observations & insights

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2010-09-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

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A day worth blogging about

2010-03-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be invited to "Made in India." a lecture put on by Carlos Teixeira at Parsons School of Design. The reason I had that good fortune was by the grace of Sonia Manchanda of Idiom, my collaborator and co-curator for the workshop series at EPIC 2010.

The lecture was fascinating. It was the first in a series related to Carlos' current project, to understand how Design is developing in emerging markets. Of particular interest is his observation that Design is developing differently in those markets. The lecture put facts to that observation. Much of their recent work at Idiom has been in the "design of business," through a collaboration with The Future Group, a company dedicated to bringing to the masses what only the rich had before, through a fusion of modern retail business models with Indian culture.

Idiom and Future Group take a particularly aggressive approach to scenario and prototype testing, quickly turning out realistic concepts for introduction to real users in real situations. Some of their innovations include BigBazaar, a big box food retailer that incorporates the local seasonal vendors that Indian communities have come to rely on, and Home Town, a Home Depot / IKEA mashup that makes home design and construction available in a cultural context that does not do DIY.

But that's not all, earlier in the day, I spoke briefly with a collection of the brightest minds working at the intersection of ethnography and business from Latin America, the US and Europe, some of whom are old friends and some I hope will be. That call was to begin the planning process for the EPIC 2010 program, for which I'm the workshop co-chair. Here's a secret: the papers deadline is going to be extended. If you're so inclined, submit something... There's still time.

Working backwards, I spent the morning doing secondary research on the current state of the Healthcare IT arena here in the U.S. and identifying opportunities for innovation in software and services. I found some inspiring new work and personalities like Dr. Jay Parkinson, a physician entrepreneur whose own pediatric practice has been described as

"Geek Squad with doctors and a Netflix-priced monthly membership subscription fee — it is a branded healthcare “experience” that mixes “concierge service for all,” with house/office calls and web visits via email, IM, video chat, and text messaging."

This is why I love what I do... It was a good day.

Friction, Reach and Social Network Dynamics

2009-03-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

A recent Economist article profiles Dr. Robin Dunbar's research into social circles and extrapolates her findings to current social networking behavior.

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis...

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively.

The author concludes that as particpants we are not "networking" exactly, but "broadcasting our lives to an outer tier of acquaintances" more efficiently than ever before.

Though the extended reach that online social networks provide may not change the physiological limitations on how we relate to each other, the increased familiarity this reach engenders with those in our outer tiers may change the dynamics of our social groups over time, destabilizing them and reducing the friction inherent in moving from one tier to another.

Full Article: Primates on Facebook

The Death and Life of Journalism

2009-03-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Outlining the current and future state of the news media. Some great lessons here on organizational vs. entrepreneurial innovation and strategic focus.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky's article is a solid analysis of the evolution of the news media. In particular, I like the points he makes about the dynamics of the old-guard enterprise re: innovation.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.

Then he paints a picture of how 'the journalism we need' will exist in the future, brought into being by the former consumers of corporate journalism.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Old Growth Media and the Future of News
Steven Johnson offers a complimentary outlook on the future of the news. He points out some of the sources of the new journalism, and how user needs may be better served by the new model.

I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.

...and offers the suggestion that the news media shift to a curatorial function, editing and endorsing the best of what the web already provides, and focusing journalistic effort on what it may be more challenging to cover.

Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been.

Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce.

Overall, both articles are required reading. The effect of the current economic situation on the news media has accelerated the evolution that the web began and the speed of change in this industry provides rare glimpse into how innovation really happens.

Hulu, Boxee, and the threat of user experience

2009-03-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

I've been following the developing Hulu/Boxee situation closely because I believe the real issue here is one of user experience. In case you haven't been following along:

...two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.

Full Post: the Hulu situation

That good faith didn't last for long:

Early this morning, Boxee rolled out a workaround that let Boxee users watch Hulu shows again, which they haven’t been able to do since last month when Hulu pulled its shows off Boxee’s browser. Late this afternoon, Hulu squelched that workaround.

Full Article: All Things Digital

If you are in the business of serving web video content, why block one particular browser, one that could potentially be your largest channel? Because, when it comes down to it, Boxee provides a superior user experience for watching internet TV, superior, quite possibly to watching regular TV. In fact, Boxee, and it's brethren could very well be the tipping point in the great public switch to internet television. The networks apparently agree:

Why does the TV industry need to keep Web video off your big-screen TV? Not because it hates technology. But because it hasn't figured out how to make money off Web video yet -- and needs you to keep watching TV on your TV.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker all but admitted as much in a keynote this morning: "What we’ve lost in viewers and advertising dollars on the analog side isn’t being made up for at all on the digital side. We want to find an economic model that makes sense."

Full Article: Silicon Alley Insider

Television is being tivoed all over again.

Empathy is the new black

2009-03-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

It's good to see empathy making the rounds in the business publications again.

