My first trip to New Jersey for fieldwork involved two memorable events: a blizzard and a bathroom blitz.

Two days before we departed for New Jersey I received an email request from my client to rent the biggest SUV available. A huge snowstorm was pounding the Northeast and he wanted to feel safe as we ventured into the streets and highways of various townships for a week of in-home interviews. I obliged and was glad I did. The evening we arrived we found the streets covered with snow and the plows were evidently having trouble keeping up.

I kept getting rescheduling calls from the recruiter. Participants were cancelling because of the weather. This seemed strange given the fact that WE were the ones travelling to their homes and they didn’t have to go anywhere! It felt like a game of musical chairs as we continually shifted and rescheduled. It was impossible to predict if we would be able to complete the targeted number of interviews during our weeklong visit. In fact, it was even difficult to predict if we would be able to leave town at the end of the week because the airport was cancelling flights every day.

There were three of us in the field: myself, a videographer, and the client. We all met for breakfast the first morning while the car warmed up. It took 30 minutes to melt the layers of ice that had accumulated overnight on the windshield. Fortunately the heater had kicked in by the time we all piled into the SUV and headed out for our first interview of the week, giving ourselves ample time to arrive at our destination.

Instead of the 30 minutes suggested by Google Maps, we arrived an hour later at our destination, a narrow residential street of two-story beige brick duplexes still decorated for the Christmas holiday. Plows had left six foot tall snowbanks on either side of the street and cars were parked in tight spaces carved out by the residents. Sadly it appeared that most of those residents didn’t have an SUV as big as our rental. We circled the area for fifteen minutes before we found a gap large enough to park in.

We were there to interview a young woman in her 20s, a nurse. She welcomed us into the living room where we set up our cameras and found places to sit among the teddy bear collection and floor-to-ceiling cabinet containing an homage to Michael Jackson. Her mother appeared in a short fuzzy black robe. “I’ve been doing focus groups for years. No one ever asked to come to this house before. Why do you want to go to people’s houses?” We explained the nature of our visit and commenced with the interview.

For the first half hour of the interview the mother came in and out of the room, answering and asking questions and reiterating her concerns about our presence and intentions. Each time, the daughter would suspend her responses to address the interruption, urging her mother out of the room. “We always meet at Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s the place to go…MA! They’re here to talk to me. Let me do this!”, “I always stop on my way to work to pick up an iced tea…MA! Go get dressed already!”, “I love those little facts on the lid. They are so cute…MA! Enough! Quit interrupting us!” No matter what the daughter said, the mother would return every few minutes to listen and contribute.

I realized shortly into the interview that, in our flurry of inclement travel, I had neglected to honor one of the cardinal rules of interviewing: “Go before you arrive.” I ignored my biological needs as long as I could but the morning’s coffee didn’t help. I finally had to excuse myself for a restroom break.

“It’s just there in the hall, on the right” said the nurse, pointing down the mirrored hallway.

I excused myself and walked up to bathroom door. It was open a few inches so I pushed it. There in the bright pink and black tiled bathroom stood the mother, facing the toilet with her little black robe hiked up above the waist, her backside completely exposed. She turned before I could retreat. “What the Hell? Don’t you knock?” I felt blood rush warmly to my face.

“I’m so sorry” I said, backing out and closing the door behind (or rather, in front of) me. “I’m so sorry” I continued, “the door was open. I didn’t realize anyone was in there. I’m so sorry.”

I swiftly returned to the living room.

“I’m so sorry,” I told the nurse. “The door was open a crack so I just went in and I walked in on your mother. I am sure I’ve upset her.”

“Ha! Don’t worry. She’ll be fine” she consoled me. “Maybe she’ll leave us alone now.”

I wasn’t sure I would be fine. I tried to concentrate on the interview, the purpose of our visit, the friendly nurse who gave us a detailed tour of the kitchen drawers. But images of her mother’s bare behind kept flashing in my mind. She was right, sort of, about her mother leaving us alone. For the remaining hour we didn’t hear a word from the woman, though she kept appearing (now fully clothed) wherever we were. She said nothing. She just looked at me with a glare that felt as icy as the windshield that awaited us outside.

Our first stop was a Dunkin’ Donuts where I was finally able to relieve myself.

I have unintentionally discovered a new way to test my comfort level with what I am consuming. In three separate events, aggressive olfactory triggers suggest that what I am putting into my car (and my home and my life) may be more toxic than I realize.

