Aline Ferreira, a sociologist who is studying UX and UX research, read Interviewing Users and summarized it in Portuguese (Planejamento e boas práticas de entrevista: o que aprendi com “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal or Planning and good interview practices: what I learned from “Interviewing Users”, by Steve Portigal).

Com uma linguagem simples e concisa, o livro de Portigal é excelente para o público iniciante em UX, assim como para os mais experientes.

O livro “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal, conta com dicas práticas sobre como entrevistar usuários em profundidade. Ele é excelente especialmente para aqueles que não têm muita experiência. Contudo, eu não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que seja um livro que contribui também com profissionais mais experientes.

Another year is speeding towards its conclusion and we wanted to share our highlights for 2011.

• We are joined by inveterate sing-talker, Tamara Christensen! Hooray!
• Steve is writing The Art and Craft of User Research Interviewing: Diving Deep for Insight to be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2012.
• Julie and Steve wrote several columns for interactions magazine: What To Expect When You’re Not Expecting It, Elevator Pitch, and Kilroy Was Here.
• We got our umbrage on about a Braun customer survey, Newegg’s gobbledygook customer communications, HP’s TouchPad advertising, Kimpton’s attempts at personalization, Facebook’s anti-empathetic approach to redesigns, Netflix’s user-blindness, web security questions, breast cancer memes, and irrelevant and badly executed cross branding.
• We kicked off the Omni project, examined how people completed everyday tasks in previous eras of technology, gained mucho insight from Nicolas Nova and Adrian Hon, and completed an extensive secondary research slash cultural audit.
• We drew inspiration from Haruki Murakami and Neil Peart.
• Steve was interviewed about the future of reading and digital books for Digital Book World and about interviewing users for the User Experience podcast.
• We reflected on consumption in general and information specifically, flow states in user research, muffin signifiers, hearing protection and customer service, nerds, recycling, gendered design and marketing, silliness at 76 stations, and MacWorld.
• Steve spoke about Discovering and Acting on New Insights at Lift11 (video and slides), Improv in Brainstorming at APDF, Successful Collaboration (slides) at Frontiers of Interaction, Best Practices For Interviewing Users at SXSW (slides and audio), Culture, User Research and Design at OCAD (slides and audio), We’ve done all this research, now what? at UCB and CHI2011 (slides), Uncovering Innovation From The Outside In at the UIE Web Apps Masters Tour, and User Research Analysis in a UIE Virtual Seminar (buy). He also taught full-day workshops including Spinning Data Into Gold (slides) with Rosenfeld Media, and Immersive Field Research Techniques (podcast) at UI16, and We’ve Done All This Research, Now What? at Unfinished Business (slides) and UX Hong Kong (slides).
• Julie presented Finding the Right People for the Center for Design Research at the University of Kansas (slides);
  Tamara co-presented Big Ideas, Focused Action, Problem Solved at the Oklahoma Creativity Forum (slides)
• We offered a design and experience critique about the One Day For Design experiment.
• Steve shared photographic observations from Geneva, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Florence and Lucca.
• Julie and Steve were out and about in New York (Julie, Steve), Boston, and Portland.
• Our blog (the place for debating/defending the design of really really nichey products, it would seem) turned 10 (yes, 10!)
• We redesigned our business cards around the theme of What’s Your Story and started a blog series to explain the stories behind the new designs (collect all six!)
• Steve began co-chairing the IxDA12 Student Challenge
• We doubled our office space, taking over an adjacent space that opened up in our complex. Kitchen! Couch! We’re living large!
• Not to mention like a bajillion quickies!

Really nostalgic? Check out summaries from 2010, 2009 and 2008.

2010 has been an amazing year for us. While we can’t talk about many of the incredible experiences we had doing fieldwork and working with clients, below are some of the highlights that we can share:

• New faces! Our team is ably enhanced by Julie Norvaisas and Wyatt Starosta (also see a conversation with Julie here)
• Steve shared observations of Austin/SXSW, SXSW again, Austin again, Munich, Rome, and gleaners at the Munich airport
• We noted symbols and meaning, branding in the details, the need for authenticity in marketing (and in jeans), and the need for something we’re calling anticipatory design,
• We took umbrage over ridiculous user experiences from United Airlines, airplanes and elevators, hotel elevators, conference badge design, a cupcake store, Lenovo, and a shaver out-of-the-box experience
• We mused about packaging and branding, conceptual collisions, neighborhood erosion, Harley branding dissonance, uncomsumption, localized stereotypes, super-immediate gratification, global norms for question asking, how research informs design, and this thing we call user “needs”
• We tracked provocative, charming and curious messaging, designs and user experiences from a cupcake store (by Steve; by Julie), a parking lot, toilets, Vodafone’s retail outline in Munich, building painters, JetBlue, what’s in the garage, foreign groceries, Devo, and the Savannah police
• We prototyped the ideal research study for Netflix (sadly, we never got the gig)
• We drew inspiration from Eminem, Will.i.am, Jack White, photographer Michael Schmidt, James Toback, fiction in the New Yorker, Douglas Coupland, and Neal Stephenson
• Steve assessed the human impact, micro and macro, of technology and design for interactions, extracted innovation principles from an discomfort-inducing ad for menstruation products for Core77, considered Homer Simpson and global culture for Core77, and interviewed Eric Ludlum (of Core77) for Ambidextrous
• Steve was interviewed for a book about innovation in design for emerging markets and in a podcast with Jared Spool about user interviewing best practices
• We interviewed ourselves for the premiere of Core77’s Wiretap feature
• Steve presented When Not To Follow User-Centered Design Techniques at HFES, Ethnography as a Cultural Practice at PARC, Skill Building for Design Innovators at CHIFOO, Culture, You’re Soaking In it at UPA 2010 in Munich, Integrating User Insight (with Aviva Rosenstein) at SXSW, and Deep-Dive Interviewing Secrets at a UIE Virtual Seminar
• Steve also lectured on improv and creativity for Seattle’s CHI group, Reading Ahead for Adobe and SCAD, innovation skills for Amazon, and synthesizing user research at the Austin Center for Design, Formation Design Group, CHI2010, University of Oregon, PDX IxDA, SF IxDA, and Interaction 10
• We attended November’s User Research Friday 10 and reflected on what we learned; we also led a Thursday workshop for User Research Friday and reflected on what we learned. We also attended last February’s User Research Friday 10 and reflected on what we learned
• Whew!

