – A mostly-forgotten (and mostly unsuccessful) rebellion against a technological advance. Also see the followup here.

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a short-lived movement that arose in 1962 and faded, it would seem, in 1964. Founded in San Francisco, the ADDL opposed “creeping numeralism” and fought a losing battle to preserve the use of telephone exchange names.

• I’m here today, giving a talk about The Power of Bad Ideas for the UX students at General Assembly. Then (Juno permitting) I’m off to New York, to attend the NASDAQ Pro/Design conference. On Wednesday, I’m doing a casual meetup in Brooklyn if you want to come and say “hi.”
• Last week on Dollars to Donuts (my new podcast with people who lead user research in their organization) I had a stimulating chat with Frances Karandy. Another episode comes online on Wednesday; you can find them all on iTunes and now also on Stitcher. If you want to hear the whole theme song, the track – and the background story – are here.
• I’m sitting on one War Story that just needs me to edit before it can go up, I’ve seen another draft that is very close, too. Stay tuned for more War Stories!
• I’m continuing to enjoy being an advisor to my agency client and talking them through not only the research tactics but also supporting their interactions with their client. It’s a nice way to add value, for me.
• Other projects coming up include advising a client with their research project and still getting my hands a little dirty with some expert interviews and collaborating on the synthesis work; organizing a networking event with industry leaders; facilitating an internal summit to help different departments look for ways to be more effective in their collaboration. I’ve also got proposals out for a couple of other projects so it seems like there’s a lot happening!
• They’ve fully booked my Soft Skills Are Hard workshop at Interaction 15 ! Looking forward to the whole conference and to the workshop. I’ll be doing a longer version at Enterprise UX in May.
• I will be leading a session about the writing process at The Design Writing Summit on February 12 in San Francisco.
• I’ll be one of several panelists at UX Careers 2015: Where is the field headed and how do you stay current?, February 28 in San Francisco.
• Ten years gone: From January 2005 – FreshMeat #23: Total Recall, logo hell, An amazing job title, The vending machine takes on the obesity epidemic, Crazy Valentine’s Day bear upsets mental health advocates, Your Call (and Rants on Hold) Will Be Monitored, Captured fugitive was living in stores, Wacky Warning Labels.
• What we’re consuming: Ida, Kin Khao, 100 Doodles in 100 Days, Dr. Katz live.

Steve will be leading a session about the writing process at The Design Writing Summit on February 12 in San Francisco.

My new Dollars to Donuts podcast features a nifty bit of intro and outro music. In the podcast you just hear snippets of the song, written expressly for the podcast by my brother-in-law, Bruce Todd. I’ve long been an admirer of Bruce’s songwriting and playing and overall musical thang, and it was an absolute thrill to have him create a piece of music for me.

Now you can hear the whole piece!

Since we’re all about digging into creative processes, here’s Bruce’s explanation of how he developed this music.

This song came to light through questions and (heaven forbid) assumptions about what Steve was looking for or better yet – listening for. Based on some email conversations and musical examples, I had a rough idea that the music had to be relatively fast-paced, rocking and attention=grabbing. Since Steve had some alternatives there was no pressure for me to actually produce anything and this allowed me to experiment and take a few small sound risks. Most of this recording was completed through digital amplification or direct line inputs which allowed me to work quietly and at my leisure (everything except vocals). Often when recording instruments with microphones you need a quiet peaceful environment which I don’t always have access to in my (non-soundproofed) home studio.

I began by finding a drum track: a simple upbeat 4/4 rock drum track which I had used on a previous recording (having exported the tracks from a master file and imported to my Tascam DP 32 Portastudio). Then the fun began. Knowing that the end result would be used as a short clip, I laid down about 2 minutes of drums and then pulled out my Fender Telecaster and began to experiment with a riff. This came pretty quickly as it is quite a simple progression in the key of F-sharp. Next, I plugged in my Vox DA5 (5-watt digital amplifier) and located an overdrive sound I liked and added a small amount of delay. I recorded two tracks with the same guitar sound and panned the tracks left and right, which results in creating a thicker overall sound by doubling the part. After the rhythm guitar tracks were completed I worked on the bass part. I ran the bass also through the little digital Vox and added compression which brought out a punchy bass track (this is a discovery I have been using on my other recordings ever since). Once drums, guitar and bass were complete I left the recording for a few days so I could revisit the idea when I was ready.

