Here we go with this week’s update

• I’m writing this in Newark Airport, halfway or so on my journey back to San Francisco from Barcelona. Great city, great conference, great time with friends and colleagues, old and new. I’ll post photos in the next few days (and some are already up on Flickr)
• For the past several weeks, when I’ve put together this anticipatory summary, I’ve referred to the large project we’re just about to start. And so once again, it’s Monday and I’m almost embarrassed to say it again. The sales cycle for this project will exceed the duration of the project itself, at this point.And we’re good to go! Hooray!
• I’ll be playing catch-up with a dozen or so phone or face-to-face networking meetings that were pushed out until after my return, which is essentially tomorrow.
• I just posted Diane’s War Story, and will have another one later this week, perhaps as early as tomorrow. Meanwhile, submit yours here!
• While the ink is barely dry on the Barcelona experience, I’m thinking ahead this week to UX Australia and even next year’s SXSW.
• Ten Years Gone: in July 2002, I blogged about IDSA 2002, Hippo Hardware, and discarding digital media.
• What we’re consuming: pintxos, Gaudi, VINCON.

Diane Loviglio, User Experience Researcher at Mozilla, has a story that reminds us our participants are part of larger systems that we don’t have insight into when we’re recruiting them.

We walk down a nondescript hallway, me and my team’s designer and engineer. It’s the first time the three of us have been in the field together. I’m confident and excited, but also a little nervous that our engineer will start asking off-topic questions like “How many lines of code did that take?” during the interview. We find the door of the gaming studio and we walk inside – straight into the kitchen. The walls are brightly painted, the plan is open, the kitchen is right in front of us, but there’s no reception area in sight. So now the three of us are just standing in the hustle and bustle of the studio and aren’t sure where to go next. We felt a little awkward. Eventually, I started to text our host, but she appeared before I finished typing the message.

Melissa (that’s what I’ll call her) warmly greets us. She had high energy, but you could also tell things were a little chaotic that day. She walks us 500 feet to one of their two conference rooms and then she goes to get her engineering counterpart, who we would also be talking to for the next 90 minutes.

We set up the Flip video camera and unpacked our notebooks and paper and markers for the drawing exercise at the end. Mike (that’s what I’ll call him) comes in with Melissa. He’s much more reserved than she is, which was expected, but we get started and things are going great. They are playing off each other well – they both had different perspectives on the subject we were studying and that was coming out very well in the interview.

55 minutes into the session, we are completely interrupted by an angry guy slamming the door open and barging into our conference room. He knew we were doing a private interview in there, because the walls were glass, but he barged in just the same. He starts yelling at Melissa and Mike – as if we wouldn’t pay attention unless he used his outdoor voice – “we’re meeting with [important company name] next door – let’s go!” Who the hell was this guy? And how obnoxious for him to walk in on our meeting without knocking or excusing himself. He didn’t even make eye contact with us.

Melissa was taken aback. This other meeting wasn’t even on her schedule, so she was a little confused, but she tried to handle it and excused herself to go talk to this lunatic. I stopped the Flip, and without prying into the details, tried to get a read on how important this meeting was and if we should start packing up to go. Mike just sat there silently, as if this behavior was completely normal and things would pass over soon. He didn’t have any kind of reaction to the incident at all. We told him we could finish this at another time if Melissa wasn’t free – maybe over the phone or email. He just shrugged. Melissa walked back into our formerly private room, was very apologetic and said that we could continue, but she was obviously distracted. She was under the impression that we would just be another 5 minutes and I told her that this was actually a 90 minute interview so we still had 30 minutes to go, but we could hurry and wrap it up in 15. She paused for a moment, and we thought “Okay, that’s our cue. We’ll leave and let you be.” But, Melissa said that Mike wasn’t needed in the meeting after all, and he offered to stay and talk with us. So we plopped back down and said, “Oh. That would be great.” Melissa apologized again for not realizing how long our meeting was supposed to be and promised to reply to questions over email instead. I gave her a hug as she left the room. She looked like she needed one. And, I gave her that sincere “Gosh, I hope you don’t get fired today” thank you. She left and went into the conference room adjacent to us and we heard the call begin, because the walls didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling.

With Melissa gone, we asked Mike the next question and realized we’d be spending probably no more than 10 more minutes with him. Not more than 1 minute later, as soon as we started to get comfortable again, the crazy guy comes back in and starts yelling at Mike! “We rescheduled this for you – we need you on this call. Now. If you don’t come, we can’t close this deal.” Okay, now we realized this was a bad situation. Mike casually said, “OK”, got up to leave, and asked us to email him the questions.

