Portigal year in review, 2013
It’s time to sum up some of the noteworthy writings/happenings of the year. Let’s get to it!
- The highlight of the year was the publication of Interviewing Users, my first book! Check out reviews by Garrett Moon, QRCA Views Magazine, and Digital Anthropologist, as well as Goodreads and Amazon.
- Some book goodies online include: cover, foreword, excerpt, acknowledgements, FAQ, testimonials and images and diagrams.
- We had book fun celebrations, with book launch parties in New York and San Francisco.
- I co-organized and hosted the IxDA Student Design Challenge in Toronto and helped with the judging for the 2014 event.
- While we’ve only done one episode so far, Dave Gray and I (along with special guest Chris Reimer) did an online show called We Might Do A Show called We Might Swear
- It was a big year for speaking. I debuted a new workshop at Fluxible called The Designer is Present. I talked about (and led workshops in) Interviewing Users at Catapult Labs, Twitter, Yammer, Citrix, Mozilla, UX Week, MIMA Summit, UX Book Club DC, UX Book Club Philly, Rome UX Book Club, O’Reilly, IxDA NYC and IxDA Los Angeles/LA UX Meetup (slides, video).
- I spoke about Bad Ideas at the Silicon Valley IxDA, SVA’s Products of Design, SJSU Human Factors/Ergonomics Alumni Symposium and SXSW.
- I spoke about improv at Walmart, mobile research at PayPal, design-led innovation at TiE Silicon Valley and Skill Building for Design Innovators at TorCHI.
- I spoke about analyzing research data at UC Berkeley’s New Product Development class and about interviewing users SVA’s Interaction Design class in Research Methods.
- We gathered and shared a huge number of compelling user research War Stories (and are still looking for more).
- Around the blog, we examined social norms around taking pictures of your food, took umbrage at rescinded bonuses, the commoditization of innovation and inauthentic customer stories, considered the impact of activist avatar changes, and explored motivations for behavior change in customers.
- We found interesting sites like Awkward Chatbot and Does The Dog Die?
- We mused about design and meaning and form, self-referential products, socializing death, sex toy design, innovation as eevolution not revolution and the limitations of data.
- In globalization, we looked at the appeal of a Friends cafe in Beijing and importing lowrider culture.
- We found an amazing healthcare case study about sweeping cultural change that wholly reinvented the way services were conceived of and delivered.
- We looked at the role of pop culture and the Bieb specifically.
- In support of Interviewing Users we did interviews with Tomer Sharon, Denise Lee Yohn, Ethnography Matters, Huffington Post, Maish Nichani, Business 901, UIE Book Corner, UX Matters, 33 Voices, UX Magazine and the eLearning Coach podcast.
- We wrote extensively about user research and interviewing, with pieces about robot interviewers, self-reporting in the YouTube era, Harry Dean Stanton and silence, Marc Maron and listening, empathy, pattern-recognition, how body language changes you inside, an approach to interviewing without questions, eye contact or rapport, the art of the interview,
a curious way to get participants, how stories fuel listening and the dangerous power of the interviewer. - While we didn’t travel overseas this year (gasp!) we did get around and shared some of what we saw in Austin for SXSW, Baltimore, Kitchener-Waterloo, LA, Minneapolis, New York , and again, Portland, San Diego and Denver, Tampa, Toronto, and again.