I’m just back from a week in Barcelona for WebVisions, where I led a workshop on fieldwork, synthesis, and ideation, and gave a short talk about championing contextual research within your organization. I’ll be covering similar material coming up in a couple of months at WebVisions Chicago. Meanwhile, I had a bit of time to explore, and found Barcelona to be a beautiful and well-designed city. Here are some sample images, with more to follow in the next day or so (and the complete set on Flickr).

Bounty at La Boqueria market.

Pedestrian safety warning placed in context, as you step from the sidewalk into the street.

Obama British Africa Gin and Rum. Odd description here.

Stickers on the corrugated metal doors pulled down when a business is closed advertise what I assumed was a taxi services but in fact is for locksmiths. Why are locksmith services advertised with such verve?

Gaudi’s La Sagrada Fam??lia, under construction since 1882. Astonishing, even from the outside.

Known in the US as Ice Age: Continental Drift.

Marketing for something via Facebook.

A very modern cinema structure, down by the water, where all the buildings are new and ultra modern. While the whole place is a delicious mix of old and new, classic and modern, this area went just a bit too far into Mall. While this building is gorgeous, its siting and overall vibe is dehumanizing.

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.

More observations from last week’s trip to Lisbon. See part 1 here

Street art.

Body-enhancing undergarments.

Clooney.

Eat box? Yum!

Y’arr! Pirate Bar! That’s some great neon. Perfect place for Drink Like A Pirate Day.

Scented dolls? They look pretty intense. Perhaps they inch forward menacingly as you pass by their window.

The design museum was redoing its facade with sticky notes. We watched their progress over several days.

This is the take-a-number device for a retail queue. Far more advanced than the familiar North American paper ticket dispenser. And also unrecognizable if you don’t read Portuguese and don’t know to look for this.

Detail of a building exterior. Tiled buildings are ubiquitous, with many different beautiful tile designs of various vintages.

Last week I went to Lisbon to speak at UX Lx (you can see my presentations and more here). We had a great time exploring the city on our own, and courtesy of our kindly hosts. I’ve got some images and observations here, and some more to come tomorrow.

This sign is advertising one of those small bright yellow cars that tourists drive around while a recording guides them from place to place. But here the promotional message is rather ribald. Is this reflective of the local culture and how English is used, or is it an attempt to adapt to visitor norms? My other triangulation point was the frequent t-shirts with rather forward sayings in English, worn by people that maybe didn’t know what they meant? I saw a slender woman jogging with a “Chubby Girls Cuddle Better.” A late-middle-aged man on the subway wore a shirt reading “Rock Out With Your Cock Out.” There was just something off about the wearer and the message, seeing my own culture coming back at me in a completely different way. Was this like Engrish, or something else?

Same idea. This is an advertisement for learning English, from the prestigious-sounding “Wall Street Institute” presumably targeting people who want to improve their careers. But FUCK (and the other side, SHIT) are the reference points for learning English. For sure, these are important words in business 🙂

The reliefs in the base of the statue of St. Anthony.

Friendly key dudes.

Do they sell each of those animals as meat?

Is this frog flashing a gang sign, or suggesting his availability for romance?

Funiculars traverse the steep hills.

Stunning architecture of the Oriente train station.

Nothing says sexy like toilet paper.

At the Vasco de Gama mall, this staircase used the same handrail as the escalator. As you approached it, you’d assume you were about to get on an escalator. But no, it’s stairs. Did some architect insist on symmetry with the design of the adjacent escalator?

Rossio train station.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Lisbon and presenting at UX Lx.

I gave an updated version of “Well, We’ve Done All This Research, Now What?” where we did a brief observation of the area around the venue and then developed concepts that spoke to the needs we uncovered. Among the concepts the teams played with was a giant robotic sheep that would provide shade.

The slide deck:

Per Axbom took a series sketchnotes during the session and kindly posted all of them here.

I gave a short presentation on the final day of the conference, exploring the power of user research not only to uncover data that drives product development but to change the way an organization thinks about it’s customers and itself.

The slide deck:

Sketchnotes from LiveSketching.com, Per Axbom, and Francis Rowland.

Click to see larger original

(Side note: amusing to see the consistent use of the presenter caricature. The organizers of the conference may have contributed to this; in each attendee packet was a poster showing a funny if awkward scene with cartoon representations of all the different speakers, as well as a set of cards for one of the speakers. Attendees were supposed to trade cards until they got a complete set.)

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

Another year is speeding towards its conclusion and we wanted to share our highlights for 2011.

