Steve was part of Rosenfeld Media’s online event 32 Awesomely Practical UX Tips (tweets

).

It’s a short week here as we’re off on vacation by the last half of the week. I’ll update here upon our return, but it’ll be quiet for a couple of Mondays.

• In the few days for the week we’re running through contracts and statements-of-work to try to get a new project officially launched and on the books. So excited about collaborating with this team and digging into some pretty interesting fieldwork.
• We just announced a new service: pro bono Management/UX Consulting for Small Businesses.
• Interviewing Users was included in Designers & Books’ 99 Must-Reads From 2013.
• I’m one of a long list of “Design and UX Leaders” who shared a bit about what we’re reading.
• In case you missed it, here’s my 5-minute talk about The Power of Silence, newly posted from last year’s Fluxible conference.
• Ten years gone: From January 2004 – Hummer line extension: shoes, CES and products for women.
• What we’re consuming: Koo, Ice Cream Bar, cheese, Psycho Donuts, Short Term 12

In collaboration with Sarah Rice, we are pleased to announce the launch of our pro bono management/UX consulting service aimed at small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We’re looking for small business owners who are interested in growing or who are feeling “stuck.” Using what we’ve learned in years of consulting, we can help you think about what’s working, what to improve, and how you can go about making those changes.

With one or two short sessions at your offices or at ours, we can help you clarify business goals, look for ways to improve your customer’s experience, prioritize strategic objectives, identify tactical next steps and so on. Each consultation will be customized to you and your business needs.

As part of the process, we’ll document and share some of your story to raise awareness and inspire others.

If you’re a small business in the SF Bay Area and you’d like to know more, please get in touch with us! Email [email protected] or phone 408-315-8961.

About Sarah and Steve
Sarah Rice is principal of Seneb Consulting, a solo consultancy helping companies of all sizes understand and influence customer behavior. Past clients include Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, Princess Cruises, Yahoo! and NetApp.

Steve Portigal is founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique agency that helps companies to discover and act on insights about their customers and themselves. He’s also the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights.

This religious pamphlet appeared on our doorstep, asking a difficult question – Can the dead really live again? – and giving the prospective convert three choice

• yes?
• no?
• maybe?

I couldn’t help but think of a survey that would ask you to force your thoughts about a complex issue into some easily-summable categories. Sadly, the rest of the pamphlet did not include any skip logic, where religious content was presented differently, depending on how one responded to this provocative lede.

Thanks to the folks from Fluxible who posted my 5-minute talk from last fall’s event. I talk about the power of silence in user research – and show just how hard it is to keep quiet when asking questions.

It’s a gorgeous January day in Northern California. I feel very lucky!

• I’m kicking off the week drowning in administrivia: sending out 1099 to last year’s contractors, paying the next installment on this year’s taxes, dealing with a missing automated bill payment to our landlord and so on. It’s gotta be done but yuck.
• There is some fun administrivia though: time spent getting ready for a possible office share with a local designer who is interested in one of our unused desks.
• Last week was really dominated by chatting with a number of prospects, outlining project plans, creating documents, talking through approaches and schedules. This week begins with…waiting. Although I’m sure that’s going to get a bit zany before too long.
• We ended last year as an agency of one, and so we’ve begun this year by reaching out to our network of collaborators in order to create just a bit more formality around an informal aggregation. This week will be a lot of conversations with people about the details of working together.
• I’ve started a fun collaboration with a local colleague and will be announcing that here very soon!
• On the town: I’ve been invited to dinner with a delegation of design executives from China. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about but will find out!
• On Thursday, I’ll be teaching a workshop about Interviewing Users at Code for America!
• Here’s my 5-minute talk about The Power of Silence, newly posted from last year’s Fluxible conference.
• Ten years gone: From January 2004 – Phase 3 is Profit!, The Sim Mafia.
• What we’re consuming: The Happy Taco, StarStruck, Modern Family, Steal This Episode.

The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Pint Lock is a simple enough product – a locking mechanism for a standard pint of ice cream. But along with its functionality comes a measure of social performance that’s worth a brief closer look.

The idea is humorous (one side of the lock has the slogan “I’m terribly sorry, but there’s no ‘u’ in ‘my pint'”) – but in that humor is a gentle reminder to everyone that Ben & Jerry’s is precious stuff, worth protecting.

As far as security goes (the ice cream is in cardboard, after all), I’m reminded of what a research participant told me once. When walking around the perimeter of his fast-food franchise, he said “A lock only stops an honest person.” His point was that any security can be broken with some amount of force, and the role of the lock is to make it clear that you aren’t welcome. Social norms keep most of us from bypassing that lock. So while we might pop open the ice cream and take a spoonful or two of our coworker or roommate or partner’s Chunky Monkey, we’re probably not going to cut through the package and make it obvious. So while this lock won’t stop a ravenous freezer rodent, it will protect your ice cream from most of your regular dessert-craving cohabitants.

