How ya don’, Monday? It’s another short week for me as I head to Holland, MI on Friday for a family long weekend.

• I expect in the next few days to finalize the work plan for our next project, evolving a product vision. I’m excited to get going on it!
• Already scheduled for this week are a number of catch-up meetings with friends, former clients, colleagues, potential collaborators and the like. I expect a few more such “meetings” to emerge as the week unfolds.
• Later this month I’ll be speaking at IxDA Silicon Valley about The Power of Bad Ideas, so I’ll be revising and updating that talk in preparation.
• I’ve been working from home more than usual as of late, dealing with (or avoiding dealing with, depending on how you see it) our new dog Max’s separation anxiety.
• Ten years gone: From July 2003 – same great Jacks taste, Tom Green’s dogs.
• What we’re consuming: Once Upon A Time In America, Mr. Show recursion #1, Mr. Show recursion #2.

Image from documentary film South American Cholo

The New York Times, in Lowrider Culture Spreads to Brazil and Beyond, offers up yet another astounding example of globalization meets enthusiast-culture.

The spread of this seemingly distant subculture, with Brazilian followers calling themselves “cholos” and cruising around in their low-and-slow automobiles, is raising eyebrows here in South America’s largest city. Some who cannot afford to buy vintage cars and customize them into lowriders simply roam São Paulo’s labyrinthine streets at the helm of bicycles accessorized with high-rise handlebars and banana seats.

Even when they just strut around in oversize khaki shorts and white muscle shirts, they speak to something larger: the global fluidity of conceptions of ethnicity, identity and style, propelling a street culture once so closely tied to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico well beyond its birthplace.

Interviewing Users is now available. Get your copy here!

It’s been two months since Interviewing Users came out! Below is a roundup of links to various bits connected with the book. I’ll republish this regularly with accumulated updates.

The Book

• Buy from Rosenfeld Media
• Buy from Amazon
• Foreword by Grant McCracken
• Excerpt from chapter 2
• The cover
• Acknowledgements
• FAQ
• Testimonials
• Images and diagrams

Reviews

• Reviews on Amazon
• Why You Should Read ‘Interviewing Users’ by Steve Portigal

Interviews

• Huffington Post
• Ethnography Matters (and in Spanish)
• Interview with Denise Lee Yohn (audio)

Presentations

• O’Reilly webinar recording

Other

• New York book launch party
• San Francisco book launch party
• Answers to questions from readers of the Usabilla blog
• War Stories
• Susan Dray’s reflections on the impact of the War Stories

Steve presented The Power of Bad Ideas at IxDA Silicon Valley at Yahoo (slides).

Dave Gray and I are experimenting (e.g., we deliberately did not overthink or even plan) with a new show called We Might Do A Show Called We Might Swear. We did it live as a G+ Hangout (that anyone can watch live, and send in comments, etc.. Our first episode featured guest Chris Reimer and we talked about social media addiction, entrepreneurship, production pop culture, the writing process and a fair amount more.

The video is embedded below

Happy Canada Day!

• It’s a short week, with a mid-week holiday (which for some will be an extra-long weekend) it’s hard to anticipate the rhythm but we’ll figure it out.
• I’ll be chatting with a prominent design graduate school to see if there’s some possibilities for me to work with their students.
• I’ve got a proposal out for a really fascinating bit of research, where our client has already developed a tremendous amount of insight around a new paradigm. Our task will be to try and refine that understanding and point towards the design vision.
• I’m also waiting to hear about a couple of different internal workshops and presentations for different design teams.
• Check out some of my thoughts about Interviewing Users on Huffington Post.
• Last week was the premiere episode of We Might Do A Show Called We Might Swear, with Dave Gray and featuring guest Chris Reimer. More coming soon, maybe.
• I’m being interviewed for a podcast about Interviewing Users; I will post when it goes online.
• I’ll be dropping in via Skype to UX Book Club Philly for their discussion of Interviewing Users.
• Ah, hardware entropy. I had a monitor just wipe out, out of the blue, and now there’s problems with the NAS; I think one of the drives has gone bad. It’s always something. We won’t even get into all the software glitches, syncing problems, updates that break things, etc. etc.
• Ten years gone: From July 2003 – Cupholder Central, The Gyros Project.
• What we’re consuming: Artists Who Are Known For One Thing, Connecting – Trends in UI, Interaction, & Experience Design, Hair Apparent, The Dirk Diggler Story.

Thrifty really blew it here. Out of the blue, I get this email containing some good news.

And then shortly after that comes this bummerific communique.

