Starting any project means we inevitably come across any number of articles that pertain to the topic or the themes that emerge from the research and synthesis.

Sometimes we’ll dedicate some time at the beginning to collect articles and summarize ’em, but more often we’ll just do a quick scan and opportunistically look for issues to inform our recruiting and planning for fieldwork.

Here’s what we’re reading now (and we’ll do a part 2 if and when we find more articles of interest):

• Kindle and the Future of Reading – Nicholson Baker in the New Yorker
  
• NPR Books: July 7, 2008 – “A challenge for amazon’s Kindle e-reader: how does it stand up to a visit to a pool?”
• Hotels Offering eBooks as Amenities – jk OnTheRun (also this from the same site)
• Amazon Taps Its Inner Apple – Adam L. Penenberg in Fast Company
  
• Barnes & Noble unveils largest ebookstore
• Some Thoughts on the Anthology – A Working Library
  

  Among the many complaints made about the shift from reading on paper to reading on screen, perhaps the most common-and most difficult to counter-is that we are moving from a medium that requires concentration to one that sows distraction into every syllable. This complaint assumes that the act of flitting from one reading to the next is necessarily inferior; but what if that were not always the case?

• Possible ou probable? – Video of a future scenario for the book itself
• Amazon’s Orwellian deletion of Kindle books- Boing Boing
• Universities Turn to Kindle Sometimes To Save Paper – NYT Green Inc. blog
• Jeff Bezos on NPR’s On Point
• NPR Books: June 26, 2008 – “Chinese fiction writers are using the Internet as a way to reach and entertain their readership”
• Comparison of eBook devices (also here)
• Devices from Wikipedia
  

  Prominent examples include:
  * Plastic Logic (2010)[8]
  * txtr by the German start-up txtr (to be presented in the Oct 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair)[9][10]
  * Cybook Opus by Bookeen (August 2009)
  * Readius foldable eBook reader by Polymer Vision (Will never release due to bankrupt)[11]
  * COOL-ER ereader by Interread (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 SW by iRex (2009)
  * Kindle 2 by Amazon (2009)
  * Sony Reader PRS-700 by Sony (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 by iRex (2008)
  * Sony Reader PRS-505 by Sony (2007/8)
  * Kindle by Amazon (2007)
  * Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)
  * Hanlin eReader by Jinke (distributed as “Lbook” in Estonia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine as “BeBook” in Europe; also distributed by Pixelar) (2007)
  * Wattpad (2006) for Mobile Java devices and other mobile phones
  * Sony Reader PRS-500 by Sony (2006)
  * iLiad by iRex (2006)
  * Librié by Sony (2004)

• iPhone as eReader – Lexcycle
  

  Lexcycle today announced that more than 2 million users have downloaded Stanza, the popular electronic book reader application for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch, since it was launched one year ago. Stanza’s award-winning reading experience, which features customizable formatting, searching, library management and over-the-air book downloads on demand, has led to more than 12 million book downloads.
  These milestones highlight that many people are quite comfortable reading full length books via Stanza on their iPhones and iPod touch.

• Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader? – ReadWriteWeb
• Why Apple’s iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product – Seeking Alpha

• Paul Graham on the "social norm" problem with the Segway – This is a point I made in my interactions column "Some Different Approaches To Making Stuff" – Kamen is the genius who got it wrong, because he focused only on technology and not on culture and behavior.

  "The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.

  My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled version, the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: "Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

  Why do Segways provoke this reaction? The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough."

• Like Nike+ for happiness, iPhone app is data collection for PhD thesis – "At repeated periods throughout the day you'll be pinged by your iPhone either by email or by SMS, and prompted to answer a short one-minute survey. This one asks how happy you are, what you're doing (yes, "making love" is an option, though hopefully it's an activity you'd prioritize over doing some science) whether you exercised recently, whether you're alone, who you're talking to and what you're thinking about." Essentially a "beeper study" but somehow a more viral story ("iPhone"!) than normal.
• 'True Blood' Beverage – "Inspired by HBO's hugely successful vampire drama series, True Blood, Omni Consumer Products struck a deal with the network's licensing division to releasing 'Tru Blood' the actual beverage..a drinkable product inspired by a beverage meant to taste like blood so that fake vampires from a pay-cable TV show can survive without having to resort to feasting on humans."

People always ask us, “how do you find the people for your projects?”

Figuring out how to identify appropriate people to interview for a project is all-important. For Reading Ahead, we know we need people who are active readers. What constitutes an “active reader?” We’re defining it as people who read books at least three times a week, in multiple locations. We want people who are engaged in the behavior at a level where they will have lots of experiences from which to draw. We also know that we want to look at how people’s behavior changes/doesn’t change/is supported by/is influenced when reading books in print vs. reading eBooks using a device.

When we have established the criteria for participating in the research, we typically use a specialized recruiting company to find people. We write a screener, which has a series of specific questions to identify people who meet our criteria.

Screener excerpt, Reading Ahead project, 2009

Finding the right people can be quite complex, and for some projects, we’ve written screeners that are more than 10 pages long. If we’re looking for people who do activities X and Y, in locations 1, 2, and 3, but have never done activity Z-well, you get the idea!

