Over the past while I’ve been working with Jason Ulaszek of Inzovu to deliver a storytelling workshop to clients. After a number of successful experiences, we’re making it more widely available. Check out details at the Inzovu site, highlights below.

Storytelling is an essential human skill for any team. It drives connections, influences decisions, and inspires empathy. Discover how powerful storytelling can unleash your team’s potential.

Integrate Storytelling Into Your Team’s Practice
In innovative and creative practices, the ability to tell a compelling story is just as crucial as doing the work itself. While good teams focus on delivering high-quality work, great teams go beyond and wrap the delivery of their work into stories. A team’s ability to tell well-crafted stories is a critical factor in influencing their success and achieving the outcomes they seek.

That’s where our storytelling workshops come in.

Benefit’s You’ll Get
Our storytelling workshops are designed to empower your team by enhancing their storytelling prowess.

Your team members will supercharge their ability to:

• Share stories of your customer’s experience, help build empathy, and influence decision-making
• Create a shared understanding for the vision or roadmap of your product or service
• Engage your audience by demonstrating your understanding of their unmet need or the values and benefits of your product or service
• Ignite a passion within your organization for what’s possible

This workshop is valuable for a range of roles and functions within growing product and service organizations including User Experience (UX) Design, Product Management, Marketing, and Innovation teams.

What To Expect
Depending on the format and your organization’s goals, you’ll:

• Practice, receive feedback, and improve your storytelling skills
• Prototype and iterate a story in a creative and collaborative environment
• Understand how to apply storytelling to organizational and team challenges (e.g., build a compelling narrative about user research insights, or explain a team’s function to the rest of the company)
  Advocate for storytelling as a force for cultural change
• Be able to choose between different storytelling formats that best suit the material, audience, and your own strengths

And, we’ll have fun together while learning a crucial skill.


Formats To Suit Every Need
No matter your industry or your type of team, our workshops are designed to enhance storytelling skills–whether that’s a series of short sessions, an in-person all-day workshop, or a multi-day activity.

• Virtual: A series of short sessions across three weeks, with individual and group assignments between virtual meetings. For virtual workshops, we typically meet once a week.
• In-person, one-day session: A one-day, in-person workshop where we will group participants throughout the day, explore storytelling formats together, and deliver a story at the end of the day.
• Custom story building: A custom workshop for your specific scenario that builds off our storytelling basics. Custom story building could be a one-day event or a multi-day activity depending on your needs.

The second edition of Interviewing Users is out! You can buy it here. Now, a little bit about what’s new: a whole set of guest essays!

Thanks to the sidebar contributors: Kate Towsey, Tamara Hale, Gregg Bernstein, Jorge Arango, Joyce Kakariyil Paul, Monal Chokshi, and Shima Houshyar for making the book better through your expertise.

I’ll be speaking at Chicago Camps Tent Talks on November 13 at 5 pm CT. It’ll be a short, live discussion about Interviewing Users, and it’ll be recorded and available online afterwards. Register for the session here.

Thanks to Chris Kovel for having me on the inaugural episode of his “In Dialogue” series on the Universal Lens Channel. For about 75 minutes, we talked about the state of user research in 2023.

The episode is on YouTube but the interview is audio only. The YouTube and audio versions are embedded below, and also available on YouTube and libsyn.

There’s a transcript available on YouTube.

You don’t have visibility into everything and so I think [a company’s user research maturity] needs sometimes a dedicated examination and consideration in order to to improve it. I guess that’s how I would make the case or because you know at a profession level there are things that we can do but ultimately the implementation is taking place inside companies and what it really looks like is very localized. Company A and Company B can learn from each other in terms of what their best practices are, what their struggles are, but it’s hyper local — we have this way of doing product management, we have this market, we have this maturity in our marketing business, we have this kind of product, this vertical — all those things are going to really change what it takes to build a more mature practice, and if you don’t locally examine it, and you know, what more mature looks like for company A is not what more mature looks like for Company B. So I think there is sort of an investment needed of time and focus and ideally an external perspective to try to see where strides can be made to to to yeah to move things to move things along.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote Interviewing Users, and I’m thrilled to announce the second edition! It comes out October 17th and is available for pre-order, at a 15% discount.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further—showing the methods and details behind asking questions—from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Bonus: read Chapter 1 here.