The customer-pleasing standard seems to be to stand behind mistakes that benefit the customer because of the disappointment (or worse) than results when you take back something you offered. While I was unlikely to ever claim the windfall from the first email, the crappy feeling the second email left me with is something that will stick around.

Now that we’ve heard from the Supreme Court, we can look back on all the involvement we had, what with updating our profile pictures on every social media service. This article Scientific American (Will changing your Facebook profile picture do anything for marriage equality?) is a really terrific deconstruction of influence. The explanation here of prescriptive norms vs. descriptive ones is very instructive.

One of the big ways that the people around us exert these influences is through the use of norms, those messages that we send out about what’s acceptable, appropriate, and-well, normal. Descriptive norms simply describe the way that things are, whereas prescriptive norms offer a mandate about how things should be. For example, if I said that most college students go to class wearing jeans and sweatshirts, that would be a descriptive norm. If I said that you should wear jeans and a sweatshirt in order to fit in, that would be prescriptive. Quite possibly the most important takeaway point from all of the research that’s been done on norms is just how powerful descriptive norms can be. When people try to change behavior, they often focus on prescriptive norms, telling people what they should do. We often underestimate just how strongly we respond to what other people actually do.

Check out An Interview with Steve Portigal

Q. What’s the difference between this type of research and something like focus groups?

A: When interviewing people we arrange to meet with them in their own context: at home, at work, at the park, in the car; wherever the thing we’re interested in is happening. We’ll be with them and maybe some of the other people you would find in those settings. People behave differently in their own environment and there are details of those environments that turn out to be relevant but we could never plan for. The organized pantry reveals something about how they approach the apps on their device, the room full of the father’s previous generations of PCs tells us about the son’s rejection not only of specific devices but also a whole approach to what it means to own devices.

Q: How important is empathy for organizations?

Empathy seems to be a hot term right now. Developing processes that include empathy is wonderful and it can really help teams rally around solving the problems that people have rather than the problems they want to work on. You hope that there’s an overlap but not always. Maybe this points to what school of innovation you’re from; you may want to be a few steps ahead of the people who will be your customers but you do need to be thinking about where they will be headed.

Empathy, meanwhile, is only the first step. Having a good sense of how people feel can instill the desire to do the right thing for them, but it doesn’t tell you what that right thing is. Empathy is not the same as understanding a highly nuanced, unarticulated, latent problem space. That’s the hard work.

Raffaella Roviglioni is a UX designer at usertest/lab. In this story she experiences, like the title says, a hot day in a bank!

I like planning for fieldwork as much as carrying out those plans. But if there’s one lesson I learned from my experience it’s that no matter how well you think about any detail in advance, there’s always room for problems.

During a current project with a nationwide bank the client agreed to conduct a round of interviews with employees from four different offices located between Rome and Milan.

The day of the interviews in Milan I got an early train. I was aware of the long day in front of me: four interviews in two different offices with the lunch break to be spent moving from one office to the other.

I was fully equipped with laptop, backup recording device, spare batteries, charging chords, pens, paper, water and even some food for an emergency. I thought I covered every possible glitch or obstacle given the context. After all, I was going to a bank: can you think of a more predictable, comfortable and reliable location? I couldn’t.

It was an unusually warm day of June. The temperature was above 38°C (100°F) and after the first two interviews my coworkers and I were heading to the second location, on the look-out for a quick lunch on the go. We walked from the underground to the bank for a few blocks and when we arrived everyone was pretty flushed. All I could think about was the relief of a air-conditioned office where I could start breathing again and conduct the last two interviews.

The came the surprise of the day: the air conditioning was out of order! Meanwhile, the two employees were waiting to be interviewed so we simply sat down and started with the first one.

I had memorized the guide in order to concentrate better on the interviewee without having to look at it, but during the first fifteen minutes I had serious problems concentrating. The heat was unbearable, humidity was close to 90% and my coworkers were panting all the time. I had to exercise some yoga breathing to calm down and try to detach myself from the uncomfortable situation and be able to focus on my task. I managed to get through the interview pretty well, then we moved to the second employee’s office.

He started telling us a lot of interesting information that didn’t come out in the previous interviews but at that point we were completely burnt out. It was really hard to follow up with him. Every question that came out of my mouth seemed nothing like clever to me. Luckily for us, the employee was pretty enthusiastic about the topic and basically conducted the conversation himself, giving us a number of significant insights despite our minimal interaction.

Usually the toughest field work has to do with reluctant participants or with poor planning. In this case, it was certainly not so, but still it was very hard for me to get to the end of the day. I guess those last insights were literally hard-earned!