Posts tagged “New York”

Learn interviewing techniques from Steve in New York in March

As part of the Advancing Research conference, I’ll be teaching a full-day workshop (registration info here) on March 27th.

Interviewing is undeniably one of the most valuable and commonly used user research tools. Yet it’s often not used well, because:

  • It’s based on skills we think we have (talking and even listening)
  • It’s not taught or reflected on, and
  • People tend to “wing it” rather than develop their skills.

Results may be inaccurate or reveal nothing new, suggesting the wrong design or business responses, or they may miss the crucial nuance that points to innovative breakthrough opportunities.

In this highly interactive workshop, Steve Portigal will teach you crucial techniques for successful user research, and give you an opportunity to practice and reflect in a supportive environment.

Target Audience
This workshop will be valuable to anyone who is using user research to inform the decisions their organizations make. This includes both people with “researcher” in their job description, as well as designers, engineers, and product managers (also known as “People Who Do Research.”) If you’re new to interviewing people, you’ll learn the fundamentals; if you’ve been doing research for a while you’ll benefit from the opportunity to reflect on and improve your own practice.

It’s been a few years since I’ve done an in-person workshop open the public on the east coast. Please pass this along to your friends and colleagues who might benefit!

Out and About: Steve in New York

Last week I was in New York to speak with two groups at SVA and at IxDA (also to see the city, eat desserts and hang with friends). Here’s some of the pictures I took during my trip.

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“I Know A Guy, Inc.”

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The New Colossus by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, public art at Lever House that references the ubiquitous labor action inflatable rats.

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Blue by Anish Kapoor at MOMA, chock full of subtlety.

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DO NOT WALK THRU ELEVATOR.

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The Strand Book Store unloading some similar titles about the women behind the men of the sea.

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Hyperlocal.

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Papa Moozi

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A mini-Jurassic Park seen as street art around sidewalk greenspace.

New York previously: Summer 2013, 2011

Out and About: Steve in New York

I spent a few days in New York last week for the book launch event, also just taking some time to explore, walk around the streets, take pictures, meet with folks, eat interesting food, go to the museum, and so on. Here’s some of my observations from the trip.

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I posted about this hippo truck one of the last times I was in New York. I thought it was a tremendous coincidence or just that way that noticing something helps you notice it again (and taking a picture helps you notice it again even more); indeed I saw the same truck in the background of an indie film I watched right after I got back. Well, I’m told by my New Yorker friends that this company’s trucks are extremely common.

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Party supply trucks, hippo or clown, are common in Manhattan.

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Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny’s The Honeycomb Vase “Made by Bees” – what he calls “slow manufacturing”, he built a scaffolding in the shape of the base and then had the bees build, over the course of a week, the vase, finally removing the frame and leaving behind a vase, made by bees.

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The typographical conventions brands have to deal with when associating their own brand with those of social networks. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful here to have the Gothic-style typefaces with the contemporary supporting brands of Facebook and Twitter.

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I like the very clear description of the equipment requirements, except for the strange use of the acronym “PPE” (I’m assuming personal protection equipment). I guess all industries are subject to their insider shorthands.

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A scene from the future?

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A really awful piece of “public art” juxtaposed with the much more appealing and authentic graffiti, seemingly an inspiration for the forms used by the “art.”

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Interviewing without questions, eye contact or rapport

interviewing-users

Interviewing Users is now available. Get your copy here!

Here’s a really interesting project about How People Talk to Themselves in Their Heads.

He would ask them to wear a microphone headset attached to a digital recorder and speak aloud their thoughts as he followed closely behind with a camera. He would not be able to hear what they were saying…[The] videos are simultaneously naturalistic and as objective as possible. In the lab, in front of a researcher, people are often reluctant to reveal exactly what they are thinking. Writing a diary of inner speech is somewhat more private, but many people find it annoying to regularly drop everything and make an entry; sometimes it’s difficult to remember what one was thinking about even minutes earlier. In Irving’s videos people are living their lives more or less as usual, walking and talking to themselves as though they were unaccompanied. Of course, people who are not completely comfortable with the scenario sometimes speak into the microphone as though trying to entertain someone else. And getting people’s inner speech on tape captures only linguistic forms of thought, neglecting the kind of thinking that happens in images and scenes, for example.

