Here’s the scoop for us this week

• Last week’s kickoff was most setting the stage for the project launch. Today we meet the entire team for a work session meant to build consensus, uncover existing hypotheses, and focus our investigation. It was a crucial if surprising moment in last Friday’s meeting when after a couple of months of scope and contract negotiations it became clear that our key project owners don’t have an exact specific focus for the user research and are looking to us to help focus that.
• Beyond that, we’ll be diving into writing a screener, interviewing remote stakeholders, and setting up conversations with experts and thought leaders who will inform the project.
• Last week produced three War Stories (from Elaine, Dennis and Debbie). We’d love yours, too!
• I’ve got a handful of lunch and coffee meetings this week to catch up with different folks, both local and visiting.
• Ten years gone: From October 2002 – a suspicion around DeLorean vs. Miata psychographics
• What we’re consuming: Neil Young Journeys, Looper, KONG Classic, Mitchell’s Caramel Praline ice cream.

• [from steve_portigal] A History of the Future in 100 Objects by Adrian Hon [Kickstarter] – [I'm in! Who else will throw some cash at this kickstarter project, crowdsourced funding for some exciting research and writing?] Let's imagine it's 2100…What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? 'Smart drugs' that change the way we think? A fragment from suitcase nuke detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world's most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid? I want to write a weblog that will explore all of these ideas, with 100 posts for 100 objects. Along the way I'll produce a newspaper and a podcast, and when it's finished, I'll publish it as a book. But it's not just going to be about technology – I'm going to focus on the deeply human effects of our fascinating future, from religion to advertising to wars. I want to tell the story of individuals, families, countries, and the human race, as we venture from 2011 to 2100.

• [from steve_portigal] Dog Scouts of America honors Milpitas dog Jasper [SFGate] – [For all the talk of game-like motivations online, here's a great offline example] Merit badges for dogs are the latest thing Jasper is the first dog in the Bay Area to earn five merit badges from the Dog Scouts of America, a real organization that has quietly been issuing merit badges to deserving dogs for 11 years. Five merit badges, it turns out, are not very many badges in the Dog Scout world. There are no fewer than 76 badges – Frisbee catching, herding, canoeing and bicycling are all badges (the dog doesn't actually bicycle, he must run alongside the human cyclist, sensibly and without making the typical dog-versus-bicycle fuss). Disaster preparation is another dog merit badge, although some might say that preparing for disaster is what you do before you get a dog. Verdahl, who is going after merit badges the way some kids go after baseball cards, said he is just getting started. The next badge he and Jasper are shooting for, he said, is the badge for fundraising.

• "Reading Ahead" Project Fuses Consumer Reading Habits With Opportunities to Enhance the E-Reader Experience – A press release about Reading Ahead and our design competition in partnership with Core77

(Updated to include slideshow with synchronized audio track)

We’re very excited today to be posting our findings from the Reading Ahead research project.

Lots more in the deck below, but here’s the executive summary

• Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
• The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
• Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
• There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading

We sat down yesterday in the office and recorded ourselves delivering these findings, very much the way we would deliver them to one of our clients.

Usually, we deliver findings like these to a client team in a half day session, and there’s lots of dialogue, but we tried to keep it brief here to help you get through it. (The presentation lasts an hour and twenty minutes.)

It’s been a great project, and we’ve really appreciated hearing from people along the way. We welcome further comments and questions, and look forward to continuing the dialogue around this work.

Audio

We’ve been hard at work synthesizing the Reading Ahead data. There’s a great deal of writing involved in communicating the results, and sometimes it makes sense to develop a visual model that represents a key idea.

Here are several partial models evolving through paper and whiteboard sketches, and finally into digital form.

We’ll be finishing synthesis soon, and publishing our findings on Slideshare, with an audio commentary.

Stay tuned…

• Reading in public, worldwide – A set of photos, on Flickr
• The Reading In Public chair – A specially-designed chair for the public performance. If the chair is available, will it influence behavior?
• Reading In Public – Reading In Public (RIP!) was formed to celebrate the written word by way of community performance in public spaces. The project began as a response to the shifting landscape in publishing, and the realization that more and more of us are writing in public, as bloggers and tweeters, for instance. Similarly, we sought to broadcast words in public, through the simple act of contemplative reading on a noisy street corner, or as performance, with readers directly engaging onlookers.
  On Saturday, August 1st, beginning at 10am, we wheeled the Reading Chair to various downtown locations in San Luis Obispo, California, where assigned readers took turns sitting and reading. Our readers were people of all ages and walks of life who shared a passion not only for words, but for story telling. They chose their own reading materials and crafted their own performances.