#1 the guest bed

I went to IKEA a few months ago to get a SOLSTA sofa bed. An employee helped me get that giant box into my Honda Element but my 8 year-old, Max, and I could not get it out of the car and into the house, so it stayed in my vehicle. For a week. And my car smelled horrific. Like I had left a to-go container of MDF-laced dinner in there. I began to have serious reservations about putting that piece of funky smelling furniture in my home and inviting my guests to sleep on it.

#2 the luggage

I hosted some friends from out of town for the weekend. When they picked me up in my car so I could take them to the airport, I was startled by the olfactory assault of marijuana; a smell that apparently infiltrated their luggage while sitting in my home for a weekend. Thanks to California Proposition 215, marijuana is legal in our state for those who have a prescription and, it turns out, my downstairs neighbors are card-carrying members of a medical marijuana clinic. I hadn’t noticed that scent in my home and then I got a whiff of suitcases that had sat in my car for less than 10 minutes. Thanks to my vehicle, I became aware of what my son and I had been unassumingly consuming. It’s worth noting that since I brought this to my neighbor’s attention they have taken to smoking outside and using an air filter.

#3 the bike I got Max a new bicycle. He’s still learning to ride so it spends most of its time parked in our garage. When we loaded up the car for a road trip to Napa last weekend, I decided to bring the bike. About 30 minutes into the journey, Max started complaining of a headache and we both became aware of the stench of rubbery bicycle toxicity emanating from the back of the car. No matter how many windows we rolled down we could find no relief. The odor was completely overwhelming. When I found a park and finally pulled that bike out of the car he refused to ride it. It’s now back in the garage and I am wondering if Max will ever want to ride it.

Sadly, the car still reeks of bicycle and the garage has become yet another coalmine where the canary of my consumption fights for breath.

My colleague and I showed up to learn about our research participant’s smart house. In the initial part of the interview, just trying to learn a bit about the family before we learned about the house, the participant (I’ll call him Jon) told me they home-schooled their kids. I was young and naive enough that I didn’t have a clue what other factors that typically signifies. When I asked about why they made that decision, Jon really snarled at me, I think because he was far more interested in showing me his gear than talking about his family, but I just explained that we wanted to learn about him as well. He told me that they didn’t support the school system and their attitude towards alternative lifestyles. That’s when I realized I was in an environment where the values were just really different than my own. Okay, no problem, that’s par for the course for the job. We spent a good long time after that checking out the details of a really incredible smart home system that he had built, cobbled, and coded together. Really incredible. Yet there was a constant theme of monitoring and control, of using the technology to check up on the kids from other rooms. Still, all good information. As we were getting to the reflective part of the interview, wrapping up or nearly so, Jon abruptly changed gears mid-explanation.

Jon: “Of course, none of this really matters because it’s all going to burn.”

Me + Colleague: [Puzzled silence]

Jon: “And now I have a question for you fellas: Have you accepted Christ as your savior?”

In my life in general, this is the sort of question I’m utterly unprepared for. In this interview, I knew it was coming, some part of my body was tense from the discussion of the rationale for home schooling, knowing that I was in a slightly vulnerable situation that was going to emerge at some point. So while I was dreading it all along, perhaps it came as some kind of relief. Watching the video later, I saw the most deadpan version of myself I’d ever seen: “…………Well…..perhaps that’s a question for another time.”

I was stuck, I couldn’t dishonor all the rapport-building and honest curiosity I’d been exhibiting for the past two hours, but now we were trapped. My colleague spluttered helplessly in an endless loop of reflecting back what Jon had said previously (“So…..it sounds like you’re saying…”). I kept waiting for my opening for the “Well, time to go!” but Jon really wanted to talk to us about what we should be doing and thinking, with respect to Christ. It seems this went on for a very long time, but we finally made it to the doorway. Jon asked us to wait, and went off to get something. We should have made a break for it, but we were ensnared by the requirements of politeness in our researcher role. He returned with some bible-related literature and exhorted us – in terms that would make the Glengarry Glen Ross salesmen proud – to follow up. Another eternity (if you will) and we were finally able to step away.

We made it to the car, drove a block and erupted in hysterical, gasping laughter. It was the laughter of relief, the kind of manic giggling you’d get from 10-year-olds who just got away from the angry shopkeeper. We had some choice words about Jon, once we were safe.