They just left us in the conference room, all alone. We packed up our stuff and awkwardly made our way to the front door, none of us saying a word. We walked down the nondescript hallways in silence, making faces at each other to share our mutual feeling of “what the hell was that?” but we kept our cool and made it out of the building. On the way back to the car, the only thing I could do was apologize profusely to my designer and engineer. “I’m so sorry guys, that has never happened to me before. I feel so icky. Oof, so sorry guys. Usually, my interviews are a lot more professional than that and people don’t come in yelling at the people you are interviewing.”

So, we spent the car ride back pretending to barge into each others’ interviews, laughing it off and trying to re-group for the rest of the day.

Not a ton to report this week

• Today I’m flying to Barcelona for WebVisions. Looking forward to the workshop, the presentation, seeing great people, and exploring, photographing, and eating!
• While I’m overseas, I’m waiting for news on a number of projects, tiny and giant, that have been imminent for a while now. Fingers crossed!
• Ten Years Gone: screamy neighbor, safety not guaranteed, unfortunate resemblances.
• What we’re consuming: Borgen, Pig & Pie, Hello Lonesome, Gorilla Glue.
  

Nicolas Nova, consultant and researcher at Near Future Laboratory encounters an unusual individual, entirely unrelated to his study.

I remember a study I’ve conducted last year that was set in a big shopping mall in France. We were there interviewing users of smartphones for an R&D project. The place was pretty standard and we decided to sit in a fast food joint called “Quick”, at the entrance of the mall (which means a lot of people were passing by). Given the focus of the project, we had to videotape the interviews and take pictures of the posture of the user. This means that the presence of cameras was hard to hide and that passers-by couldn’t avoid noticing them.

After four interviews, we started the fifth one, kind of tired after hours of discussions with informants. Right in the middle of this interview, my colleague and I saw a tall guy moving to us with urgent haste, putting his two hands on the table, and screaming the following line: “I’ve just been released from prison and I’m hungry! What are you guys up to? Are you in the video business? Do you want me to act? Or what?”

The size of the guy, his level of excitement, the face of our informant and the people around us made the event very odd as it stopped everything for a second or two. It’s this sort of situation in which you have to behave yourself and avoid pissing off the nervous intruder, take care of the informant naively stopped in her description and an audience frowning at us. He seemed so energetic, perhaps by his re-entering of public society, that he looked at the same time excited about a new opportunity AND being a thug about to rob us from our devices. The “or what?” was said with so much hatred in his voice that were a bit nervous ourselves.

We explained to the guy that we were interviewing someone, asking her about her perspective for a research project and that he could be a participant later on. We were of course hoping it would be the end of it, a sort of way to make him understand that this is not the moment to chat with us.

Of course, he didn’t seem convinced, or he simply didn’t get it because he told us: “Oh yes I’ve a friend in Marseille in the video industry, I know your stuff!” To which he added: “But why do you have so many telephones?” My colleague explained the project and that was the end of it. “Arf, I don’t get it, I don’t care, plus I’m hungry”… and he left as fast he arrived few minutes ago.

Nothing really bad here but it was just awkward for us, a sort of break into our interview day…which actually readjusted our energy because we then completed three more afterwards!

Here’s another proof point for the power of video in user research. Check out this very simple observational video.

If you didn’t watch it, it shows person after person stumbling on poorly designed stairs.

I don’t know about you but I felt increasingly emotional the more I watched this. A bubbling outrage and a sense that something so obviously needs to be done about this. Of course, this is a simple problem

, which makes the failure to act even more aggravating.

The goal of user research isn’t always to uncover people’s fail states with the team’s existing products, but when it is, tools like video are impactful on rational and emotional levels.

Update: according to this Tweet, the stairway is now closed.

Product Design Manager Leo Frishberg underscores the effort required to ensure you’re seeing the right user in the right context.

Our team was embarking on an ambitious, multi-country Contextual Inquiry effort. We had created our sample cells, identified the right industries, established a great relationship with our sales team and done All The Right Things Up Front to make the effort a success.

Working from Oregon with prospective participants in Bangalore is never an easy prospect; introducing a new research technique at the same time raised the stakes.

Several weeks in advance of the interviews we had contacted our sales team in-country explaining the process: we needed individuals who were currently working with our equipment and willing let us observe them working in their labs, in situ.

Everyone claimed to understand. We arrived in-country and I confirmed the arrangements, on the telephone, with the sales team. “Yes,” they confirmed, “we’ve found exactly who you are looking for…”

We arrived at our first interview in a gorgeous sparkling new office building and were led to an upstairs glass-enclosed conference room. Presently, a manager-type entered, clearly expecting to hold court with us.

