Here’s the scoopage for us

• Our largest project is wrapping up. Beth is working on finalizing a document that turns our insights, a-has and visual models into a story that points towards next steps.
• I am in Toronto this week for Interaction13, specifically the Student Design Challenge. Check out the amazing jurors who will be reviewing the student work, and the generous set of prizes that folks have given us for the winners.
• While in Toronto I’m speaking at TorCHI (a group I helped found in the mid-1990s) about Skill Building for Design Innovators. Join us!
• Ten years gone: From January 2003 – Putzmeister
• What we’re consuming: Steam Whistle, Evan Penny, Momofuku.

Happy short week (if you took Monday off; else: Happy Tuesday)…

• We’re focusing on what our synthesis has revealed and moving from findings to implications, asking ourselves “so what?” as we shift from the messy walls of re-organized stickies to written documents. This is some heavy brain work.
• I’m at PayPal on Wednesday, speaking about User Research for Mobile at their UX Summit.
• Last week we published war stories from Cordy, Marta, and Rachel. I’m not expecting anything this week.
• I’m heading to Toronto for the IxDA Student Design Challenge (part of the Interaction 13 conference); this weekend is the masterclass; check out the great jurors and the incredible prizes!
• Ten years gone: From January 2003 – Exotic meats, jargon-inflected customer support
• What we’re consuming: Snackle Mouth, Mr. Show, Diavolo Pizzeria, RiffTrax.

It’s almost the ides of January! It’s c-c-c-old and we’re thinking about what’s ahead for us this week.

• We’ve got foamcores full of sticky notes from last week’s client workshop. Now we’ve got a few more interviews to review and then we’re going to start putting together our big themes and getting them written up for an upcoming presentation.
• I’m putting together a talk for a Silicon Valley firm’s UX retreat. Much of the material is new for me so right now I’m outline mode, trying to organize thoughts, examples, and points of view.
• Last week we published five War Stories (Daria, Prasad, Jen, Ryan, and Valerie) and this week already we’ve got one from Rachel. We’ll have one tomorrow for sure, and we’ll see what the rest of the week brings. Interested? Let us know your story!
• In the community this week is the QRCA local chapter meeting. Beth will be there. Will you?
• Ten years gone: From January 2003 – Infiltration, music industry upside
• What we’re consuming: The Staircase, banchan, Django Unchained.

Hello Monday and hello all. We’re back into the swing of things; one of my favorite tweets last week was someone saying it was the longest 3-day week ever. So true for us as well. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got happening:

• We’ve been closely reading a bunch of transcripts and are spending a full day and a half this week with visiting clients to sort through the fieldwork stories and pull out the bigger themes and patterns. I’m pretty excited about some of the ideas that the transcripts prompted for me just on my own, so no doubt once we get into the room some interesting things will happen.
• We just published Daria’s War Story – an epic one – and there should be one more each day for the rest of the week or so.
• In the community this week is Cyd Harell’s talk on Fearless Mobile Research. I’ll be there. Will you?
• Ten years gone: From January 2003 – Steve’s sci-fi detective fiction from the 80s, Flasher the Clown.
• What we’re consuming: This Is My Kingdom, chicken and waffles (for breakfast!), Last Train Home, Gang Nam Chicken.

Happy 2013 to everyone! It’s Wednesday, back to work for a short week after a long break. Chilly and sunny outside, foggy inside (well, inside my head at least, as I fight off the last bits of a holiday cold).

• We’ve taken a set of fieldwork transcripts and divided them up between ourselves and our client team in preparation for an extensive synthesis workshop next week.
• Proposals! We’re working with a number of different organizations to lay out a range of interesting engagements for the next few months.
• I turned in my latest book manuscript before I took off for holidays; am waiting to hear from the editorial team about next steps but I know we’re making serious headway towards actual publication. More details when I have them.
• Ten years gone: From January 2003 – clown names, streaming audio of porn music, exotic meats.
• What we’re consuming: crab, Frequency and Volume, ramen, Weird Al and Bill Plympton.