The experience was terribly uncomfortable; I could not find a way to follow my own values as a researcher and still protect myself from a conversation that was personally risky (as a Jew, I’ve had my share of proselytizing/Hell/Christ “discussions” and really don’t ever want to have one again). As a researcher, I am interested in and have respect for Jon’s views on his family, his home, education, and the afterlife. But as a person, I just don’t want to have to reveal my own beliefs or defend them, especially in this sort of setting.

This was more than 10 years ago, I wonder how I would handle it now.

Last Friday we opened our doors to a few superheroic leaders from Silicon Valley firms for a morning discussion about championing user research within an organization (thus “Breakfast of Champions”). This event came hot on the heels of Steve’s recent webinar and provided a learning forum for us as consultants and for our guests, who shared insights and questions from the client perspective.

The discussion included trials and triumphs, questions about current challenges, and new frameworks to yield as tools for overcoming obstacles. We were impressed with the humility and willingness to share evident in the discussion as research champions from diverse departments, companies, and industries swapped war stories and provided each other with encouragement and new ideas.

I captured some of the conversation on our whiteboard. On the left side are successes, questions and ponderings in the middle, and current challenges on the right. See a bigger image here.

We covered a lot of ground during two hours so the list below is not exhaustive, but it does start to hint at the themes that came up.

• The importance of measuring, benchmarking, and storying research successes
• The value of taking non-researchers (especially skeptics and critics) into the field
• The challenge of confronting organizational paradigms and questioning sacred ‘truths’ when framing research questions
• Success with embedding research in the design process as opposed to making it a distinct, standalone project
• Overcoming obstacles of apathy with insights that are action-ready and and deliverables that are easy to share
• Thinking strategically about the relationship between quant and qual, and considering how they feed each other
• The value of research in corporate strategy and business solutions and the need to frame it as such
• The changing role of the consultant and research provider
• The importance of show and tell of research results to various groups, departments, etc.

This was our first time doing something like this and we’re looking forward to doing it again in the near future!

We love stories, and in our work as ethnographers, we love war stories about fieldwork. These experiences – the crazy household, the dog that does his business on your shoes, the GPS failure – are inevitable and are often (at least in hindsight) hilarious. Exchanging these stories is a way of socializing our technique and creating learning opportunities for both tellers and listeners. A culture of exchange – wherever we can find it – is going to help us grow our own skills.

Through this series, we’ll be sharing our own war stories and those of other researchers. Watch this space for the first few war stories, and some info about how you can get your own fieldwork war story published here.

It’s a gorgeous sunny Monday here in Pacifica (stay away fog, stay away!) and we’re on our way into another interesting week.

• Later this week we’re taking our clients and their prototype out into the field to meet users. We’re also exploring how people are using a brand new product, something no one on our client team has any idea about, so we’re expecting a very cool experience. Meanwhile, Tamara is printing out materials, putting incentives in envelopes, charging batteries, picking meetup and debrief locations and other organizing the hell out of the whole process.
• We’ll be launching a new feature here devoted to war stories from field work.
• Steve gets his revising on, hopefully wrapping up the next iteration of the book manuscript.
• We’ve put away all the leftover snacks from our event last week and Tamara will be posting some of the highlights (of the discussion, not necessarily the snacks).
• Out and about: Look for us at the inauguration of the new Orange Silicon Valley office, at SF Service Design Drinks, or the Tangible UX Happy Hour.
• Steve will be heading over to Mozilla to speak with UX researchers and designers about how to synthesize user research data.
• We’ll be making at least one announcement about an upcoming conference presentation, and in a wonderful location!
• While it’s not quite American Idol level of tension and suspense, we’ll be chatting with more people this week about collaborating with and even joining our team.
• What we’re consuming: Roadie, head rubs, margaritas.

I’m intrigued by a few examples I’ve come across lately that downgrade (to an interesting effect) the visual to the textual.

On Twitter, two feeds that take image-specific services and simply describe them in a few words.

• PicturelessPinterest offers “The best of Pinterest without having to look at the pictures.” (sample tweets: Overexposed picture of a bride walking through a white hallway; A recipe for rhubarb-lemon curd yogurt; Dining room table set up on a beach)
• Text-Only Instagram is “Your personal Instagram feed in a lightweight text format.” (sample tweets: Tilt-shift fortune cookie; Latte with foam shaped like a heart; Four self-portraits of a teenage girl separated by white lines.)