I began the discussion with a recap of our expectations and a quick sanity check with the individual.

“So,” I began, “we are looking forward to working with an actual user in the lab. Are you going to work with us today?”

“No,” he said, dismissively. “I’m the team manager. I can tell you everything that’s wrong with your equipment. I’ve polled the team and have collected answers from all of them.”

It’s at times like this, having flown 10,000 miles, having spent as much time as I had setting things up, that I lose a part of my conscious brain. I could feel the anger rising, but I knew that couldn’t help improve the situation.

Instead, I signaled to the sales guy sitting next to me that as far as I was concerned, the interview was over and we could pack up to go to our next meeting. Here’s where the details get sketchy, but I know he said something, in English, to the manager, and whatever magic words he uttered, the manager smiled and nodded, suggesting he could definitely get the lead engineer to help us. He left to find the guy.

A few minutes later, the engineer entered the room, curious as to what the group was doing there. We began the front part of the interview, and it was clear he was the right guy. After explaining what we were planning to do, we asked if he had any questions or needed any further explanation.

‘No,” he said, “you want to see me work with the equipment. I don’t have anything to do today, but I could show you what I was doing last week.”

That was fine, we agreed.

“Okay. Just give me a few minutes and I’ll bring you back…”

Imagining what he might be doing in those few minutes I stopped him. “Uhhh, what would you be doing between now and then?”

“Oh,” he assured us, “I’m just going to get the equipment all set up.”

“Great!” We practically shouted. “That would be great! We’d be happy to watch you do that!”

He smiled as if hoping we had taken our medication and led us to his lab. “I’m not sure what you’ll find so interesting about my pulling the machines off the shelf, but come on along…”

The take-aways remain the same:

• Persistence and staying on track no matter what the situation throws you
• No matter how much you prepare, nothing will go as planned

While attending and presenting at the CPSI conference last week I managed to find a few moments to get outside of the hotel and take in some of the sights, sounds and flavors of Atlanta. The conference was dedicated to creative thinking and innovation so perhaps it’s no coincidence that I kept running into examples of my favorite creativity catalyzing tool: forced connections (also referred to as combinatorial creativity). Essentially, it’s the mashing up of seemingly different things to create something new.

Take this sign, a great forced connection between Italian and Southern hospitality. In my opinion this is considerably more successful than the Collard Kimchi dish I ate the night before. Curiosity got the best of me, I had to try it. And I was pretty sorry that I did.

What happens when you cross a cotton mill with a condo? No, that’s not a joke. It’s actually an amazing example of urban revitalization with a factory that had ceased serving its purpose. My hats off to the developers – they maintained architectural authenticity leaving many elements intact (as seen in the background of this image), and honored the rich history of this place through its rebirth as a hip place for urban dwelling denizens.

I came across this little poem in the window of a coffeeshop. All of the windows had clever sayings printed in them. Rhymes are fun examples of forced connections. I also like the play here between transparency (i.e. looking through a window) and translation (i.e. looking at words for meaning).

The sign here reads: Sister Louisa’s CHURCH Of The Living Room & Ping Pong Emporium, Come On In Precious!! Below the arrow on the left it states (it’s a bar). So, yes, it’s a forced connection between bar and church with some ping pong and living room thrown in for good measure. Other signs on the building simply read CHURCH and (it’s a bar). It’s funny to see that, clever as the name is, it still requires qualification that this establishment is, in fact, a bar.

Ethnographer Mary Ann Sprague is forced to improvise when one slip changes her plan.

I have always taken great care and a certain amount of pride in always being on time and prepared for field sites and interviews. I thank my mentors for instilling this in me early on. I always made sure I had charged video and audio equipment, discussion guides, contact information, notebooks, extra writing implements, and power cords to carry on despite any possible problems. There have been the occasional failed battery, but I always had a spare, or my coworker had one. It’s never been a serious setback until this spring.

I was meeting my coworker at an elementary school for a teacher interview. Teacher free time is at a premium so I made a point of being on time and prepared to maximize the time we have together. On this occasion I arrived at the school parking lot a few minutes early, so I turned off my car and pulled out my iPhone to check messages. I did a mental check that I had everything in my backpack in the passenger seat. Everything was in order, so I relaxed for a couple minutes.

Just before the meeting time, I put my phone in my pocket, got out of the car, and hit the door lock. I walked around to grab my backpack and the door was locked. No problem I thought, I’ll go back to the driver’s side and unlock it. The driver’s door was locked, and the keys were still in the ignition with my equipment, questions and paper still locked in the car!