There’s always something new in every project. Often we encounter a bit of process that we may not know how to best manage it. So we’ll make our best plan and see what happens. We learn as we go and ultimately have a better way for dealing with it next time.

In a regular client project, we write a screener and work with a recruiting company who finds potential research participants, screens them, and schedules them. Every day they email us an updated spreadsheet (or as they call it “grid”) with responses to screener questions, scheduled times, locations, and contact info. It still ends up requiring a significant amount of project management effort on our end, because questions will arise, schedules will shift, people will cancel, client travel must be arranged, etc. etc.

For Reading Ahead, we did all of the recruiting ourselves. Although we’ve done this before, this may be the first time since the rise of social media: we put the word out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, email to friends, and here on All This ChittahChattah.

While Dan lead the effort, we both used our own networks, and so we got responses in a number of channels, sent to either or both of us, including:

• @ replies on Twitter
• direct messages on Twitter
• Comments on Facebook posts
• Messages on Facebook
• Emails (directly to either of us, or forwarded from friends, and friends-of-friends

A private dialog on Facebook

Comments on a Facebook status update. Note that Dan is able to jump in and make contact directly

Direct Messages in Twitter

Some people were potential participants, some were referrers to other potential participants, and some were both. And given the range of platforms we were using, with their associated restrictions (and unclear social protocols), we had to scramble to figure out who could and should communicate with who to follow up and get to the point where we could see if the people in question were right for the study. We didn’t expect this to happen, and eventually Dan’s inbox and/or his Word document were no longer efficient, and as some participants were scheduled or in negotiation to be scheduled, he ended up with this schedule cum worksheet:

Being split across the two of us and these different media, eventually we were interacting with people for whom we had to check our notes to trace back how we had connected to them, which was great for our sample, since it meant we weren’t seeing a group of people we already knew.

It was further complicated when we had finished our fieldwork and wanted to go back to everyone who offered help close the loop with them, thanking them for help. Technically, and protocol-wise, it took some work (who are the people we need to follow up with? Who follows up with them? What media do they use), basically going through each instance one-by one.

We haven’t figured out what we’ll do next time; we won’t forget the challenges we’ve had but there’s just not time or need right now to plan for the future. If I had to guess, I’d imagine a Google Spreadsheet that includes where we got people from, who owns the contact, whether they are participant-candidate or referrer, etc.). Despite being very pessimistic about the demands of recruiting, we still underestimated the time and complexity required for this project.

I started today by typing up all of the Post-it notes you saw in our recent blog post on Synthesis.

This activity created a 6-page Word document of bullet points.

The next part of the process is something I always find challenging: taking an incredibly detailed list of observations, particpant statements, hypotheses, and ideas; figuring out what the Big Ideas are (there’s a point in the process where many of them seem Big!), and putting those into a form that tells a cogent story.

First step: make a cup of tea.

Ok, then my next steps were:

• Categorize all those bullet points
• Synthesize those categories a bit further
• Write down in as short a paragraph as possible what I would tell someone who asked me, “what did you find out?”

Then I went into PowerPoint, which is what we use when we present findings to our clients. I’ll continue bouncing back and forth between Word and PowerPoint; each piece of software supports a different way of thinking and writing.

I dropped my synthesized categories into a presentation file, sifted all of the bullet points from my Word doc into the new categories, and then started carving and shaping it all so that it started to follow the paragraph I had written. (I’m mixing cooking and sculpting metaphors here.)

I printed out the presentation draft, and laid it out so I could see the whole thing at once.

Steve came back from a meeting and I asked him to read over what I’d printed out. He started writing notes on my printouts, pulling out what he saw as the biggest of the Big Ideas.

We talked about what he’d written, which led to an energetic discussion in which we really started to breathe life into this. Tomorrow, I’ll start the day by iterating the presentation draft based on our conversation.

• OneMillionGiraffes.com – fascinating to look at how a simple exercise can be tackled in so many different ways – My friend, Jørgen, doesn't believe I can collect one million giraffes by 2011. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. So far I've got 76.870 giraffes, so I need 923.130 more! And I have 503 days left to get them.
• See my giraffe – Will it be one in a million?