You can also see previous summaries from 2009 and 2008.

• Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? [The Consumerist] – Three years after the protests began, it seems Subway has finally listened to its customers and will start tessellating cheese on its sandwiches, according to what appears to be an internal weekly newsletter. As anyone who has gotten a Subway sandwich knows, most Subways layer their isosceles-cut cheese in an overlapping fashion. This means one side of the sandwich gets more cheese than the other and leaves pockets of zero cheese, resulting in a uneven flavor and texture distribution. As the newsletter says, "This will improve the cheese coverage on the sandwiches."
• Reading Lolita On Paper [graphpaper.com] – Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands. Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.
• Kno is a digital textbook that is about to change the way knowledge is transmitted and the way students learn – First we did our homework about the way students do their homework. We studied the way they study. We probed them about the best way to re-imagine the analog studying and reading experience in the digital world. The Kno’s two generous panels open like written material has opened for hundreds of years. The experience is reassuringly book-like. Indeed, because we respect and honor the textbook, content of 99 percent of all textbooks – including the charts and graphs – fit flawlessly. No material spills beyond the screen, so there’s no awkward scrolling or manipulation required. If Kno only transferred existing textbooks into a digital form, we might as well sleep in and skip class. Kno pushes further than that. Our mission is to create a new kind of immersive, fluid, fully-engaging learning experience – made possible because the power of the physical is combined, for the first time, with the potential of the digital. It’s a whole new form factor that feels natural because it is natural.
• Christina York’s sketched notes from UPA2010 – [Her summary of my presentation begins on slide 5] This was the perfect complement to Rachel Hinman’s opening keynote. Steve enthusiastically dives deeper into cultural clues, cues and gaps that impact our work and our own experiences in this world. In this session I sat at the front, which I usually don’t do (I like to observe the entire room). However, I am a fan of Steve’s and was like a groupie in the front row. How embarrassing. But Carol sat next to me, and I felt better about myself. Steve delivered an impassioned talk and engaged an audience that richly represented the cultures present at this conference. The group discussion was as rich as the presentation and I really appreciated that Steve’s focus was to give us something to think about and not try to ground everything in application.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Design Research [UX Booth] – Valiant attempt to take a complex volume of expertise and boil it down to some essentials. Not sure what it means to be a "luminary" in this field but certainly the company we're listed with is pretty awesome. Curious to hear what others have to say about this piece.

• Remixing Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets [Things On Top] – This remix of tweets from “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets”, a UIE virtual seminar by Steve Portigal, gives you some of the answers. I missed out on Steve’s webinar, unfortunately, and decided to check out what others had tweeted about it using the hashtag #uievs. Luckily, there had been lots of activity and discussion, and I felt that Twitter provided me with quite a comprehensive summary of Steve’s stunning insights in to interview techniques. For my own sake and for future reference, I decided to compile that Twitter timeline in to a short document.
• Remembrance of Candy Bars Past [WSJ.com] – These companies are the face of what the candy industry in America used to be. Each city or region had its own factories, and people could actually see and smell the place where their favorite sweets were made. Regional candies are a dying breed. Today, there are perhaps a dozen such concerns left in America. The rest have been swallowed up, or put out of business, by the massive consolidation that has shaped the modern confectionery industry. Thousands of candy bars have disappeared along the road to consolidation, including such recent delicacies as the peanut butter-and-chocolate pods known as Oompahs, the treacherously chewy Bit-o-Choc, the glorious, nougat-and-caramel-filled Milkshake, and the Bar None, an ingenious marriage of peanuts and wafers dipped in chocolate. Also gone (but not forgotten) is the curiously alluring Marathon Bar, a braided rope of chocolate and caramel whose wrapper featured a ruler on the back.

• The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2009 – A stupendous year-end review. Lots and lots and lots here.

Man, am I late to the party. I only just read “Blink” but it was more than 2 years ago when PeterMe wrote Everything You Need to Know About “Blink” Boiled Down Into 9 Words.

Snap judgments are valuable. Except when they are not.

I’d add 6 qualifying words: Hindsight is 20-20 in determining which.