The notion that unfettered, deeper self-exploration and self-expression can come when not interacting with the interrogator – to the point here of nearly eliminating the interrogation entirely – evokes the (I presume mostly obsolete) approach to therapy where the patient does not face the therapist.

I find the videos compelling (and voyeuristic to the extreme). Check out the other videos at the link – the ones that take place without the strolling seem more like a diary and less like a peek into the stream of consciousness. But for each of them, see if they pass the sniff-test for you: is the person talking the way they are because of the experiment (they know they are being recorded; they feel they need to come up with something to say, they are aware of their own “voice”, etc.) or is it really getting as deep as the researcher claims? I was mostly convinced but a sliver of doubt remains.

In the research we do, we make no claim of naturalism; we certainly want to direct and influence what is being shared, and we build rapport to facilitate openness and honesty. This approach isn’t likely to be appropriate for us, but it’s certainly provocative to look at the output of an opposite approach – where the interviewer is effectively absented and rapport is not a consideration.

Out and About: Julie in NYC

There’s no better place than New York for the casual wandering photog. And no better way to unwind between interviews than wandering casually. Tamara shared her observations from last week’s trip; here are a few of mine.


An ambitious seeker-of-companionship slipped this onto the subway; an attempt at old-school social networking, ironic in its particular placement. It’s author provides a few interesting and wholesome-sounding options (library, the zoo, coffee date) to entice people to respond to this rather salacious-seeming invitation. Who calls, I wonder? And don’t they know that with Google Voice they can link those two numbers?


Surprisingly lifelike and expressive, for mini-robots cobbled out of plastic scraps.

A few of my pictures wound up revealing accidental compositional synchronicity. That’s one of the joys of taking photos – along with being obvious documentations of what I ran across, I often discover something new when I get them back and reflect on them:


When I took this, I only saw the blue face. And yes, this is the correct orientation of the photo!


The colors in this juxtapostion of the utilitarian and the ephermeral echo each other.


I like taking pictures of poles for the way they can surprisingly and dramatically bisect a scene. And because people put stickers on them. The little face sticker here is obviously a product of the same person/people who slapped up a little sticker I snapped on the other side of the country, at Venice Beach, just two weeks prior – the LA one reads, “Enjoy You” rather than, “Gain You.” Interstate sticker-art pattern! Theories?


Red, yellow and blue syncopate in a Brooklyn subway entrance, in a way that put me in the mind of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Jazzy patterns abound, waiting for us to notice them.

Introverted Observers

We’ve had a lot of good posts – and comments – as of late about extroversion, introversion, talking to strangers, comfort zones, and so on. This brought to mind a story from a visit to New York a while back. In Let’s Embrace Open-Mindedness I tell two stories from my personal life (e.g., not when conducting research) where I explored the edges of my own comfort zone in just slightly unfamiliar circumstances, one situation where I saw the opportunity and couldn’t make the leap, another where I saw the opportunity and convinced myself to take that leap.

Followers of this blog will know I love taking pictures of curious and interesting things that I see everywhere, but it’s much harder – and not always appropriate – to take pictures of the curious and interesting people that I see everywhere. Indeed, in true Heisenberg fashion, you can’t always get the picture you’d want if you have to interact.

Anyway, visiting New York and walking through Times Square, I came upon people promoting Carrie Fisher’s “Wishful Drinking.” They were dressed as parodies of the book cover, with Fisher as Leia. At two separate points, I asked these hawkers if I could take their pictures.

Well, sure. It’s New York. It’s Times Square, thick with tourists, and these people are calling attention to themselves for promotion. All those cues shift the norm and make it reasonable/comfortable/appropriate/possible to do something that we don’t normally do: asking “Hey, can I take your picture?” That’s probably why I have so many photos taken with Shrek, Mr. Peanut, an Animaniac, the Monster.com monster – there’s something delightful and ironic about this staged naturalism, as if yes, I am hanging out here with my arm casually thrown around a 6-foot be-monocled legume. The opportunity to ask for a picture is so built-in to our scripts that it seems a crime to not get the picture!

