I’m technically off today, spending today and yesterday in LA for a short birthday trip to see the Turrell retrospective at LACMA and eat delicious food. It’s a short week otherwise, with Thursday (and sorta Friday?) as Thanksgiving.

• Last week was my O’Reilly webcast Interviewing Users. You can see the recording at the link, also two summaries from the Twitters here and here.
• Next week I’ll be in New York for a few days. I’ll be giving a talk about Interviewing Users at IxDA NYC on December 6. You can sign up at the link but it was waitlist only a few hours after it was announced last week.
• Also in New York, I’ll be visiting SVA, speaking about The Power of Bad Ideas at the Products of Design program and guesting at the Interaction Design program in their Research Methods class.
• Ten years gone: From November 2003 – Kung Faux, Recruiting fail, Luxury Golf Cart Lawsuit.
• What we’re consuming: Underworld U.S.A., Flightfox, Osteria Mozza, 31st Union, Like a Rolling Stone, Bazaar.

Steve visited SVA and spoke about The Power of Bad Ideas at the Products of Design program and guested at the Interaction Design program in their Research Methods class.

Steve spoke about Interviewing Users at IxDA NYC.

I’m back from a relaxing week in Hawaii and plowing through email, catching up, trying to figure out what is going on.

• This Thursday is my free O’Reilly webcast Interviewing Users: Uncovering Compelling Insights, Sign up at the link.
• I was interviewed by Cruxial CIO for an article about design, user experience, and customers.
• Ten years gone: From November 2003 – Diamante Poems, Dirty Toilets, young people who swindle older people by pretending to be their children or grandchildren urgently in need of money.
• What we’re consuming: The Best American Noir of the Century, Big Island Brewhaus.

I’m in Hawaii.

That is all.

I was interviewed by CruxialCIO about how companies can design and redesign digital and mobile products that engage rather than frustrate. The article (Digital Products Flunking User Test) is broken across three tabs (Situation – Solutions – Takeaways) and the quotes from me appear on the second two tabs. FYI, the pages are a bit slow to load.

Remember the precedents. While copying competitors isn’t necessarily advisable, it doesn’t make sense to design, for example, a fly swatter that you use by swinging a string around with the flat swatter piece attached to it. People expect a stick at the end. “You can’t fail to acknowledge that there are precedents out there,” says Portigal.

“There’s some history about how customers are going to expect something to work. Everyone is a consumer so in an enterprise situation, we bring in expectations about how something should work.” If people expect that swiping left or right, double clicking, or other gestures will have a certain outcome, the lack of that outcome will be confusing. After Apple came out with the iPhone, for example, it became quickly clear that when consumers wanted a smartphone, they expected something fairly similar in form factor and function to the iPhone.

Eloquent awesomeness by Grant McCracken

The object of ethnography is to determine how the consumer sees the product, the service, the innovation. Often, this is obscure to us. We can’t see into the consumer’s (customer’s, viewer’s, user’s) head and heart because we are, in a sense, captive of our own heads and hearts. We have our way of seeing and experiencing the world. This becomes our barrier to entry. Ethnography is designed to give us a kind of helicopter experience. It takes up out of what we know and lowers us into the world of the consumer.
Ethnography is a messy method. In the beginning stages, we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what we need to ask. We are walking around the consumer’s world looking for a way in. Eventually, as we ask a series of questions, we begin to see which ones work. We begin to collect the language and the logic the consumer uses. And eventually, we begin to see how they see the world.

The method is designed not to impose a set of questions and terms on the discussion, but to allow these to emerge over the course of the conversation. We are allowing the consumer to choose a path for the interview. We are endowing them with a sense that they are the expert. We are honoring the fact that they know and we don’t. (Because they do!)

Eventually, we end up with a great mass of data and it is now time to stop the ethnography and start the anthropology. Now we will use what we know about our culture, this industry, these consumers, this part of America to spot the essential patterns that make these data make sense. ”Slap your head” insights begin to emerge. ”Oh, that’s what their world looks like!” “That’w what they care about!” ”This is what they want!”

And now we begin to look for strategic and tactical recommendations. Now we can help close the gap between what the consumer wants and what the client makes.

I love this great post

by Margaret Hagan that looks at a few different ways to deal with a “Yes, and…” collaboration when your partner won’t play by those rules, falling back on “that sucks” a little too often. She suggests three different approaches, which I’ve spun as follows

1. Redirect – go off on your own or find other people to interact with and bring that good stuff back to the collaboration
2. Respond – challenge those that challenge you with their stinky negativity
3. Reframe – do all the design activities you like, but don’t describe them with code words, eliminating one particular generator of pushback.

There’s much more to be said about all of these, but Margaret’s simple post and lively illustrations are a good bit of inspiration

A recent episode of This American Life tells a fascinating and horrifying story of a murder confession gone wrong. The story is a reflection from the retired detective who seems to have sincerely believed the woman in question to be guilty. He realizes in his reflection that he was open to hearing what fit his theory and dismissed information or cues that didn’t support his theory (this is known as confirmation bias). This is a real concern for people doing user research who have preconceived notions about people, their behavior, their desired solutions, etc. One tactic is to develop greater self-awareness and learn to hear your own biases and assumptions.

Even more disturbing in this story is how the suspect began to provide details of the crime that supposedly only the person who committed the crime would know. In fact, this woman who would want to clear her name, responded to the questioning by shifting to please her interrogator, looking to provide the “right” answers. While the police didn’t realize it, she was picking up clues from the documents they were showing her and presenting them back as if it was her own knowledge. She wasn’t trying to confess, she was trying to succeed in answering the questions, even though it was significantly against her own interests. This is also a crucial concern for user researchers, where participants will want to please them and will work hard to figure out what “pleasing” looks like. The way you ask questions (e.g,. “Do you like doing it this way or would you rather have it happen automatically when you enter the store?”) has a tremendous influence in how they are answered.

The New York Times offers this summary

He tells about a woman who confessed to killing a man. She knew insider things like that the victim was wearing his wedding ring when he died, and that his credit card had been used at a People’s drugstore and a Chinese takeout place. Case closed.

A few weeks go by, and it turns out the woman has a strong alibi. Charges are dropped.

Years later, with the case still officially open, Detective Trainum went back to the file because he still suspected that the woman had gotten away with murder. He discovered that he and the other detectives accidentally videotaped the whole interrogation — not just the confession. That’s when he found out how an innocent person could know unreleased details of the killing.

At one point during the interrogation, they were trying to get her to admit to using the dead guy’s credit cards, and said, isn’t that your signature on these slips? And they showed them to her. So she read the name of the drugstore and the restaurant.

At another moment, they showed her the crime scene photos. In one, the left hand of the corpse was prominent. You could see the wedding ring.

So they had accidentally fed her all the incriminating details that she returned to them in the confession.

We received a pamphlet from RIMADYL, a doggie painkiller. It included this lovely testimonial from “Ronnie Beck.”

I could almost track my transitions from belief to disbelief to appalled as I read it. What on earth is going on in that company that anyone thinks that this blatant lie is acceptable? Among the pictures of happy canines frolicking in park is this pile of poop. Egregiously bad corporate communications.

Also see On Authenticity, published in interactions back in 2009.