It’s great to see an awareness of user experience popping up in humble, low-tech places. Grabbing an apple yesterday, I discovered the small arrow pictured below at the top of the sticker, telling me exactly how to get the label off my fruit. Delightful. No apple under my fingernails on this one.

User Interface

And last week, I had another fruit-related experience that, while not as unequivocally positive, was still thought-provoking.

I poured myself a bowl of cereal-no raisins. Looked all through the plastic liner bag-no raisins. Figured I had defective cereal. Then I noticed a little yellow callout on the box-“Stay Fresh Fruit Pouch Inside Box.”

Sure enough, there it was at the bottom of the box-a silver foil pouch full of raisins. The experience promised by Health Valley on the pouch: eternally fresh, plump raisins and my choice as to the cereal/raisin ratio for each bowl.

Custom Cereal

While I still think I prefer having my cereal pre-mixed and ready-to-pour, I do appreciate the concept of this approach-the appeal to freshness and personal tailoring. Though I’d suggest that Health Valley do a better job calling attention to their packaging system, so that people don’t have to go through the same terrible moment of perceived raisinlessness that I did.

I’ll be in London for the first half of September, and Peter Merholz

will be in town for a few days as well. We’ll be having a meetup on September 4th (coordinated by Andrew Harder, thanks so much), at John Snow at 19:00.

Looking forward to it!

Update: event is listed on Upcoming.

My latest Core77 Broadcast is up; I speak with Will Tschumy and Chris Bernard who recently joined Microsoft as User-Experience Evangelists. Steve says check it out.

They suck for us, the people who respond to them. Who wants to participate in something like this? (recorded after my conversation with a United rep to resolve the ticket cancellation I blogged the other day)

It’s not unusual at the conclusion of conversational bit of research (something interactive, interpersonal, and listening) for the person being interviewed to thank the person running the interview…at first you might think “you’re thanking ME? But I got great info from you…” but the fact is that an interview done well is a pleasure to participate in.

These surveys aren’t really interested in you; they’ve already forced you to think and respond in a completely unnatural and awkward fashion.

Sure, surveys do have their place and I’m being pejorative here only to highlight the bad user experience being created by this sort of research.

dux07 has just been announced.

DUX (Designing for User eXperiences) Chicago, November 5-7, 2007

Social media and networks are producing a new set of expectations regarding people’s ability to contribute, create, personalize, and share information.

I think the theme is very timely. I’m also not sure how interested I am in it, and given that my last DUX experience was not quite satisfactory, I’ll have to keep this in the maybe pile.

Here is a link to a podcast page for my recent talk at Adaptive Path’s UXWeek.

Effective user research requires both observation and interviewing. When doing research we strive to get outside our own default expectations and perceptions, in order to better see the details of what we’re looking at, in other words, to understand the cultural context. This third component is the most crucial to innovation. Interesting things happen when we leave our homes and our comfort zone, perhaps in another country where business, language, food, and more is beyond our own frames of reference.

Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, offers expert tips in both observation and interviewing, and considers the challenges and opportunities in conducting research abroad. He believes that one way to better understand a different culture is to look at how things in your own culture are handled differently. He gives some examples of how some things are promoted differently in Japan than in the United States. He states that mundane observations reveal important cultural differences.

Here are the slides

I’ll be curious how others fare; I couldn’t get it to go past slide 6, although I could go to the end and page backwards. I’ve reported a bug and hope it gets fixed, but since it’s just been launched and getting some buzz, who knows. I re-uploaded and replaced it with a version that works. They are working on tracking down the problem with the last version.

We did an unplanned meal shopping thing at Safeway the other day – went in for that night’s meal, thinking “let’s get some fish, and maybe some vegetables.” We check out the fish and choose Dover Sole, relatively bland. We think about some spices and I go off to the spice aisle for something from Zatarains or whoever has that silhouetted dancing chef (anyone?), but then we see this pretty cool display right in front of our noses (there’s so much crap on display in these stores that I guess we tend to look past it when possible) – a variety of spices and marinades.

The fish-prepping man was incredibly nice, very genial, and asked lots of questions as he prepared our food (“how spicy do you like it?”, etc.). We could get the spices on the fish, or on the side. He pointed out another flavor they had but didn’t have room for in the display. We went from ingredients to meal with an enjoyable and custom bit of service (yeah, you can buy flavored/spiced fish and chicken, already done, but this was done at that moment, just for us).

Of course, there were no ingredients on these containers and if you’ve ever read the packages on marinades and flavoring spices you’ve probably noticed the ridiculous amount of salt they contain. We usually comparison shop at length until we find something that is not going to drown us in NaCl. Well, as you can imagine, the fish was spicy and really really really really salty. Each bit was like someone held your tongue with a pair of tongs and held a container of free-running salt above your head for a full minute.