Also see: The bear that saluted me

ChittahChattah Quickies

In East Harlem, ‘Keep Out’ Signs Apply to Renters [NYT.com] – When in a large city I often look at the residential spaces above dense commercial/retail and wonder who lives there and what it’s like (I once lived above a real estate office of some type – we never really knew what they did down there – and was constantly pestered by couriers and other delivery people) – but the answer may very well be that nobody lives up there. Naively, it doesn’t make economic sense, but the situation appears to more complex than that.

East Harlem has been undergoing a resurgence for two decades, yet the neighborhood is still pockmarked with four- or five-story walk-ups where the ground-floor stores are bustling and the apartments above are devoid of life. Their windows are boarded up, blocked up or just drearily empty, torn curtains testifying to no one’s having lived there for years. Although the vacancy rate in Manhattan hovers at 1 percent, at least some of the landlords of these sealed-up buildings are deliberately keeping their buildings mostly vacant, content to earn income from first-floor commercial tenants rather than deal with the trouble of residents. …At the corner of 106th Street and Third Avenue, the boarded-up windows and the remainder of the five-story building have been sleekly painted a rich taupe, allowing the Chase Bank branch below to escape looking as if it were in a forsaken slum. Still, no one lives in the apartments.

Reinventing Post Offices in a Digital World [NYT.com] – Digital, and all that it encompasses, is remaking every industry. We straddle the opposites of welcoming new services and holding onto traditional ways of receiving familiar services. Nice to see the German post office reframe this away from loss, towards reinvention. The article doesn’t characterize the pain that must have been felt by the organization and the customers but you can imagine it must have been tremendous.

With mail volumes decreasing 1 to 2 percent annually in many countries, European postal services from Germany to Sweden to Switzerland have reinvented themselves over the past decade as multifaceted delivery and information companies tailored to the virtual age. Though Deutsche Post by law still delivers to every address six days a week, it has jettisoned tens of thousands of buildings, 100,000 positions and its traditional focus on paper mail. “We realized that being a national postal provider was an endangered business, that we had to redefine the role of postal providers in a digital world,” said Clemens Beckmann, executive vice president of innovation of the German post office’s mail division. After selling off all but 24 of 29,000 post office buildings in the past 15 years, the German postal service is now housed mostly within other business “partners,” including banks, convenience stores and even private homes. In rural areas, a shopkeeper or even a centrally located homeowner is given a sign and deputized as a part-time postmaster. At the same time, many European postal services, including the one here, have developed a host of electronic services that are increasingly making traditional post offices and mailboxes obsolete. Bills and catalogs can go first to digital mailboxes run by the post office on customers’ computers, and the customers can tell the post office what they want it to print and deliver

Ford reintroduces the 1965 Mustang [Yahoo! Autos] – First I’m hearing that Ford has its own business supporting the classic car market. There are obviously design, performance and legal/safety issues why they won’t sell you an actual 1965 Mustang, but the idea of having someone make you a new version of an old car is very compelling. Who will make me one?

As part of its Ford Reproduction business, Ford revealed today it had approved a new stamping of the steel bodies for first-generation Mustang that buyers could then build into their own 1964 1/2 through 1966 Mustang, using whatever engine, axles, interior and other parts they can find on their own. The first-generation Mustangs rank as America’s most-restored vehicle, and the cottage industry of reproduction parts has grown to where it’s possible to build a Mustang just as it would have appeared on the showroom floor in the mid-1960s, down to the pushbutton AM/FM radio.

Out and About: Julie in New York

My aimless wanderings between meetings and meals in Manhattan last week led to observing these collisions of order and chaos.

Cupcakes at Dean and Deluca (Greenwich Village) bear a resemblance to the tiered visuals and colors of the crowd (Times Square).

Impact emerges from the pattern of repetitive elements in street/sidewalk art (SoHo) and tagged signage (Chinatown).