It’s great design in that it considers the functionality in its cultural context. If they built this by spec-sheet (as one might with a bike lock, say) they would miss the point entirely.

Thanks, Mom!

Happy 2014! I took yesterday off, driving from Vancouver to Seattle, then flying home from Seattle to San Francisco. Of course, a “day off” is a relative term, since I spent much of the travel dealing with scheduling meetings, having pre-meeting check-ins, and so on. Anyway, today we’re back!

• I see they’ve announced the students who will be going to Amsterdam for the IxDA Student Design Challenge. I was excited to see that one of the winning entries was one that I had reviewed and was very enthusiastic about. Good luck!
• This week is so far peppered with meetings about collaborations, projects, fieldwork, helping teams develop and more. Whew!
• Next week I’ll be teaching a workshop about Interviewing Users at Code for America. Can’t wait to meet everyone!
• CHIFOO in Portland, OR has announced their 2014 speaker series I’ll be giving a new talk, about the War Stories, in June.
• Ten years gone: From January 2004 – customers are on their own at eBay, “Internet-Toy”, The Matrix Reloaded, local edition.
• What we’re consuming: Lynda Kay, Mob City, Archives Be Damned 2000, Corny milkshake/chicken karagge waffle sandwiches.

Over this past year, we wrote extensively about user research and interviewing, with pieces about robot interviewers, self-reporting in the YouTube era

, Harry Dean Stanton and silence, Marc Maron and listening, empathy begets empathy, pattern-recognition, how body language changes you inside, an approach to interviewing without questions, eye contact or rapport, the art of the interview,
a curious way to get participants, how stories fuel listening and the dangerous power of the interviewer.

It’s time to sum up some of the noteworthy writings/happenings of the year. Let’s get to it!

• The highlight of the year was the publication of Interviewing Users, my first book! Check out reviews by Garrett Moon, QRCA Views Magazine, and Digital Anthropologist, as well as Goodreads and Amazon.
• Some book goodies online include: cover, foreword, excerpt, acknowledgements, FAQ, testimonials and images and diagrams.
• We had book fun celebrations, with book launch parties in New York and San Francisco.
• I co-organized and hosted the IxDA Student Design Challenge in Toronto and helped with the judging for the 2014 event.
• While we’ve only done one episode so far, Dave Gray and I (along with special guest Chris Reimer) did an online show called We Might Do A Show called We Might Swear
• It was a big year for speaking. I debuted a new workshop at Fluxible called The Designer is Present. I talked about (and led workshops in) Interviewing Users at Catapult Labs, Twitter, Yammer, Citrix, Mozilla, UX Week, MIMA Summit, UX Book Club DC, UX Book Club Philly, Rome UX Book Club, O’Reilly, IxDA NYC and IxDA Los Angeles/LA UX Meetup (slides, video).
• I spoke about Bad Ideas at the Silicon Valley IxDA, SVA’s Products of Design, SJSU Human Factors/Ergonomics Alumni Symposium and SXSW.
• I spoke about improv at Walmart, mobile research at PayPal, design-led innovation at TiE Silicon Valley and Skill Building for Design Innovators at TorCHI.
• I spoke about analyzing research data at UC Berkeley’s New Product Development class and about interviewing users SVA’s Interaction Design class in Research Methods.
• We gathered and shared a huge number of compelling user research War Stories (and are still looking for more).
• Around the blog, we examined social norms around taking pictures of your food, took umbrage at rescinded bonuses, the commoditization of innovation and inauthentic customer stories, considered the impact of activist avatar changes, and explored motivations for behavior change in customers.
• We found interesting sites like Awkward Chatbot and Does The Dog Die?
• We mused about design and meaning and form, self-referential products, socializing death, sex toy design, innovation as eevolution not revolution and the limitations of data.
• In globalization, we looked at the appeal of a Friends cafe in Beijing and importing lowrider culture.
• We found an amazing healthcare case study about sweeping cultural change that wholly reinvented the way services were conceived of and delivered.
• We looked at the role of pop culture and the Bieb specifically.
• In support of Interviewing Users we did interviews with Tomer Sharon, Denise Lee Yohn, Ethnography Matters, Huffington Post, Maish Nichani, Business 901, UIE Book Corner, UX Matters, 33 Voices, UX Magazine and the eLearning Coach podcast.
• We wrote extensively about user research and interviewing, with pieces about robot interviewers, self-reporting in the YouTube era, Harry Dean Stanton and silence, Marc Maron and listening, empathy, pattern-recognition, how body language changes you inside, an approach to interviewing without questions, eye contact or rapport, the art of the interview,
  a curious way to get participants, how stories fuel listening and the dangerous power of the interviewer.
• While we didn’t travel overseas this year (gasp!) we did get around and shared some of what we saw in Austin for SXSW, Baltimore, Kitchener-Waterloo, LA, Minneapolis, New York , and again, Portland, San Diego and Denver, Tampa, Toronto, and again.

All those years ago: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.