In this project, the criteria are simpler, and we’ll be doing our own recruiting. In fact, if you’re in the Bay Area and an avid reader or Kindle user, let us know and maybe we can talk with you!

Update: We put together a representative screener that is formal enough to be given to a recruiting firm, even though we aren’t doing that for Reading Ahead. You can download it here.

We’re very excited here at Portigal Consulting to announce the start of a new self-funded project–Reading Ahead.

In Reading Ahead, we’ll be exploring the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective–what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and beyond.

Over the course of the project, we’ll be blogging both about how we work and what we see and learn.

Steve Portigal (left) and Dan Soltzberg, project kickoff, July 27, 2009

Understanding our client
One of the first steps in any project is figuring out what the project is really about. So the first piece of research we do is often focused on our client.

As we work with our clients to establish the scope and approach of a project, we also interview key stakeholders in their organization to better understand what they know and what they need to know. (This doesn’t always map to what they think they know and what they think they need to know, and it’s important to suss out the differences.) These interviews help us understand the dynamics of the team and the organizational culture.

In this case, we’re our own client, so we sat down and asked each other some fundamental questions

• What is it we want to know that we don’t know now?
  
• What are we going to do with what we learn?
  
• What are the people, places, things, behaviors, etc. that we think we want to focus on.
  
• How broadly or tightly do we want to draw the scope of the exploration (at least at the outset-this can change as the project moves forward). In this case, to what extent might we want to be looking at bigger categories like content, entertainment, free time?

The way we answer these project definition questions will have a huge affect on how the work unfolds. As in most projects, we’ll be looking for the sweet spot that is constrained enough to give the project a clear focus but open enough to leave room for the unexpected.

• UK teen sex education pamphlet emphasizes sex sex as healthy and pleasurable rather than warning about disease – "Health officials are trying to change the tone of sex education. The new pamphlet, called "Pleasure," has sparked some opposition from those who believe it encourages promiscuity among teens in a country that already has high rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases."

  Regardless of what you think of this morally, politically, etc., it's a powerful example of reframing a discussion and challenging closely-held beliefs in order to innovate.

• Slides and audio posted for “Well, we did all this research … now what?” at BayCHI – BayCHI has relaunched podcasts and my recent BayCHI talk is among the first to be posted. You can listen to the audio, or you can watch the slides with embedded audio."Steve Portigal introduces a framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of a customer's unmet needs."

In addition to the summary posted last week, BayCHI has now posted the presentation from my recent talk, “We did all this research … now what?”

Audio

Keith Rayner ([email protected]) has put together a detailed summary of last month’s BayCHI presentation featuring Kate Rutter and I each sharing our approaches for going from research to design. Hit the link for the whole review, but here’s an excerpt:

In a fascinating, interactive pair of presentations on product and services design, the audience gained valuable insights into design thinking and the design process. Both presenting companies, Adaptive Path and Portigal Consulting, help companies with the design process for product and services creation and improvement. The session dispelled any notion that these companies work in an intellectual ivory tower, remote from their clients. We saw how their methodologies effectively engage a client in the process, and how the design concepts get pushed through to final product creation. As an added bonus the audience got to join in, be creative and become part of the design process ourselves.
…
Steve is often asked by clients to help designers determine what’s going on with their products and services and find out what the future holds. For Steve, conducting research and turning field data into insights consists of two main aspects:

• Synthesis – turning field data into insights
• Ideation – turning insights into solutions

I’ll be running a half-day version of this workshop at EPIC later this summer as well a shorter version to be held in an East Coast city late fall (TBA).

• BusinessWeek looks at how Steelcase went from user research data to insights to opportunities – "But most innovations depend on nontraditional research methods—ethnographic studies, customer-created collages, and so on—that can't easily be sliced and diced in Excel. That means synthesis can be one of the most challenging steps in the innovation process." This is an issue I'll be addressing in my upcoming workshop at EPIC 2009 "Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities"
• The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies – Not technically a museum (or even an Internet museum) as they've really just aggregated images that represent tools and ways of working that have or are in the process of obsoleting.

My latest interactions

column, Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design? has just been published.

Our client had the right idea-get feedback on something unfinished in order to improve the finished product. Unfortunately, aspects of the object were so unfinished that people were unable to make the leap from the prototype (excuse me, appearance model) to the real thing, and the outcomes shifted away from usability and aesthetics toward high-level concept validation. Given that, there’s always the opportunity to create something specifically to provoke people around the deeper issues we want to explore.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Be sure to read Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research? as well.

Related: Steve Portigal speaks at User Research Friday – Design and Research, Ships in the Night?

Other articles

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

My EPIC 2009 workshop Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities is now open for registration. It takes place September 1 in Chicago.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of ethnography in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. How can designers and researchers work with ethnographic data to create new things for business to do?

Participants in this workshop will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.

This workshop is a lot of fun to lead and, as we’ve heard, fun and informative to participate in. Earlier this year it sold out at Interaction 09, and was enthusiastically received in its abbreviated format at San Francisco’s Interaction09 Redux and BayCHI.

Hope to see you there!