Coming back, I wasn’t too sure I liked what I had. If this was a more serious venture I would have probably scrapped the idea. Given that I wasn’t overly convinced that the song idea had much merit I thought I would have my young daughters (Talia 8, Arianna, 4) join me and be exposed to the recording process. Regardless of what the end result was I was sure Uncle Steve would get a kick out of his nieces being involved. Talia has a small electronic keyboard which I plugged into the Portastudio, and I gave her some headphones and had her play along with the guitar, bass and drums. Her first track was a keeper as she found a funny sound and played a part that complimented the space that the guitar riff left. Then Arianna played a part with a toy instrument of hers (in the end this track did not make it on the recording). The girls also helped me do a little vocal improvisation which also didn’t make the master mix but helped me get to the next part of the recording.

Several days again went by until I felt ready to listen to the song and see what was there and what else I could add. I went back to my guitar and found another overdrive tone which I overlaid with the auto-wah pedal sound setting on the Vox DA5. This was a lucky choice as I think it is what gets the attention of the listener at the beginning of the song. The track is pretty much one big lead guitar riff which from time to time stops and echoes the rhythm guitar tracks. This was a fun part for me as was the final vocal tracks. For the vocal tracks I ran a Shure 57 through the Vox DA 5 flanger setting with a lot of flange and overdrive and experimented by saying “Talk it Out” and by making other weird sounds. I mixed the song and sent it digitally via email to Steve – and to my surprise received a very nice response.

And that is how Dollars to Donuts found its music.

Today’s guest is Frances Karandy, a senior manager within the Customer Experience Group at Citrix. We discuss doing product-focused research in a company with a large number of products, what to look for when hiring researchers, and how to select projects that not only support the business but also help team members to develop.

Design goes hand in hand with research.. it’s about solving complex problems. How do we improve not just the UI or the screen, but also the product itself? – Frances Karandy

Show Links

• Frances Karandy
• Citrix
• Catherine Courage
• Stanford’s Design School

Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes.

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• It’s a holiday today (MLK day) for some folks in the US. But we’re working today.
• Last week on Dollars to Donuts, my new podcast with people who lead user research in their organization, I had a great conversation with Alex Wright of Etsy. Another episode drops on Wednesday; you can find them all on iTunes.
• Video from my talk on Interviewing Users from the HOW Interactive Design conference is now on YouTube and Vimeo.
• My agency collaboration is going well; their client is doing some interesting work and the research is going to help unpack expectations around a few similar-seeming value propositions. This week they’re planning to start screening for participants across the country who will fill out diaries over several weeks.
• I’ve got the green light (at least the green light that means let’s begin the paperwork) from a client team to advise them through some in-home fieldwork. I’ll be doing some interviews with experts at the same time, and we’ll all come together and synthesize the results into…something! It’s a really nice group and we’ve been looking for a chance to work together for a few months now.
• Soft Skills Are Hard, my workshop for Interaction 15 has filled up! Looking forward to the whole conference and to the workshop. I’ll be doing a shorter version for a bigger crowd at World IA Day in DC on February 21.
• Tomorrow is my rescheduled workshop on improv, collaboration and creativity at GreatSchools in Oakland.
• Next week I’m doing a lunch-hour session with the UX students at General Assembly. We’re going to talk about the Power of Bad Ideas.
• Also next week, I’ll be New York to attend the Pro/Design conference.
• Ten years gone: From January 2005 – Dubious pancake mix FAQ, Titan Probe Drops Into ‘Creme Brulee’-Like Surface.
• What we’re consuming: Keep on Keepin’ On, Brenda’s Meat & Three, 100 Doodles in 100 Days, Boyhood.

I was finally able to get my hands on the video from November’s talk (Interviewing Users: Uncovering Compelling Insights) at the HOW Interactive Design conference. Below is the video both on YouTube and Vimeo (in case you have a preference?). Also below are the slides.