It’s time to sum up some of the noteworthy writings/happenings of the year. Let’s get to it!

• The highlight of the year was the publication of Interviewing Users, my first book! Check out reviews by Garrett Moon, QRCA Views Magazine, and Digital Anthropologist, as well as Goodreads and Amazon.
• Some book goodies online include: cover, foreword, excerpt, acknowledgements, FAQ, testimonials and images and diagrams.
• We had book fun celebrations, with book launch parties in New York and San Francisco.
• I co-organized and hosted the IxDA Student Design Challenge in Toronto and helped with the judging for the 2014 event.
• While we’ve only done one episode so far, Dave Gray and I (along with special guest Chris Reimer) did an online show called We Might Do A Show called We Might Swear
• It was a big year for speaking. I debuted a new workshop at Fluxible called The Designer is Present. I talked about (and led workshops in) Interviewing Users at Catapult Labs, Twitter, Yammer, Citrix, Mozilla, UX Week, MIMA Summit, UX Book Club DC, UX Book Club Philly, Rome UX Book Club, O’Reilly, IxDA NYC and IxDA Los Angeles/LA UX Meetup (slides, video).
• I spoke about Bad Ideas at the Silicon Valley IxDA, SVA’s Products of Design, SJSU Human Factors/Ergonomics Alumni Symposium and SXSW.
• I spoke about improv at Walmart, mobile research at PayPal, design-led innovation at TiE Silicon Valley and Skill Building for Design Innovators at TorCHI.
• I spoke about analyzing research data at UC Berkeley’s New Product Development class and about interviewing users SVA’s Interaction Design class in Research Methods.
• We gathered and shared a huge number of compelling user research War Stories (and are still looking for more).
• Around the blog, we examined social norms around taking pictures of your food, took umbrage at rescinded bonuses, the commoditization of innovation and inauthentic customer stories, considered the impact of activist avatar changes, and explored motivations for behavior change in customers.
• We found interesting sites like Awkward Chatbot and Does The Dog Die?
• We mused about design and meaning and form, self-referential products, socializing death, sex toy design, innovation as eevolution not revolution and the limitations of data.
• In globalization, we looked at the appeal of a Friends cafe in Beijing and importing lowrider culture.
• We found an amazing healthcare case study about sweeping cultural change that wholly reinvented the way services were conceived of and delivered.
• We looked at the role of pop culture and the Bieb specifically.
• In support of Interviewing Users we did interviews with Tomer Sharon, Denise Lee Yohn, Ethnography Matters, Huffington Post, Maish Nichani, Business 901, UIE Book Corner, UX Matters, 33 Voices, UX Magazine and the eLearning Coach podcast.
• We wrote extensively about user research and interviewing, with pieces about robot interviewers, self-reporting in the YouTube era, Harry Dean Stanton and silence, Marc Maron and listening, empathy, pattern-recognition, how body language changes you inside, an approach to interviewing without questions, eye contact or rapport, the art of the interview,
  a curious way to get participants, how stories fuel listening and the dangerous power of the interviewer.
• While we didn’t travel overseas this year (gasp!) we did get around and shared some of what we saw in Austin for SXSW, Baltimore, Kitchener-Waterloo, LA, Minneapolis, New York , and again, Portland, San Diego and Denver, Tampa, Toronto, and again.

All those years ago: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

I had a wonderful trip to Los Angeles last week so speak at a combined IXDA Los Angeles/LA UX Meetup event. They gave me a really warm welcome (including a pint of cold Ben and Jerry’s ice cream all to myself) and the at-capacity room was filled with enthusiastic and thoughtful folks who contributed to an interesting discussion.

Here are the slides

And the video

Also, an alternate video is here and highlighted tweets are here.

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.

The lovely folks at UXLx have just posted the video from my talk earlier this year, Discover and act on insights about people.

Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

If you don’t see the video embedded above, you can view it here

I’ve got a proposal in for next year’s SXSW conference. The talk I’m planning to do is entitled “The Power of Bad Ideas”

In business and in life, we pursue the good stuff and champion people who are known for their good ideas. But when we place too strong an emphasis on just the good, we may neglect to consider the bad ones. In design and in brainstorming, deliberately seeking out bad ideas is a powerful way to unlock creativity. Generating bad ideas can reveal our assumptions about the difference between bad and good, and often seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good ones. Jotly and Cow Clicker were jokes/parodies (e.g., not good ideas) that have been surprisingly successful. Neil Young and Crazy Horse have covered folk songs. An action blockbuster features a US president swinging a silver axe against vampires. In this talk, I’ll explore how opening up the bad idea valve can lead unexpectedly to the kind of success we aim for with our good ideas.

This talk picks up where my Core77 article and some recent blog posts (here, here) left off. I’m looking forward to developing the material further and talking it through live.