Descriptive Camera is a camera that captures an image and then obtains a typed description of the contents. Example: Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a study lamp attached to it.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

I love people hacking together some bit of technology (or a technology-enabled experience) to drive just a bit of reflection on what we might take for granted.

Bonus deconstruction: garfield minus garfield

Monday is well underway and the week is filling up with meetings and work sessions! Away we go!

• Last week we kicked off a super-rapid project. We didn’t know we were doing the project at the beginning of the week and by the end of the week we had started recruiting research participants. This week we’re lining up our participants and figuring out what we’ll do in the field.
• I’m calling it “collaborative listening” – thanks to our officemate Olly, we’re experimenting with some networked speakers that lets us all listen to music together instead of individually over headphones. This will mean sorting out some social norms around volume, phone calls, and musical tastes. But so far, so good (oh yeah, because we’re listening to my music right now!)…
• We’re hosting our first event later this week. We’ve invited a small number of folks for a discussion and will be sharing more once it’s all over. But we’re actively discussing our catering options right now!
• More conference submissions to prepare, more conference acceptances to announce, and more conference presentations to start getting together!
• This week we’ve begun reaching out to potential new teammates, partners, and collaborators. We don’t know where we’ll end up but the journey is sure to be an informative one.
• What we’re consuming: A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Firestarter Sessions, Pizzeria Delfina

I am always on the lookout for ideas to boost creativity. Below are a few recent insightful readings…

Alcohol Benefits the Creative Process [Psychology Today] – Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago set out to determine if being intoxicated actually helped people think more creatively. They recruited people ages 21-30 and gave half of them vodka cranberry cocktails until their blood alcohol level reached .075. Then both groups completed a Remote Associations Test wherein they were given a series of three words (i.e. tar, arm, peach) for which they had to find a single word that would create two-word phrases with all three (i.e. pit). This kind of task was chosen to assess creativity because it is believed that the most obvious response is often not correct and therefore people must search for other more remote words in order to solve the problem. The findings indicate that the intoxicated participants not only performed better than their sober counterparts, they did so in less time and were more inclined to attribute their performance to a flash of insight; an “Aha!” moment.

Why might being intoxicated lead to improved creativity? The answer has to do with alcohol’s effect on working memory: the brainpower that helps us keep what we want in mind and what we don’t want out. Research has shown that alcohol tends to reduce people’s ability to focus in on some things and ignore others, which also happens to benefit creative problem solving.

I had a great excuse to practice this approach this weekend (admittedly, this was not the first time). I found that a yuzu-infused cocktail from Morimoto in Napa actually did catalyze divergent thinking. In fact, I generated a significant number of ideas for ideation and training sessions that involve yummy bites and liquid concoctions.

Produce First, Sharpen Second: What Dylan’s Vomit Teaches Us About The Creative Process [The Creativity Post] – This article references Bob Dylan’s creative process behind Like A Rolling Stone which involved a massive vomit of verses followed by a period of crafting and sculpting that rambling mass into an exquisitely refined piece of work. Dylan’s experience and other examples from the article illustrate a topic that I believe is profoundly important to understanding what creative thinking is and how to facilitate it. Creativity involves two polarized modes of thinking that can be described as opposites: divergent/convergent, imagination/logic, improvisation/composition, writing/editing, and so on. The key is to keep these two modes, vomit/cleanup, separate. Do not mix! In fact, a recent study at a Dutch university that is cited in this article concluded that taking a break between creating ideas and assessing them actually improves one’s ability to recognize the more promising concepts. Quick tip: The next time you are looking for great ideas, set yourself (or your team) a wildly large goal (i.e. 30-100 ideas) and don’t stop until you reach that number. Then take a break (10 minutes, 24 hours, whatever). Finally, go back and dive in to your ideas to cluster, organize, eliminate and ensure that the best ones rise to the top. Then give them refinement and strengthening that they deserve!

The reason we should “never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down” is because we initially don’t know which of our ideas are worthwhile. It’s only after we get everything down that we are able to recognize what works from what doesn’t. This is the lesson from Ritter’s research: we need to give the unconscious mind time to mull it over so it can convince the conscious mind to make adjustments.

