• The Product Is You, No. 12 – Rob Walker does a series of advertisements that reveal a customer segmentation and the associated characteristics. Similar vein to my postings about personas leaking outside the enterprise
• Please vote for our SXSW panel "Culture Kicks Our Ass: How To Kick Back" – The conference lineup is chosen partially based on input (i.e., voting) from the community. Even if you don't attend, you still have a voice about what the discourse should be in our various fields, so please vote for this panel from Steve Portigal and D. P. Haine, of Obvious Design.

  We’ll explore the different cultural challenges that breakthrough products must overcome: emergent usage behaviors that are impossible to predict, a global customer base and cultural barriers inside the corporation that suffocate innovation. We’ll also share best practices for addressing each challenge.

• Please vote for our SXSW panel "FAIL: When User Research Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong" – The conference lineup is chosen partially based on input (i.e., voting) from the community. Even if you don't attend, you still have a voice about what the discourse should be in our various fields, so please vote for this panel from
  Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting
  Nate Bolt, Bolt|Peters
  Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio
  Aviva Rosenstein, Ask.com
  Mark Trammell, Digg

  Best practices for user research are not hard to come by, but experience is the ideal way to develop mastery. And with experience inevitably comes failure. Embarrassing, awkward, hilarious failure that gives the gift of self-improvement. We’ll share our own unvarnished examples and what they taught us.

• Do programmers still buy printed books? | Zen and the Art of Programming – Likewise, when I’m holding a book or have it open on my desk, I’m in “book reading mode”, which makes it far easier to immerse myself in it. This means that I’m focused on the task and can proceed quickly. The only context switch that happens is between the book and the editor/shell, if it’s the kind of book that warrants typing along. If you are reading a book in a browser tab, it’s very easy to think, “I’ll just check my email for a second”, or introduce similar distractions. I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect.

  When I buy a physical copy of a book, I feel psychologically more obliged to at least try to get through it. Online I experience a paradox of choice of sort. With hundreds of interesting books available there in front of me, I’m more inclined to excessively multitask, and end up checking out different books while I should still be reading the current one.

  (Thanks @onwardparam and @chirag_mehta)

• New study suggests people from different cultures read facial expressions differently – East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.
  They were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

  The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

  (via Design-Emotion.com)

We’ve posted any number of survey design critiques over the years, and here’s the latest, a close read of a question and the cues associated with different responses.

In response to the prompt How closely do you agree or disagree with this statement: “We saw business strengthening in the Spring, but it seems to be stagnant or falling off again. We thought we had seen the bottom, but now we are not sure.” we’re asked to move a slider between Agree Completely and Disagree Completely.

As we move the slider, the expression on the little green character changes, supposedly to provide an additional cue to ensure that our response is accurate.

But when we agree (a positive emotion), the guy is frowning. Because we are agreeing with a negative in which case we making a negative observation? So we feel negative? But the green dude isn’t mapping our feeling about the situation, he’s mapped to our response – our degree of agreement. We can feel positive about agreeing, even if the thing we agreeing about is negative (haven’t you ever exclaimed enthusiastically at someone that expresses a similar frustration to you? That’s being positive about a negative). The mapping here is wrong.

It’s further complicated by the indirectness of the prompt – that situation you are agreeing or disagreeing with – describing a situation going from positive to uncertain. How much do you agree or disagree with: something was positive but now it’s negative? In fact, besides being indirect and somewhat abstract, it’s also a compound question. You might agree that things were positive, or you might now. You might agree that things have gone downhill, or you might not. The question is asking you to agree ONLY to the cause where i) things were positive and ii) things have gone downhill. If you don’t agree with both of those, then what do you do? And since you can indicate the strength of agreement/disagreement, how will people interpret the question? I would suggest not very reliably!

Ironically, this is a survey aimed at providers of market research services, who should absolutely know better.

I took my last ride in my 1977 Datsun 280Z today. I’ve sold the car, and the new owner is picking it up tonight.

On this last drive, I patted the dashboard and said something like, “Sorry I have to sell you.” Which made me think about how some objects in my life are things I have relationships with, and some are just things.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have to give up a pet, or a baby, when I feel sad about just seeing my car go.

I really don’t want to own it anymore-it just doesn’t serve my daily needs-but on a deeper, emotional level, I have a warm feeling towards it, and something significant is going on around giving it up.

This feeling about my Z is totally different from the way I felt when I got an iPhone, which was nonetheless strong as well. I woke up early the morning the contract with my old provider expired and drove right to the Apple store. This was like a consumer electronics booty call. Object lust.

But now my phone is just a thing I use. I feel more emotion about my Swiss Army knife.

And I never felt a thing for my computer, even though I probably spend more time with it than anything–inanimate or animate–in my life.

What’s up with that?

Actually, I’ve got some pretty good ideas about why all of this is the way it is, but I’d rather hear your comments about things you

• love
  
• lust after
  
• hate
  
• feel indifferent about

• 401(k) syndrome mentioned in NYT – I hadn't heard the term before but this is definitely something we saw in our recent study of people's financial attitudes and beahviors
  —
  “I think we are seeing a little of the ‘401(k) syndrome,’ ” Mr. Steele said, referring to people who are ignoring recent financial statements because they know they will present bad news.

While in Florida last week I had the chance to learn a bit of history and realized that the manufactured experiences intended to evoke another time/place go back to the earliest days of Florida land booms.

In Orlando, I stayed at the Lowes Portofino Bay, meant to evoke a resort on the Italian Riviera.

Some faux touches included the scooters parked – well, installed, actually – around the grounds…

…and the made-to-look Old Country stair details.

But getting around the place was a nightmare.

In order to convey some sense of authenticity, the architects echoed bits of a townscape, with limited ability to see what was ahead. Although what you could see was devoid of any actual real details – no people, no commerce, no mess, nothing that would help you located yourself or make a decision about what direction you might want to go into. It felt like a rendered videogame background before the branding, characters, and gameplay was added. I just found it frustrating trying to get around, with a very small amount of triumph when I succeeded or found an alternative; but I wasn’t there to work on getting un-lost and I wanted the hotel’s precious Portofino-ness to get out of my way so I could perform basic wayfinding tasks.

Previously:

• FreshMeat #1: Blue Hawaii, or Viva Las Vegas
• Artsy Hotel Raises the Barre
• Meet The New Authenticity
• We’re not in Kansas anymore

Also: Orlando pictures; Miami pictures.