Part of the consideration that SXSW uses in sorting out their 3200 proposals is voting. I’d really appreciate your help: check out the page for the talk, add any comments, questions, or words of encouragement, and vote “thumbs up” (you’ll have to sign in or create an account if you don’t have one).

Thanks for your help!

Last night I spoke at the ACM Bay Area chapter’s monthly event. My talk was Yes, My Iguana Loves to Cha-Cha: Improv, Creativity and Design, another iteration of a talk I’ve been giving since 2005. For me, the topic continues to evolve and inspire and each time I talk to a group about this, some new things emerge. Last night, I talked (albeit briefly) about the power of Yes. In improv, we hear a lot about “Yes, and…” which is really an alternative to saying “no.” In “Yes, and…” you accept an idea and then add your own. But I really got to thinking about the fundamental reframe being about empowering ourselves to say Yes. The “and…” is about putting yourself back into it, but I thought there was something to focusing for a moment on the core idea of responding to things with yes. A few years ago we led an ideation training workshop and at the end we had everyone line up and one at a time come to the front and say something that they had learned, while everyone in the room responded with “Yes!” While it had a bit of a revival meeting about it, it was an interesting exercise. My challenge to the folks last night (a mix of old-skool Silicon Valley types and people in my network, all of whom jumped into the games and exercise) was to try responding yes in a situation where you might typically respond no. It’s a challenge I’ll have to take on myself as well.

The slides are below:

I am frequently asked when I’m doing a public talk in the SF Bay Area, and now I can answer: next week!

I’m giving my popular talk Yes, My Iguana Loves to Cha-Cha in Cupertino on Wednesday, June 20th, at 6:30. This talk, about improv, creativity, and design, is something I’ve revisited and revised for a number of years. As the talk has evolved, I’ve presented it at CHIFOO, Puget Sound SIGCHI, IxDA New York (slides, video), IDSA’s Southern Conference, IDSA/ICSID World Design Congress, IDSA 2009, and DUX05.

Read more here, and come on down to the event
HP Oak Room
19111 Pruneridge Avenue
Cupertino, CA 95014

I hope to see you there. No iguanas will be harmed. No one will be forced to do improv but there should be plenty of opportunities to try it out if you’re up for it!

Here’s the latest on our end

• Infrastructure? Who needs it! After last week’s challenges (resolution still pending) on the water for our kitchen, today PG&E finally made good on their repeated promise to only offer intermittent power throughout the day. So we’re in and out, in cafes, and waiting hopefully for full service to return.
• We’re taking last week’s flurry of Bay Area and Sacramento interviews and very rapidly turning that into a deliverable. We’re committed to finishing up this week (which is about as rapid as we’ve ever done something like this, admittedly with a bit of trepidation) but it looks like our client has some scheduling gremlins emerging at the last minute.
• It’s San Francisco Design Week, a time to hang out at other firms, talking to our friends, and eating-and-drinking from their free and sumptuous spreads. Maybe we’ll see you around (we’ll be the ones with our mouths full).
• We’re hiring!
• I’m in some near-final stages with the book, focusing on the images, a lot of which I’m crowdsourcing from other research folks. Hooray, community!
• Do you have a fieldwork War Story? Please share it with us!
• We’re moving ahead on upcoming talks at CPSI, San Francisco/Bay Area ACM, and WebVisions Barcelona.
• What we’re consuming: Stanley Park Noble Pilsner, Crunchie Bar, Hyperbole TV.

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 all survived Friday the 13th last week and are ready to take on another week that certainly promises to end less ominously…

So, what’s happening this week at Portigal? Quite a bit…

• We are up to our ears in interesting opportunities that require some creative thinking about participant engagement. Our research gears are turning!
• Steve and Tamara will be giving a curtain-call presentation of findings from a recent study.
• We continue to prepare for upcoming fieldwork (New York!! Los Angeles!!) and Julie is going to be busy making some tools to catalyze conversation.
• Steve presses on with writing for his forthcoming book, synthesizing fabulous interviews with change agents who have driven the adoption of user research and pulling together the great suggestions people contributed to Tips to Improve Your Interviewing Skills (and a request for more!)
• We are percolating some sweet ideas for primary research in 2012 for the Omni project and plan to share them soon. Stay tuned…
• Steve continues to plug away on various tasks related to the upcoming Interaction 12 in Dublin.
• We are all eagerly awaiting the arrival of Wednesday so we can get our geek on at Nerd Nite SF!
• Steve is meeting with a big Silicon Valley player to explore how we can deliver design research training to their teams.
• We continue to search for (and find!) cool opportunities for learning, teaching, and sharing. Julie and Tamara are currently in the throes of submitting proposals for Agile2012 and a few other gigs…
• Tamara continues to dive deep into the eye-candy-land of visual thinking, doodling, mind mapping, graphic facilitation, etc. and welcomes suggestions for articles, websites, examples or groups of local SFists who like to get together with colored markers, blank paper, and ideas.

Merry Monday and Happy Week to you!