Lots of emotions as the year winds down, with another one waiting just around the corner. Here’s some of what went down this past year.

• We welcomed Beth Toland to the team. Yeah!!!!!
• Steve is closing in on the last of the writing for Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights to be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2013.
• Our columns for interactions magazine included Content, the Once and Future King (with an associated quickies) and Never Eat Anything Raw.
• We looked at the naturalness (or not) in talking to strangers in this post and this one.
• We found perspectives on interviewing people, including a funny take on journalistic norms in in Birbigs’ short film, dark patterns in this article about conversation, Deborah Tannen on interrupting, Henry Thomas and the power of silence, rapport building at Safeway, and the hilarious BBC Radio series People Like Us
• We addressed user research best practices in Tips to Improve Your Interviewing Skills (with a ton of great stuff in the comments), Seventeen types of interviewing questions and Interviewing past the platitudes.
• We really got going with a series of posts called Curating Consumption (co-published on Johnny Holland until they shuttered), with this year’s posts here, here, here, here, here, here and (whew) here.
• We hit the road and took pictures this year, going to NYC (and again), Dublin (and more), LA, (SXSW, Lisbon (and more), Phoenix, Atlanta, Barcelona (and more), Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney (and more), and Ottawa.
• Observations like Stupid computers and our tolerance for them were inspiration for a strong editorial, Stick to the Knitting, in the Journal of Usability Studies
• We began collecting fieldwork War Stories and built up over 35 fantastic, real, dismaying, insightful, hilarious and frustrating stories from the experiences of fieldworkers. More stories still to come; meanwhile go to that link and just keep reading as they are great!
• We drew inspiration from Gotye, Richard Saul Wurman, and Kevin Kelly.
• Steve presented Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization (slides) as a UIE Virtual Seminar and at WebVisions Barcelona and WebVisions Chicago. This exploration informed (and was informed by) our own breakfast roundtable on the same topic.
• We did at a heap-load of other workshops and talks including the Phoenix Design Summit, UX Lisbon (including slides and sketchnotes for two talks), and CPSI. Steve spoke about Early-Stage User Research at General Assembly, Skill Building for Design Innovators at Service Design Melbourne (and at Carleton University in Ottawa), Qualitative Data Analysis for the University of Dundee, best practices for user research to the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s “Design Thinking for Business” class (and Academy of Art University in San Francisco) and led an Immersive Field Techniques workshop at UX Australia (Sketchnotes 1, 2, 3 and also here). Steve also presented We’ve done all this research, now what? at Mozilla and The Power of Bad Ideas as the closing keynote for UX Camp Ottawa
• Video are available for We’ve done all this research, now what? (from Mozilla), Skill Building for Design Innovators (from Service Design Melbourne), and Discover and act on insights about people from UX Lisbon.
• Core77 published Steve’s Power of Bad Ideas and we found even more bad ideas here and here. The exploration of Bad Ideas led to the aforementioned closing keynote at UX Camp Ottawa.
• Steve presented Yes My Iguana Loves to Cha-Cha about design, improv, and creativity at IDSA SV, Carleton University, Schwab’s “Brain Circus, and Silicon Valley ACM. Read a great writeup of the talk here.
• Earlier this year Steve helped organize the Interaction 12 Student Design Challenge. Check out the winners. Planning ahead to early 2013, Steve is involved in the challenge again and our participants are here.
• We considered packaging design as experience design, pondered the moral calculus of offsets and noticed financial pings.
• Some cool patterns in media projects included reframing the image-heavy web by removing text and going beyond the frames of existing content.
• Where was the umbrage this year? We held it in check, focusing only on Hertz.
• We reviewed disturbing but enlightening video projects that explore social norms, including handholding breaching experiment and Surveillance Camera Man.
• While the Omni project ended up going dormant, we published two thought-provoking interviews with brilliant women: Molly Wright Steenson: Shifting time and Lucy Kimbell: Expanding the visible and sayable.
• ChittahChattah turned 11, we shared a bit about the life at Portigal every week, and kept it up with lots and lots of ChittahChattah Quickies.