Interestingly, I don’t blame Safeway for that. I take responsibility – caveat emptor – for purchasing a likely-to-be-salty product without finding out more. I compliment Safeway for providing a value-added experience (with the quality of the service – the human – really making it work). I guess we won’t do that next time, and will take the prep burden back on ourselves.

also: I thought the design of the marinade dispensers was kinda cool, allowing you to measure and presumably prevent overpouring.

Strange sign seen near the UXWeek hotel in D.C. Fractured Prune is a strange name for a donut shop (I mean shoppe). Their website explains how they named the chain after Prunella Shriek, a female athlete (sometimes injured) and landowner from the 1800s. But more interesting (as if the story of Prunella isn’t jaw-dropping in and of itself) is that “Here’s the fun part — you pick the toppings, glazes and sugars for your donuts!” from choices such as

* GLAZES
honey, banana, chocolate, maple, strawberry, raspberry, peanut butter, mocha, mint, cherry, lemon, orange, blueberry, mixed berry, caramel
* TOPPINGS
rainbow sprinkles, chocolate sprinkles, coconut, peanuts, Oreo cookie, mini chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs
* SUGARS
powdered, granulated, cinnamon/sugar

and resulting in a wild array of interesting combinations:

Peppermint Patty
Mint / Mini Chips

Blueberry Hill
Blueberry / Powdered Sugar

Trail Mix
Banana / Nuts / Coconut / Jimmies

Who knew? I just saw a strange logo and an old deli being torn down. Looks like an interesting version of a familiar product, with customization as an easy but powerful tool for reinvention. I would bet it’s a pretty fun experience, too.

Notes from my UXWeek session are online (not sure how helpful they are without hearing me talk through the issues, (Update: you can hear me talk through the issues here) but if you want to, check out Dan Saffer’s notes or the notes from the wiki.

Hawai’i makai/mauka signs
different orientation toward navigation: toward mountain, toward ocean
difference in how we move through space

so what?
mundane observations reveal differences in cultural needs or drivers

Michael gave one of the keynotes today at UXWeek. He is a great storyteller with a wonderful self-deprecating style (that somehow combines with an amusing cynicism about some of those around him; but yet he’s genuine in it all). His talk essentially focused on his learning moment(s) as a designer around being user-centered.

He took on a pro-bono project to rename/rebrand/create a logo/etc. for a project to redo decrepit libraries in NYC schools. In a post-modern fashion, he presented his deliverables for that client in a dry and critical tone, mocking his own “big ideas” in a way that made it clear he no longer sees them as big ideas any longer. It was an interesting line to skate, there is always bullshit and performance in trying to convince someone that a new idea (or a trite idea, brought in for the first time, etc.) is a valid one, and it’s easy to present the same idea as genius or crap depending on the tone of voice. Listen to some old Bob Newhart recordings for a concrete example (Tob-acco… er, what’s tob-acco, Walt? It’s a kind of leaf, huh?… and you bought eighty tonnes of it?!!… Let me get this straight, Walt… you’ve bought eighty tonnes of leaves?… This may come as a kind of a surprise to you Walt but… come fall in England, we’re kinda up to our…).

Bierut’s ideas were completely inappropriate and indicated how poorly he understood the problem. The client took him out to see the libraries, and he got it. Instantly, and hugely. And the design work that he and many others collaborated one was wonderful. Framed as a story about his own failures, it’s actually a story about success. But the framing is what makes the telling of the story so genius.

Bierut gave his client a new treatment for the library. In a funny PowerPoint build he went from
Library
to
Library!
to
L!brary
to
L!brary

He planned to deliver a full specification document indicating fonts and treatment and all the rest, but in the interim, the client took control over the logo and started using it whatever way they wanted. He realized that this was okay, and that the cultural (and indeed design) benefits outweighed any super-specification desire he might have projected on them.

One awesome and obvious (in hindsight) example of this dawning user-centered perspective was in how Michael and his team referred to these different libraries being designed. Before meeting the librarians, he referred to them by the architect (i.e., the Peter Arkle (sp!) library) but afterwards he learned that it was referred to as “Vince’s library” – a classic user research insight – different groups call things by different names, revealing their underlying use model!

Five things he learned
1. Innovation is overrated*
2. You get power by giving away power
3. The real opportunity may be outside your scope of work
4. Consistency does not equal sameness
5. Take care of the experience and the brand will take care of itself

The “innovation” comment was challenging and Ryan Freitas

asked about it. Bierut added that “innovation has never been a profound motivator for me…design has to work within conventions to work.” Seems like we’re approaching the I-word with some different things in mind. Bierut felt he started off being too “clever” – which I hear as new for new’s sake – and that wasn’t the right thing to do. I don’t think innovative means shocking, obviously new, different, and all that. I think innovation can be invisible and brilliant and seamless to adapt to, with that whiff of exhaled “ooh!” that happens afterwards. To a graphic designer, the word may mean something else.