Aline Ferreira, a sociologist who is studying UX and UX research, read Interviewing Users and summarized it in Portuguese (Planejamento e boas práticas de entrevista: o que aprendi com “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal or Planning and good interview practices: what I learned from “Interviewing Users”, by Steve Portigal).

Com uma linguagem simples e concisa, o livro de Portigal é excelente para o público iniciante em UX, assim como para os mais experientes.

O livro “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal, conta com dicas práticas sobre como entrevistar usuários em profundidade. Ele é excelente especialmente para aqueles que não têm muita experiência. Contudo, eu não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que seja um livro que contribui também com profissionais mais experientes.

Jennifer Rash interviewed me for DesignTalk, her blog.

I pulled out one part of our exchange, but there’s more and you should read the whole thing (it’s pretty short!):

What is your approach for discussing sensitive topics?
I can think of plenty of times where participants opened the door to an off-topic sensitive area (say, repeated, thinly-veiled references to being frustrated with a spouse) and I just left it alone, because it wasn’t germane to our focus. In general, It’s worth being clear with ourselves whether a topic might be uncomfortable for us or for our participants and not conflating the two. So I think there’s a combination of sensitivity for either party, and relevance that informs how if or how I proceed.

When we’re talking about sensitive topics, I’ll generally be neutral (maybe using body language to indicate I’m listening rather than an exclamation like “oh no!” that indicates I have my own emotions about what they’ve shared). My follow-ups may be neutral and direct (“What did you decide to do then?”) if I perceive my participant as comfortable, but if I’m going to be more cautious I can ask a projective question, where the question isn’t about them, but some other group of people.

Q: How have you seen other people in the community deal with that situation?
A: Well, when it happened to me, I decided to…

Making the question less direct sometimes prompts a response about them, but those cases, it was their choice to talk about themselves specifically rather than more broadly about other people.

I recently spoke about Boosting User Impact to the Product Makers community. The 47-minute video is embedded below, and on YouTube here.

Steve joined us to talk about how organizations can operate user research programs with greater maturity, engaging stakeholders to maximize influence and impact.

Event summary here (registration required).

If you’re at all online, you probably have seen the reactions to SyntheticUsers. I have enjoyed the snark and outrage about this ridiculous ‘service’ but we really benefit from Niloufar Salehi actually trying it and reporting back so the outrage can be founded in the facts. Ironically, this is something that SyntheticUsers doesn’t actually do

This short post, I tried out SyntheticUsers, so you don’t have to is summed up by the sub-head

Using AI as a replacement for interviewing actual users is a brilliant idea if you want to look like you made an effort, but are really looking to fill the page with superficial, stereotyped bullshit.

Further in, we see that this experiment compared the output of SynthesicUsers with the conclusions from some actual research. In the research itself

Our own in-depth interviews over months with real parents found that the dashboard was a misguided solution and that what was really meeting our participants’ information needs was through trusting relationships that met them where they were and went beyond information about schools.

but SyntheticUsers reports that

Participants said that the dashboard would be “very effective,” “very useful,” and “very helpful” in solving their problems (6/6) and rated it on average 3.4/5.

Again, there’s no surprises here, but there is delight in seeing an actual example. Send this to your bosses, clients, and colleagues who decide to suggest these sorts of tools instead of actually, you know, doing the work.

Coming up June 14 in San Francisco, I’ll be running my first public user research training in several years. Thanks to Mind the Product for hosting me for this day-long session.

Register here.