Don’t forget, my upcoming Design Research Methods class is in 3 weeks. If you’re planning on signing up, you might want to do so sooner, rather than later, as registration is steadily filling up.
Hope to see you there!
Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows of the early Louis Cheskin work, a recent Stanford study established that the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes.
Expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.
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“We have known for a long time that people’s perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price,” said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
When we worked with a wine brand recently, we sought to understand the complete wine “usage” process, from planning, through shopping, to storage, to opening, to serving and drinking. We looked specifically at people who were interested in lower-priced wines and most of them were limited in their knowledge and/or experience.
In other categories when the customer is new and is presented with enormous product choice (the amount of wine choice dwarfs most other categories I can think of) we might feel sympathetic for the learning/selection/usage learning curve they would face; with wine people spoke very enthusiastically about the journey. Each trial experience involved drinking wine…something they liked to do! A social, tasty, and rewarding experience. Even a wine they “didn’t care for” (the typical critique) wasn’t a failure, because it still carried all the symbolic meaning.
The marketers were hampered by a limiting view of their customers; the market had been sliced into ridiculously narrow price points and this inevtiably drove discussions of people characterized exclusively within those $3 slots (as in, “I’m a $7.99 to $10.99 drinker”). While our client no doubt had cash register data to support their segmentation, it was completely at odds with how people saw themselves. They purchased across a much broader price range, and their primary concern was their own knowledge and accumulated experience. We were given a great opportunity to offer this different view and illustrate some of the unmet opportunities this presented.
Registration is now open for the full-day Design Research Methods class that I’ll be teaching. It’s a full-day event on Saturday March 1, 2008 in at Involution Studios in Sunnyvale, CA. Not local to the Bay Area? Well, why not hop on a plane for the weekend?
This course will provide first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods. At its root, design research emphasizes learning about people and using the insights gained to inform and inspire design. We will focus on exemplary models of what research is, what it looks like, its role in concept generation, and what it produces.
From the official announcement:
The Involution Master Academy recently released its Winter 2008 semester for open registration. A post-secondary education program designed for mid-career professionals, Involution Master Academy focuses on direct, one-to-one interaction and training between the instructor and students. To ensure maximum interaction and an intimate educational setting, each course only accepts nine participants.
The Winter 2008 course schedule features five courses taught by well-known user experience thought leaders:
Product Architecture Symposium
Instructor Andrei Herasimchuk
Saturday February 23, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Design Research Methods
Instructor Steve Portigal
Saturday March 1, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Applied Empathy: An Experience Design Framework
Instructor Dirk Knemeyer
Saturday March 8, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Web Form Design Best Practices
Instructor Luke Wroblewski
Saturday March 15, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience
Instructor Lou Rosenfeld
Tuesday March 18, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Past courses have sold out. Given the small class sizes, you are
encouraged to register well in advance.
My first interactions column, Persona Non Grata, has just been published. In the article, I consider some of the fatal problems with personas and how they can hurt while pretending to help.
Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
See what else we’ve written about personas.
Other articles
Boiled down from a bullet-pointy Fast Company piece that is heavy on highlight but makes me hunger for details.
Get more people to tune in to Court TV
The key has been to think like a consumer-products marketer…create a clear identity for each network.
Research revealed that the viewers of Court TV’s prime-time shows include two main groups: mystery solvers, typically women ages 25 to 54 who enjoy piecing together a story to solve a problem, and “real engagers,” young men who like true stories that take them places they wouldn’t otherwise go.
[So,] change the name. Court TV evokes images of criminals. The channel will relaunch as truTV.
Before truTV debuts, Koonin will send researchers into the homes of target viewers to gather information, much as Intuit famously does with its software.
From our Design Research Methods class, some observations from an interviewing exercise.
The scenario was to conduct interviews in order to uncover opportunities in helping people to manage food, meals, nutrition, etc.
The question asked was
What are the challenges you face in meal preparation?
Of course, that question is flawed because it presumes that there are indeed challenges. This was evident when the respondent struggled with how to answer outside the frame of the question.
An alternative might be
Are there any challenges in meal preparation?
which is is more open-ended.
But better still is
What are your feelings about the experience of meal-preparation?
since it doesn’t put the label challenges into play. It would be important to understand the labels the person being interviewed places on the different aspects of their experience, and to use their terminology to probe further.
Also worth noting is that the original question came right off the sample interview guide I distributed. Sometimes the interview guide is a tool to document “questions you want answers to” rather than “questions you want to ask”; doing fieldwork involves a lot of translation back and forth between the two.
Recently I wrote about the importance of practicing our noticing and reflecting skills. A few weeks ago I read on MetaFilter about John Stilgoe “a professor at Harvard who teaches his students how to, among other things, mindfully observe the urban and suburban environments they inhabit.”
I bought his book Outside Lies Magic, and although the book itself is so-so, the introduction is passionately articulate about some of these same issues I’ve written about
It is a book about awareness in ordinary surroundings. It is a book about awareness that builds into mindfulness, into the enduring pleasures of noticing and thinking about what one notices.
I hope this book encourages each reader to widen his or her angle of vision, to step sideways and look at something seemingly familiar, to walk a few paces and see something utterly new.
The Dutch university of Wageningen has opened a restaurant of the future
that doubles as a research lab. Cameras and other data monitoring devices will help the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies “find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light,” said Rene Koster, head of the center, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.
“This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse,” he said. “The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn’t like it.”
From a control room, researchers can direct cameras built into the ceiling of the restaurant to zoom in on individual diners and their plates. They watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away.
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Koster said researchers can experiment with variables like noise, smells, furniture and food packaging. Is the same ham and cheese sandwich more appealing if it is wrapped in cellophane, under a glass cover or on offer in a vending machine?
They had already noticed that one table where the plastic chairs had pink flowery covers was always occupied.
Koster said observation is much better than questionnaires for consumer research as many choices are unconscious.
One week from tonight is the first class in the Design Research Methods that course I’ll be teaching at the Involution Master Academy in Sunnyvale, CA. If you’re thinking of signing up, don’t wait!
I hope to see some of you there.
On Tuesday nights from October 9 to November 13 I’ll be teaching a weekly two hour class, aimed at providing first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods.
This course is part of the Involution Master Academy (an educational program for experienced professionals in design and related fields) in Sunnyvale, CA. Class size is being kept quite small to make sure that participants get significant hands-on time with instructors. Registration opens today, so sign up soon!
Full Description
This course will provide first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods. At its root, design research emphasizes learning about people and using the insights gained to inform and inspire design. We will focus on exemplary models of what research is, what it looks like, its role in concept generation, and what it produces.
Students will develop their own design research philosophy, learn how to think about people, behavior, and culture, as well as the importance of being open to new perspectives. They will also learn tactical skills they can immediately put into practice: how to conduct observations and interviews, find research participants, and interpret and synthesize results as fodder for design and storytelling.
The schedule includes:
Week 1 – Introduction to Research
Week 2 – Methods and Research Planning
Week 3 – Problem Refinement, Interviewing & Fieldwork Planning
Week 4 – Analysis & Synthesis
Week 5 – Ideation
Week 6 – Presentation
Additional Involution Master Academy Courses:
Product Architecture Symposium
Instructor Andrei Herasimchuk
Saturday October 27, 2007
10:00 AM-6:00 PM
Strategic Influence by Design
Instructors Luke Wroblewski and Tom Chi
Saturday November 17, 2007
10:00 AM-6:00 PM