I called my husband and he agreed to drive home (luckily it wasn’t too far) to get my spare keys and deliver them (but still a good 40 minute wait). I went into the school to meet my coworker. She had relied on my previous level of preparation and had a notebook, but without the questions or any recording equipment.

Not wanting to reschedule, we met with the teacher. Luckily, the teacher had printed the list of questions I had emailed. I was frustrated because I didn’t want to miss any part of this conversation. The teacher was a wealth of information, but the information came out at warp speed and I worried about being able to keep up.

Thinking about what I had with me, I realized I had my iPhone, so I recorded the entire conversation using the voice messages app and took several pictures, as did my coworker, using our phones. I wrote my notes on the back of the question sheet from the teacher and we had a very interesting discussion. My husband met us in the parking lot just as we left our interview. Later, I was able to retrieve the audio through iTunes and convert it to listen on my PC.

Everything worked out in the end, but it was a shock to my confidence. I have since begun looking at other apps to capture audio on my iPhone so I have a better backup plan for the future, and my coworker now carries audio equipment at least so we are always prepared.

Next week I’m off to Barecelona to speak at WebVisions. In collaboration with Kelly Goto, I’ll be running a workshop called Synthesis to Ideation:Making Research Real.

In this hands-on workshop, insight strategists Steve Portigal and Kelly Goto will lead you through a fast-paced, engaging workshop with one requirement: Rethink your research approach and implement new frameworks for collection and synthesis of findings — to create actionable artifacts and outcomes for the real world.

I’ve been leading workshops like this a lot over the past few years, but I’m really excited about the collaboration with Kelly; our approaches are generally aligned but different in interesting ways and we’re using that creative tension to give our participants a broader perspective.

If you’re interested in signing up, use registration code PORTIGAL for a 40% discount.

I’ll also be presenting Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization during the conference itself.

I hope to see you there!

We’re back this month with another round of Curating Consumption, seen last week over at Johnny Holland. In previous editions we have looked far and near for ponderous consumer experiences. This time around we are looking a little closer at the messages targeting us and what meanings they explicitly and unintentionally reveal.

On my last overseas flight, by the time they came around with the meal, I was more than ready. Sure, the crew didn’t seem to know what the options were, where words like “beef” and “chicken” were interchangeable options (and one attendant was freestyling with the radical “lentils” offering). Given the uncertainty, I went for the most-likely-to-keep-me-from-dying-of-low-blood-sugar-option: pasta

. Looks like I made the right choice, because the pasta was homemade! Well, sure, the perfect formation of noodle-cheese-sauce may not evoke the sense of the artisinal, but the industrial inkjet printing on the foil covering reassures me that it was indeed homemade. Just like an artist numbers her limited edition prints, the pastacraftsman behind this meal uses a special code to document the individual pride and care. Sure, it tasted like crap, but I was thrilled to have homemade airborne crap. /SP

In this park in Lisbon, we found a phone hole, where a payphone once was, but is no more. The sign helpfully suggests that the phone is temporarily unavailable while being repaired. But let’s face facts, that phone is long gone and ain’t never coming back. Lisbon telco maintenance people, please don’t set up expectations you can’t meet! /SP

I recently received this card from an agent at the Southwest Airlines check-in counter. It included a lovely little flower-shaped piece of paper with flower seeds in it that I can plant wherever I choose. While I “luv” the idea of Southwest giving me flowers, I am baffled for a few reasons. Firstly, it seems like an unnecessary use of paper. Why not just print the promo message directly on the flower paper? Why use up a not plantable piece of paper to give me one that is? I have seen this kind of paper printed on before so I know that it is possible. Secondly, I don’t understand the campaign purpose. In preparation for this post I visited the Southwest Citizenship link on the card and found no connection to this item. I expected to see an image of this card or something, anything really, that would visually or conceptually close the loop between the gift, the targeted behavior (visit the site) and the message. A flowery fail, really. /TC

Celebrity sighting! For all of you out there wondering “Whatever happened to Johnny 5 from the 1986 film Short Circuit?” I believe I have the answer! While my son and I were returning a movie to a DVD rental kiosk in our local market this message appeared on the screen. My son doubted the likelihood of a little old-fashioned robot inside of the kiosk handling the check-out and return process. Of course, he is much too young to remember Johnny 5. So while he left the store incredulous, I left sighing with satisfaction that even 26 year-old robots can find relevant work in today’s economy. /TC