The key to delivering a great experience for is to have empathy for your customers. And the best way to develop that empathy is obvious, yet it requires constant repeating: Go to them. It's shocking how many methods companies have for learning about customers (surveys, focus groups, phone questionnaires), and how hesitant they are to engage in the simplest approach. I suspect its because they're afraid of what they'll find when engaging customers directly, and prefer to hide behind the reports and charts those other techniques produce, and which provide endless opportunities for interpretation.

Full Article: Harvardbusiness.org

It's become fashionable in the last decade to prescribe innovation as the cure for every ill facing business. If companies could only start creating compelling products and services on a regular basis, they would never need to worry about next year's growth figures. While that might be true, such talk tends to focus on design or even flashy marketing. In the process, a critical factor gets left out of the conversation: empathy, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another person. Unless new products or services connect with the lives of real people, design or marketing can't do much to make them succeed.

Full Article: BusinessWeek

Memory Is More Important that Actuality

2009-03-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

In the latest Interactions Magazine there is a piece by Don Norman on the tendency for people to minimize the bad and amplify the good when remembering an experience. From the article:

Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson identify three different aspects of an experience: “rosy projection,” “dampening,” and “rosy retrospection.”
Rosy projection: “the tendency for people to anticipate events as more favorable and positive than they describe the experience at the time of its occurrence”;
Dampening: “the tendency for people to minimize the favorability or pleasure of events they are currently experiencing”;
Rosy retrospection: “the tendency for people to remember and recollect events they experience more fondly and positively than they evaluated them to be at the time of their occurrence."

This struck a chord in my memory, a couple actually. Doblin Group's Compelling Experiences framework (bottom of the page, PDF download) and Adaptive Path's The Long Wow approach to Customer Loyalty both start from a similar experience model. The thing that strikes me as novel about the Norman piece is not it's psychological underpinnings, but his advice for designers:

Design for memory. Exploit it. Make sure there are reminders of the good parts of the experience: Photographs, mementos, trinkets. Make sure the experience delights, whether it be the simple unfolding of a car’s cup holder or the band serenading departing cruise-ship customers. Accentuate the positive and it will overwhelm the negative.

It's difficult to accept the notion that there is something more important than the quality of the experience as it happens, but it's a compelling argument. To embrace this thinking, we need to put more focus on prototyping tools and techniques that allow us to enact experiences for people in addition to those which explain experiences to them. Then we need more analytical focus on the understanding the aftereffects of these experiences on the people who engage in them.

Full Article: Interactions Magazine

Ethnography is not an in-home interview

2009-03-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

Grant McCracken provides a case on how the new Tesco US stores are underperforming expectations, and where the blame may lie.

Ethnography is good at the following things.
it is good at picking up the telling detail. And yes, you want to be in someone's home to do this. Or at point of purchase. Or where the product gets consumed.

it is good an embracing point of view, so that we see all the details at once. This is the "holistic" approach for which anthropological is in the social sciences famous.

it is good at seeing the topic from several (and collective) points of view, the client's, the consumer's, the various members of the household, family, neighborhood, city, etc. This is the cultural point of view. And it looks as if Tesco entirely missed this entirely.

it is good at dollying back from fine details to an ever larger picture so that we see the product, or innovation, or opportunity in successively broaders contexts. This is the strength of the big management consulting houses like McKinsey. What they lack in ethnographic nuance and cultural understanding, they make up in the construction of a powerful strategic picture.
The irony: when we define ethnography as interviews done in-home, almost all of this potential value is lost.

Full post: This Blog Sits at the…

Industry trends in prototyping

2009-03-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Dave Cronin of Cooper put together a nice overview of the current thinking on prototyping in interaction design, both the rationale creating them and the forms they may take.

In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ways of representing interactivity—not just the form but also behavior.

Full Article: Adobe - Developer Center

Patterns in UX Research

2009-03-02T20:52:00.000-08:00

Steve Baty illustrates 10 common patterns found in user research data. Knowing what to look for can help you see the forest and the trees, but it can also make everything look like a forest.

One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.

Full article: UX Matters

Laura Barton meets Gillian Tett | On the money

2009-03-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times, on the causes of the credit crisis and how her training in anthropology helped her predict our current dilemma more than two years ago.

I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,' she reasons. 'Firstly, you're trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don't do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

Full Article: The Guardian

Some thoughts on Frames and Interaction Design

2009-02-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

Michael Angeles brings my attention to David Malouf's latest post on language and interaction design.

In "The language we use," David Malouf discusses how ideas about user interaction can become so ingrained in what we are familiar with, that our language begins to reflect that familiarity.

It strikes me that a useful thinking tool on this topic may be the concept of Frames. I became aware of Frames, when Cognitive Psychologist George Lakoff popularized the idea in his book, Don't Think of an Elephant. However, the idea predates his use of it by 20 years, going back to 1974 and Sociologist Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

A simplistic description is that a frame is the subjective definition someone may assign to a situation and as such relies on the past experiences, culture and language that person uses for interpretation. Applying this to Dave's post, the "click" frame was being subconsciously applied by the student, based on his own past experiences with interactive technology, and this was limiting the range of imaginable solutions the student could devise to the problem.