Journey through the past: 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

It’s our last real week of work for the year. And as seems to happen every Monday for the past little while, rain has turned to sunshine by the time I sit down to tell you about our week ahead.

• Wonderful topline session with our team concluded last week; we’re on the cusp of diving into synthesis, full-on, but as often happens with this organization, we’re in a bit of a holding pattern on schedule.
• Potential projects abound. Our cup nearly runneth over with a diverse set of interesting projects for the first quarter of 2013. We’ll be excited to see which we’ll move ahead with.
• I’ve set aside some time to do our Portigal-in-2012 writeup. Watch for that!
• I’ve got one War Story in hand, a near-final draft of another, and a promise of a third.
• We’ve got our winners for the IxD13 Student Design Challenge. Lots of logistics to get them sorted for travel to Toronto next year and now the planning for the conference moves forward: figuring out the details of their assignment, setting up our judges for Toronto, and looking to see what kind of prizes we can arrange for these folks.
• I’m taking a book day to finalize the next revision of the manuscript before the year runs out. It’s been a while since I had the time to focus but I’ve got a deadline to meet!
• Ten years gone: From December 2002 – The 250-word short story
• What we’re consuming: SF Sketchfest, The Day the Earth Stood Cool, Best Music Of 2012, Best Books Of 2012, The 100 best British films, Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants 2012.

I was out of the state during a big storm and arrived back just in time for more gorgeous weather. We know it won’t last but in the meantime, we’re enjoying it. And this week looks like this:

• After wrapping up fieldwork last week, we’re sitting down with the team later this week for a topline summary; we haven’t yet begun the in-depth analysis but we find it critical to gather everyone together and align on what we think we’ve heard and what we think it means. No doubt that will be replaced by the outcomes of the analysis, but having a discussion before that begins in earnest is very valuable for the end result.
• This Thursday in Mountain View I’ll be giving a talk about improv, creativity, and design. Tickets available here. Hope to see you!
• I’ve got jury duty this week. Let’s see what happens with that!
• The judges are reviewing the IxD13 Student Design Challenge submissions and we’re planning on announcing the winners in a few days.
• Out on the town this week: Tragically Hip at the Fillmore, Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco
• We just published David’s War Story. As usual, I’ve got a few more in progress that I hope to see come to light before too long.
• Ten years gone: From December 2002 – Hotel soap confessions
• What we’re consuming: Latkes, Marina Abramovic, Radiolab, Memrise.

Here’s the scoop for this week, written ahead of Monday, as I am already at an undisclosed location for a brief yet long-awaited vacation.

• We’re finishing up the last interviews and crafting the initial deliverable, a top-line summary of initial hypotheses and observations. This is before we get into any of the formal analysis, but establishes a point for checking in among the entire team about what we’re hearing and what we think it means.
• Ten years gone: From December 2002 – clearing up the marmoset/marmot confusion, what’s in a name?
• What we’re consuming: Gorilla Barbecue, The Queen of Versailles, Nina Conti.

It’s Monday after a holiday weekend. Whoah.

• Today we begin fieldwork! We’ve been revising the field guide, developing materials, prepping incentives and release forms, collecting homework exercises, coordinating schedules, parking lots, and meeting locations, and today it all starts. Our whole week is primarily dedicated to completing this round of in-home interviews. We’ll be looking at how people live now and how they want to live in the future. Broad enough for you?
• The UXPA has just posted Stick to the Knitting, my invited editorial for the Journal of Usability Studies. I challenge designers – especially those involved with technology – to return to the still-unsolved problems that we originally set out to address.
• What we’re consuming: Gorilla Barbecue, The Queen of Versailles, Nina Conti.