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

• 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.

• UX guy complains about AA.com being crap and UX guy from AA.com responds – UX guy reprints email and then attempts to address corporate culture issue; strong opinions follow but most compelling part is the insight from the AA.com UX guy himself (known as Mr. X)

  "But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like."

• Health management goes for ethnic marketing/customization: Asians and diabetes – Rice is a carbohydrate that is particularly unhealthy in large quantities for people with diabetes. That's why doctors and other health care providers are increasingly trying to develop culturally sensitive ways to treat Asians with diabetes – programs that take into account Asian diets, exercise preferences and even personality traits. "Diabetes is primarily a self-managed disease, and you have to try multiple approaches with different patients. But many of those are not culturally appropriate for Asians."

Widget

During the 2008 Presidential election, colored cherries at this
Minneapolis airport bar let you indicate your political affiliation



Tooltip

Door lock at Hotel Blake, Chicago



Fixed layout

Raised ring in cup lid keeps stacked cups from slipping



Related posts: Interfaces IRL

Forcing function…

Animal Hospital with separate dog and cat entrances, Berkeley, CA

WYSIWYG…

Wallaby Yogurt container: Clear container lets the color and texture of the contents “create” the label



Related Posts:
Fair warning
Progress bar
Fruit 2.0

• Design Research Methods for Experience Design – Triading is a method that allows a researcher to uncover dimensions of a design space that are pertinent to its target audience. In triading, researchers present three different concepts or ideas to participants and ask them to identify how two of them are different from the third. Participants describe, in their own terms, the dimensions or attributes that differentiate the concepts. Participants follow this process iteratively—identifying additional attributes they feel distinguish two of the concepts from the third until they can’t think of any other distinguishing factors.

  The benefit of this process is that it uncovers dimensions of a particular domain that are important to the target audience rather than the researcher or designer. For example, participants may describe differences in groups as “warm” versus cold” or business-like” versus fun.” Designers can then use the most relevant or common dimensions as inspiration for further design and exploration.

• Mapping Oakland – Mapping Oakland is a research project aimed at mapping people’s perceptions of neighborhoods and urban space within the City of Oakland. Mental maps have been used in geography to understand individual perceptions of space and place for sometime. The method has proven useful in helping geographers understand how people perceive elements within the landscape for navigational purposes and to understand the cultural value of spaces. This web site provides citizens throughout Oakland access to a survey that measures how people perceive and use public open space in the City of Oakland.
• How ethnic groups change Oakland neighborhoods – When Robert Lemon, a UC Berkeley landscape architecture grad student, was a community planner in Columbus, Ohio, he noticed that despite the car-oriented landscape, residents of the city's Latino community, for the most part, liked to get around on foot and bicycle and, as a result, were bending the neighborhood to their collective will. Taco trucks and open-air produce markets popped up in vacant parking lots on one of the city's main shopping thoroughfares. The bicycle was a key mode of transportation even though there weren't dedicated bike lanes, and colorful murals appeared on the walls of large buildings. The neighborhood had the feel of small-town Oaxaca, the Mexican state from which many of the city's Latinos hailed.

  In California, he found similar changes occurring in Oakland's Fruitvale and Chinatown neighborhoods. He is conducting a formal survey as part of a fellowship & has gone through Oakland's diverse neighborhoods, walking up and down the streets asking questions.

• Paul Graham writes on "Why TV Lost" – Lots of interesting points in Graham's essay, but I found these two, about the underlying media component of many startups, and the temporal aspect of TV-watching especially thought-provoking: "Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks. That's what a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. People only have so many leisure hours a day, and TV is premised on such long sessions (unlike Google, which prides itself on sending users on their way quickly) that anything that takes up their time is competing with it."
• Where does Twitter go from here? – My post on Core77 about how Twitter can think about evolving its overall user experience as it straddles lead users and mass awareness
• Logic+Emotion: Skittles Smackdown, A Sociological Viewpoint – Nice words from David Armano, pulling out something I wrote yesterday about the Skittles/Twitter PR experiement

A few weeks ago I was driving to work and heard a story on NPR about an initiative to use cowboys to clear out the stray yet sacred cattle that roam the streets and marketplaces of New Dehli.

I thought the story was fascinating and wanted to post something about it, but I wasn’t sure which program or even which of several local NPR stations I’d been listening to.

When I did a quick search for the story, I couldn’t find it anywhere. What I did find was one of the best user experiences I’ve had on the Web.

Having trouble finding something? NPR can help you find a story or music you heard on an NPR program.

This was the promise on NPR’s Search page, but all I knew was the general topic of the story I was interested in, and the approximate time and location where I was driving when I heard it. I wasn’t too hopeful, but I filled out the search form anyway.

Three days later, I received this email (excerpted slightly):

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting NPR.

The piece you are referring to was aired on the public radio program Marketplace. Although heard on public radio, Marketplace is neither produced nor distributed by NPR.

Here is the link to the story you have requested: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/02/02/dehli_cowboys/.

For contact information, or to learn general information about the program, please visit http://marketplace.publicradio.org/.

Hats off to NPR for understanding that many of their customers need to engage in the kind of follow-up activity I was, and for creating a straightforward tool to help us get what we want from the experience.

It seems simple, but in so many cases, companies miss these opportunities completely, or offer solutions that don’t work so easily and elegantly.

Some cows I often pass on my way to work

As far as the Indian Cowboy story itself, I find the tradition-meets-attempt-at-purposeful-change aspect intriguing, as well as the way a whole business model has formed around these cows and the way they’re positioned in the culture.

They belong to thousands of unlicensed dairies around the city that make an estimated $120 million a year selling milk and yogurt. The owners of those dairies let the cattle forage for themselves, taking advantage of a Hindu custom of feeding cattle as a spiritual good deed.

It will be interesting to see how New Dehli’s attempts to alter this complex set of relationships plays out.

Fast Company describes how Alaska Airlines has been redesigning their check-in environment. Some nice bits of process to note

White assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. “Disneyland is great at this,” says Jeff Anderson, a member of White’s skunk works. “They have their people in all the right places.”

The team began brainstorming lobby ideas. At a Seattle warehouse, it built mock-ups, using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. It tested a curved design, one resembling a fishbone, and one with counters placed at 90-degree angles to each other. It built a small prototype in Anchorage to test systems with real passengers and Alaska employees.

It appears that Alaska had some obvious (and shared) design goals: increase throughput and reduce confusion. There’s a whole class of environmental redesign projects where the goals aren’t as clear. In those cases, there’s some generative research needed to understand what aspects of the overall experience could and should be different.

Portigal Consulting is covered in a recent cover article (Design an “Experience” for Users) in NIKKEI ELECTRONICS, January 28, 2008 vol. 970.

A large number of companies are seeking detailed information from end users that will hold clues for products offering a brand new experience. But for an idea to become reality, companies will have to discard any basic assumptions they already hold.

The magazine is print-only, and is in Japanese (link above is only to the article summary). If you’ve got a copy of the article and want to share, please let me know. We’d love to see the piece

and someday even find a translation.

Update: scans are posted here. Thanks, David!