Dave's suggestion for how to overcome this challenge is a good one:

...you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

In addition to a little critical self-analysis, I'd add a technique I learned early in my training as a designer. Try to consciously re-frame the problem at hand. It's not a pencil, it's an instrument for writing. It's not a post-it, it's a portable reminding device. It's a simple technique but it can shake loose the subconscious frames that limit your thinking.

What is ethnography and how does it aid customer understanding?

2009-02-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

Simon does a wonderful job here describing the value of ethnography, getting past the typical arguments re: depth of understanding (where most explanations stop) to explain the enduring business value of the models of human experience that can result.

But perhaps the most significant advantage of high-calibre ethnographic work is derived not from its academic legacy, but more directly from its recent history as a business tool. Most of the pioneers of applied ethnography developed approaches that were tailored to innovation, decision-making and production processes. In practice, the focus on building models is what realises an ethnographic programme’s value to a business. A model can be applied to issues that weren’t part of the original research brief, and it can be updated and extended long after the original research programme has ended.

Full article: MyCustomer.com

How to Keep Innovating

2009-02-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

Bill Buxton on cultivating your inner learner. Great advice for designers.

1. Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
2. You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
3. When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
4. Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
5. Remember: You can learn from anyone.

via: BusinessWeek

Teaching kids about engineering

2009-02-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

Michelle Levesque, an engineer at Google, puts together a very nice overview of "what is (security) engineering" for elementary school kids. For most of the presentation, Engineer could be swapped out with Designer.

Thursday and Friday there are hundreds of kids coming to Google for National Engineering Week and somehow I got roped into giving the big tech talk to all of them. (I have to learn to stop doing that whole 'volunteering' thing.) So how do you keep 100 middle school children entertained for an hour while you talk about the ultra-snore topic of What It's Like to Be An Engineer?

via: Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

2009-02-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

A straight-forward and clear overview of the major components of analysis for experience design. A must read.

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its major sub-techniques.

Full Article via: Designing For Humans

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles

2009-02-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

A good litmus test for your life and work, particularly in the current economic environment.

1. Work on something that matters to you more than money.
2. Create more value than you capture.
3. Take the long view.

via: O'Reilly Radar continued in this Video Interview with Tim O'Reilly.

Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff

2009-02-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

Emerging criticism on what the author hopes will not be called postpostmodernism.

It strikes me as the apotheosis of a new category of critical discourse that, for better or worse, has been slowly congealing over the past few years via such various modalities as LOL cats, Vice magazine do’s and don’ts, flame wars, douchebaggery and douche bags as a widely recognized species, text messaging, sock puppeteering, YouTube karaoke, intensely and disturbingly self-referential video art, and so on.

via: PopMatters | Marginal Utility

How the Crash Will Reshape America

2009-02-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

Richard Florida's counterpoint to David Brooks' piece on the American unshakable desire for a suburban/exurban liefstyle.

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

via: The Atlantic Online

I Dream of Denver

2009-02-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

Looking for an academic exploration of the suburban/exurban experience a la Learning from Las Vegas. Suggestions?

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They’ll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community — and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option.

via: NYTimes

Journey To The Center Of Design

2009-02-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

Quoting Whitney Hess paraphrasing Jared Spool on the growing inadequacy of hard-line user centered design philosophy.

Last year at IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool declared that it was time for us to retire the dogma of user-centered design, citing that the most effective design teams don’t follow a specific methodology, but instead have a whole toolbox of techniques and tricks to use when the time is right.

view Jared's slides here: Journey To The Center Of Design

Old World Lessons for the Next-Gen Web

2009-02-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

Describing the trend toward specialized sites, one way to deal with the very real user experience problem of finding relevance in the information glut.

Whatever and whenever the next generation Web x.0 is labeled, it will have two defining traits. First, it will be more specialized. Second, it will be more editorialized. A large part of current behavior will continue. We'll still use large, incumbent, generalist sites like Google and eBay. But at the same time, there will be a movement toward more specialized sites as we seek a better balance between authoritative, expert-endorsed content and broad, less bounded user-generated information.

via: HarvardBusiness.org

WikiDashboard and the Living Laboratory

2009-02-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

More evidence on why the current techniques of user-centered design need an overhaul.

Artificially created environments such as in-lab studies are only capable of telling us behaviors in constrained situations. In order to understand how users behave in varied time and place, contexts and other situations, we need to systematically re-evaluate our research methodologies.

via: Augmented Social Cognition @ PARC

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

2009-02-19T11:53:00.000-08:00

Note to self: Get Supermemo

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

via: Wired

The No-Stats All-Star

2009-02-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

A really great article about excellence and measurement, and how the two often are not in sync.

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

via: NYTimes