Want To Be More Creative? Get Bored [Fast Company] – If you are looking for something to do between ideaphoria and analysis, a break that Edward deBono calls the “creative pause”, give some thought to not thinking at all. The author reflects on the importance of clearing the mind and the calendar and not doing a thing. Why? Because this space of quiet be-ing (not doing) is a lacuna from the litany of productivity and entertainment. It gives the mind room to breathe. Think of it as mental yoga, a place to pause between the inhale of ideas and the exhale of action.

I know it sounds strange, but I welcome boredom. It forces me to ponder. But to make sure we’re on the same page, when I speak of boredom, I’m not referring to killing time on your smartphone, your iPad, or your laptop. I’m not even talking about paging through a book. I mean bored as in doing absolutely nothing.

Meet Google’s search anthropologist [SF Chron] – While the article still has a bit of the wow-technology-companies-use-social-science-to-watch-people-use-stuff wide-eyedness we see in every popular press piece, I was intrigued by the nice exploration of the gulf between what some people reveal they need and what design changes make it into the product. It’s not a one-to-one match and the article speaks to that reasonably well.

Google has hundreds of millions of users, each with different needs, working styles and levels of search competence. Every change for one subset – like those who occasionally use advanced search – comes at a cost for others – like the vast majority of people who never use it and don’t want it cluttering up the main page. Striking the right balance for the greater good requires listening to the data – and, of course, to the users themselves. “That particular interview didn’t finish off the painting,” Russell said. “But every interview helps fill in a little bit more of the canvas.”

Why Storytellers Lie [The Atlantic] – “Lie” is a perfect headline-grabbing word and it probably pays to read the piece with a less judgmental take on what people tell us. There are many situations that are lies but in research it’s our job to seek a number of possible truths and understand why what we hear may not always be the same as what we identify as true.

Sinister as that may sound, therapy likely helps many of us feel better at least in part because it encourages us to become less truthful autobiographers. As studies have shown, depressives tend to have more realistic-and less inflated-perceptions of their importance, abilities, and power in the world than others. So those of us who benefit from therapy may like it in large part because it helps us to do what others can do more naturally: to see ourselves as heroes; to write (and re-write) the stories of our lives in ways that cast us in the best possible light; to believe that we have grown from helpless orphans or outcasts to warriors in control of our fate…We should remember how much we all have a tendency to fictionalize, whether we realize it or not. We like stories because, as Gotschall puts it, we are “addicted to meaning”-and meaning is not always the same as the truth.

Clickers Offer Instant Interactions in More Venues [NYT] – This continues to be an almost-trend; the desire/opportunity/ability to “like” stuff IRL (“in real life”) the way we do on Facebook (see a previous example here).

The delighted shouts from middle-schoolers and seniors alike suggest that neither group is accustomed to having its opinions solicited. But with a clicker, “suddenly their voices are important,” said Professor James Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers. “If people feel their opinions really count, they’ll be happy and likely to give more opinions.” The dynamic of social comparison – understanding where you stand relative to your tribe – is also a draw. Clicker software satisfies that curiosity by immediately displaying a bar graph of responses in the room. “This is a new form of transparency for crowd psychology,” he said. He added some cautions about using clickers, also called audience response systems. In a society in which checking the crowd’s opinion becomes the norm, Professor Katz said, taking risks or relying on one’s instincts may be devalued. “Those who want to strike out in new directions and challenge the sentiments of a crowd, like artists and writers, have an additional burden with this technology because they can know that no one takes comfort in their vision,” he said. “There goes the Great American Novel.”

The Wizard of Oz Focus Group – Footage from an early focus group for The Wizard of Oz. ‘Nuff said.

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What Makes People Share Information? [Mozilla UX]

– The Mozilla UX team is doing a nice job at sharing their inquiries, their methods, their artifacts and their thinking behind all of ’em.

We’re starting another research study this week. We’re interviewing 8 users in their homes, for 90 minutes each, to understand how people define their online life. It’s purposely broad as we’re trying to learn more about how people discover and organize websites from both online and offline sources. It wouldn’t be a successful interview without some artifacts to help us collect this data, so we came up with a two fun activities – the timeline and “me in the middle”. At the beginning we’ll start with a simple timeline and have the participants walk us through their yesterday – what they did, where they where and we’ll prompt for what tools and devices they used – but that is just a way to get all the raw data on paper quickly. What we are really after is their stories.