• We are joined by inveterate sing-talker, Tamara Christensen! Hooray!
• Steve is writing The Art and Craft of User Research Interviewing: Diving Deep for Insight to be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2012.
• Julie and Steve wrote several columns for interactions magazine: What To Expect When You’re Not Expecting It, Elevator Pitch, and Kilroy Was Here.
• We got our umbrage on about a Braun customer survey, Newegg’s gobbledygook customer communications, HP’s TouchPad advertising, Kimpton’s attempts at personalization, Facebook’s anti-empathetic approach to redesigns, Netflix’s user-blindness, web security questions, breast cancer memes, and irrelevant and badly executed cross branding.
• We kicked off the Omni project, examined how people completed everyday tasks in previous eras of technology, gained mucho insight from Nicolas Nova and Adrian Hon, and completed an extensive secondary research slash cultural audit.
• We drew inspiration from Haruki Murakami and Neil Peart.
• Steve was interviewed about the future of reading and digital books for Digital Book World and about interviewing users for the User Experience podcast.
• We reflected on consumption in general and information specifically, flow states in user research, muffin signifiers, hearing protection and customer service, nerds, recycling, gendered design and marketing, silliness at 76 stations, and MacWorld.
• Steve spoke about Discovering and Acting on New Insights at Lift11 (video and slides), Improv in Brainstorming at APDF, Successful Collaboration (slides) at Frontiers of Interaction, Best Practices For Interviewing Users at SXSW (slides and audio), Culture, User Research and Design at OCAD (slides and audio), We’ve done all this research, now what? at UCB and CHI2011 (slides), Uncovering Innovation From The Outside In at the UIE Web Apps Masters Tour, and User Research Analysis in a UIE Virtual Seminar (buy). He also taught full-day workshops including Spinning Data Into Gold (slides) with Rosenfeld Media, and Immersive Field Research Techniques (podcast) at UI16, and We’ve Done All This Research, Now What? at Unfinished Business (slides) and UX Hong Kong (slides).
• Julie presented Finding the Right People for the Center for Design Research at the University of Kansas (slides);
  Tamara co-presented Big Ideas, Focused Action, Problem Solved at the Oklahoma Creativity Forum (slides)
• We offered a design and experience critique about the One Day For Design experiment.
• Steve shared photographic observations from Geneva, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Florence and Lucca.
• Julie and Steve were out and about in New York (Julie, Steve), Boston, and Portland.
• Our blog (the place for debating/defending the design of really really nichey products, it would seem) turned 10 (yes, 10!)
• We redesigned our business cards around the theme of What’s Your Story and started a blog series to explain the stories behind the new designs (collect all six!)
• Steve began co-chairing the IxDA12 Student Challenge
• We doubled our office space, taking over an adjacent space that opened up in our complex. Kitchen! Couch! We’re living large!
• Not to mention like a bajillion quickies!

Really nostalgic? Check out summaries from 2010, 2009 and 2008.

I visited the great city of Portland, Oregon over Thanksgiving week, and noticed some of the ways its denizens use surfaces to communicate and express. Like Steve did earlier in his recent post, Out and About: Steve in Boston, given our recent interactions article about noticing and documenting street art, Kilroy Was Here, I too wanted to share some snaps!

As elsewhere, the backs of city signage serve as canvas for quick-stick expression. The tiki-figure here is one I commonly see in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, where I live, which surprised me and gave me a little charge, a feeling of connection to home.

A City of Portland sanctioned sticker, which includes a number to call to report damage to this sign, sits alongside its renegade brethren.

Great juxtaposition of two messages about the dangers of inhaling alongside a DANGER sticker.

I appreciated the friendly, bubbly, colorful style against the rainy, grey backdrop of Portland. Contributors to the collective urban collage here seem respectful of each others boundaries – not much overlapping of images.

And, finally, bunnies!

I was in Boston earlier this week to speak at UI16. During a bit of downtime, I went for a walk and of course, started taking pictures. Given our recent interactions article about noticing and document street art, I wanted to share some of what I saw.

One tag (bundtcake? budcloth? badclam?) and stickers for a cutesy-brand pet waste removal service, a skater magazine, a web/movement/thingy, and a beer label that seems to be fake and actually points to a local art collective.

There’s that tag again, the Eye of Providence (a local reference?), and a DJ promoting himself with an homage to the locally dominant Dunkin’ Donuts branding.

Some buffing of previous stickers, that same beer cum art sticker, and the random and hilarious Vonnegut and crossbones (I found a better one here).

Much larger pieces, including Andre. I like how you can see a little bit about how these were done, as they emanate from the fire escape.

A number of streetlights near here had these colored plastic blocks in letter-like forms. I felt like it was probably “official” since it was in a vaguely design-y district and consistently placed on city infrastructure, but there was no information about it and so it was hard to be sure. And that moment – trying to determine if this is “legit art” or “street art” or one masquerading as the other – was delicious. I passed by here with my local friend Joe and asked him about this. While he didn’t know, for him it evoked the 2007 incident when 8-bit-graphics promoting Aqua Teen Hunger Force caused a bomb scare in Boston.

Under the bridge. Just a more familiar graffiti scene, one that seemed to typical, unremarkable, and even slightly comforting (despite the broken glass I had to step around to take this picture).

Our latest interactions column (written by Steve Portigal and Julie Norvaisas) Kilroy Was Here has just been published.

Reviled or celebrated, graffiti is ubiquitous in even the least-urban environments. With roots in the wall-scrawled slogans of ancient Greece, it is a physical yet ephemeral expression of the personality of a neighborhood. It allows us to see a colorful trail of inhabitants’ interactions with public spaces. Graffiti (or street art, or urban art) has been displayed in (and arguably corrupted by) art exhibitions, influenced fashion and pop culture, and generated revenue for municipalities and the paint-removal industry alike. Of course, it’s largely illegal. It’s everywhere, and we are grateful. Perhaps we are drawn to the element of danger that feeds street art, and the rebellion implicit in its enjoyment (probably the same reasons we loved the Fonz!)…We find ourselves considering the street art of one city, or neighborhood, or corner, as a whole, compared to what we know from other cities, neighborhoods, and corners. What elements make them visually distinct? What might these observations say about the culture or history of the location? How does one graffito fit into the larger context of surrounding graffiti? We can channel our inner visual anthropologist, uncovering signs not only of the times but also of the place.

Get the PDF here and let us know what you think. Do you follow street art? What do you like about it? Share your pictures with us!

And, here are some photos to supplement the article

Previous articles also available:

• 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
• 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
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King