Harley-Davidson President and CEO Jim Ziemer, Harley-Davidson Annual Report, 2007

My latest interactions column, Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research? has just been published.

While user-research-eschewing Apple is everyone’s poster child for “design for yourself,” I find Harley-Davidson to be a more compelling example (although I may be comparing Apple(s) and oranges). At Harley, Willie G. Davidson is the grandson of the original Davidson. Senior vice president and chief styling officer, he is known as Willie G. And he looks exactly like a guy who rides a Harley: big, bearded, and leather-clad. If we judge a bike by its fairing, the designer is the customer. That’s part of the Harley brand: In a recent Harley-Davidson annual report, executives appear next to their bikes, and we know that they all ride. A crucial part of Willie G.’s role is to preserve the legacy of the brand; the company communicates that it is (and always has been) part of the culture for which it’s designing. People at Harley, we believe, use the products and live the lifestyle. But underneath it all is a sense that Harley-Davidson, through its history, has created the brand (i.e., the products and their meaning) in partnership with its customers. For all the tribal connectedness Apple has facilitated, the company itself is not a participant. It is a benefactor.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Related: Steve Portigal speaks at User Research Friday – Design and Research, Ships in the Night?

Update: Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design? is now available

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting with Advertising
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• Harley-Davidson: You Can File Our Obituary Where The Sun Don't Shine – Passionate and 100% on-brand response to rumblings about Harley not making it through 2009. Seen as full-page ad in today's New York Times and presumably elsewhere
• Very slight story on how and why we use lines from movies in regular conversation – It also turns out that using movie quotes in everyday conversation is akin to telling a joke and a way to form solidarity with others, according to a researcher who has actually studied why we like to cite films in social situations.
  "People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh," said Richard Harris, a psychology professor at Kansas State University.
  Harris decided to ask hundreds of young adults about their film-quoting habits after he and his graduate students realized it was a common behavior that no one had looked at closely before.
  He found that all of the participants in his study had used movie quotes in conversation at one point or another. They overwhelmingly cited comedies, followed distantly by dramas and action adventure flicks.
  As for horror films, musicals and children's movies, "fuh-get about it." They were hardly ever cited.
  When asked about their emotions while quoting films, most people reported feeling happy.

• Everything's amazing, nobody's happy – Thanks to John Zapolski for this one. Louis CK on Conan ranting with disgusted amazement against the dissatisfaction that he sees with what are clearly amazing new behaviors enabled by technology. Once again standup comedy provides some articulate-as-hell cultural observation. I don't encourage producers to take on Louis' attitude (basically, get over it) themselves, but it does provide a provocative point of view
• My latest column for interactions: Interacting with Advertising – There’s a famous saying (attributed to John Wanamaker, the retailing pioneer): “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” And while that’s still true, we propose this corollary: Half our encounters with advertising are dripping with evil; the trouble is, we don’t know which half.

My latest interactions column, Interacting With Advertising has just been published.

There’s a famous saying (attributed to John Wanamaker, the retailing pioneer): “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” And while that’s still true, we propose this corollary: Half our encounters with advertising are dripping with evil; the trouble is, we don’t know which half.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Related: Forced Engagement

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• The school called this a “restriction,” not a “suspension,” so as not to have to report it on college applications. – Was this use of language ethical? Randy Cohen's "The Ethicist" in the NYT mag explores some of the themes from my recent interactions column Poets, Priests, and Politicians

• Dean Kamen: Be A Genius and Get It Wrong – This Esquire profile of Dean Kamen nicely supports with what I wrote in a previous interactions column (Some Different Approaches To Making Stuff).
  "A process that usually begins with Kamen fixating on a pressing human need and following his nose with little regard for precedent or practicality. One day he saw a man in a wheelchair struggling to get over a sidewalk curb. Instead of trying to build a better wheelchair, he asked himself what that man really needed. To be able to go up stairs, to cross rough terrain, to rise up and look normal people in the eye. [The solution:] Wheels that could spin back and forth so precisely and so fast, you could balance on just two of them.
  He made the iBOT come true. It's an amazing accomplishment, but the practical issues still dog him — at $26,100, it costs way too much for most wheelchair users. Same with the Segway, which he put $50 million of his own money into before giving any serious thought to the problem of selling it."

My latest interactions column, Poets, Priests, and Politicians has just been published.

[W]e’re increasingly exposed to rhetoric in the arenas of marketing and politics. It’s easy to be cynical and dismissive of relabeling. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” has long been a cliche in software and technology development, and we are perhaps less likely to examine the possibilities that lie along that tension: the power of words in the process of understanding people and creating new things for them.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• A rather wonky discussion of design processes
  Jared Spool proposes the following hierarchy:
  0) Unintended Design
  1) Self Design
  2) Genius Desig
  3) Activity-Centered Design
  4) User-Centered Design If you enjoyed my recent interactions column (available upon request) Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff, the discussion linked here might be of interest.
• Brandweek on Design Thinking
  Which is now apparently referred to as DT. Yuck! This article most clearly presents what Design Thinking refers to: the same stuff that design firms and creative agencies and innovation teams and the rest of us have been doing for a long time now: observe, ideate, implement. The examples presented here could be the same examples used in all the classic business press articles about ethnography over the last 10 years. Only now it’s DT. At least they quote Tim Lebrecht from frogdesign saying the same thing; that there’s nothing new here. The article makes a strong case for ethnographic research up until the point that they highlight how Web 2.0 lets customers document their own lives easily. So, umm, how does Brandweek use the term? Anything that gets you a flavor of customer lives, I guess. Hooray for the further championing of this approach. Boo for the lack of clarity and the buzzword boosterism.

My latest interactions column, Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff, has just been published.

I propose an incomplete framework for how companies go about making stuff (products, services, miscellaneous). In characterizing this as incomplete, I hope to hear about other approaches that will flesh out the framework.

1. Be a Genius and Get It Right
2. Be a Genius and Get It Wrong
3. Don’t Ask Customers If This Is What They Want
4. Do Whatever Any Customer Asks
5. Understand Needs and Design to Them

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

Last year I gave a talk at an IDSA event where I described the practice of personas as user-centered bullshit. In January I expanded that into Persona Non Grata, my first column for interactions magazine. More recently, I was interviewed about the topic by Forrester Research.

Vidya Drego at Forrester has now issued a report – How To Get The Most From Design Personas

– although given her brief, much of our conversation around the limitations and risks of personas, as well as alternatives, does not appear prominently in this document.