Out and About: Steve in New York

After wrapping up a few intense days of work with a client, we decided to stay in New York an extra day. Our meals were certainly beyond a typical office day (Balthazar for breakfast and Joe’s Shanghai for lunch); meanwhile we huddled at a Starbucks in SoHo to get some work done. The only available seats were in the window, so we propped the laptop on the countertop and did our thing. So there we are, two professional noticers in front of a window in a busy part of Manhattan. You can imagine the staccato work conversations we had, as we constantly interrupted ourselves with “Did you see that sign?”, “Did you see that person?” or “Did you see that truck?”

We did see a lot of lovely trucks. I wonder if NYC-area businesses have figured out the business benefit of the business end of the truck? As above, a delicious reinforcement of the pig hippo branding specifically for the back of the truck. Earlier, a rear graphic that read “I [pretzel] N Y.” Before that, the Meat without Feet truck.

Trucks, part of a great day.

My deli is more authentic than your deli

From a San Francisco Chronicle interview with Noah Alper, founder of Noah’s Bagels

Q: You write about how important it was that the stores be authentically New York, and authentically Jewish. What did you have to do to make that happen?
A: It involved not being afraid to be unapologetically Jewish. It sounds simplistic, but we acted as if we were operating the store in a Jewish neighborhood – we had Hanukkah candles at the appropriate time of year, challahs on Friday, charity boxes in every store.
We also operated a strictly kosher establishment. We were the largest kosher retailer in the Untied States when we sold the business. That was an added level of complexity. But it not only captured a very loyal kosher community, it also added to the authenticity.

Although I first encountered Noah’s before they were sold (which ended many of these practices), I don’t recall noticing this level of authenticity. Perhaps it’s eroded so far that my early memories have been wiped out. But this discussion of authenticity and Jewish deli on the west coast reminds me of my first encounters in the mid-90s with Portland, OR-based Kornblatt’s. The PDXers I met seemed to cherish Kornblatt’s as a local treasure and I’m sure any criticism here will upset them to no end. My apologies, but Kornblatt’s always struck me as a place for people that hadn’t ever been to New York, liked it that way, but wanted some element of what people supposedly ate over thar. The place evoked what you might call checklist-authenticity: bagels (check), celery tonic (check), New York street signs (check), soft-spoken-shrugging-Jackie-Mason-meets-Ben-meets-Jerry-meets-Jerry-Garcia-proprietor (wha????).

While Noah’s decor is the same cartoonish parody of what New York’s Lower East Side, at least Alper had a sense of how to go beyond that. And ultimately, what it took to export New York deli authenticity to the Bay Area is completely different what it took to expoert New York deli authenticity to Portland. Different markets, different culture, different context, different definition of authenticity.

See also:

Start Spreadin’ The News: Steve in New York, NY

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Urban Camouflage, New York, June 2004

I’m off to New York next week for a handful of speaking engagements. If you’re going to be at any of them, please let me know!

Upcoming Speaking Gigs

It looks to be a busy time between now and the end of the year, with a lot of exciting opportunities. Some details still TBD; I’ll update with links when we get ’em. Meanwhile, if you’re going to be at any of these presentations, please let me know!

True Imitations of Real McCoys

The NYT describes the Twinkies Brand Bake Set which allows kids to make a home version of the famous Twinkie. Not exactly the same, but a similar item. The home version is under license, and offers a second official channel to get the Twinkie experience. But no mention is made in the article of the various bakeries that sell a store-made fresh gourmet version.

Fluff in NYC is one such place.
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They sell Fwinkies and Fwodels. I think this is a chocolate-covered Fwinkie (an evolution of the original).
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Snowfall stops – Central Park

I was in New York earlier this week. On Friday morning I looked out the window and saw this
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I am pretty sure it’s been several years since I had seen snow. After a while it stopped. There was quite an interesting view looking north at Central Park.
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It worked out fine for me; despite some anxiety about just doing basic stuff like getting around when weather was happening, it stopped for good once I left the hotel, and turned into a sunny day. Some annoyance with slush, but it worked out. I was amused at myself having grown up with this stuff but being so completely unsure (or to some extent, unprepared) in dealing with it.

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