I just came across this music video by Maltese rap band No Bling Show titled “Lucija u Samwel”. I was impressed at the quality (artistic merit aside which I also think is cool) of the production, creativity and technique. It may seem ‘normal’ for other bands and countries but for Malta, it’s a giant step forward . Well, like any change, it’s not just “one giant step”, it’s a build up on top of countless small steps by other musicians, artists and creatives who slowly but surely have promoted, encouraged and enabled this kind of quality.

Anyway, I was going to write a long, thoughtful and insightful post about all this but Toni Sant beat me to it with an excellent one that just expresses everything I could have wanted to say. Click here to read it.

Given the choice, how many people would swap a gloriously sunny Cambridge Saturday for a 7-hour long tutorial about, wait for it, qualitative field research methods and analysis? Yet thirty odd people did just that last Saturday and elected to be closeted in one of Churchill College’s nicer rooms to listen to what User Centred Design (UCD) practitioner and researcher David Siegel had to say.

It turned out to be a highly motivating, fast-paced and anecdote-rich journey through the process of designing and analysing qualitative field-work in a product design context.

As anybody involved in UCD, User Experience (UX) or related work probably knows, field-work – be it usability tests, interviews, focus groups – is an essential tool of the trade. Yet making sense of the data and field notes collected can often be a non-trivial task. The material can easily build up to a stack of notes, transcripts and visuals that is measured in inches. Even more challenging is the task of communicating the results to the client in a compelling and authoritative way. Based on extensive real-world examples, including his work on Microsoft’s Tablet PC OS and similarly high-profile clients, David attacked these problems with vigour and enthusiasm. These are my top 5 take away tips from the day-long session:

1. Preempt the Quantitative Dissenter
   The big divide between qualitative and quantitative research is well known. Quantitative results sometimes tend to be more appealing because “10%” is easier to understand and take home than a page-long narrative. Deal with this by recognising and showing that a quantitative study, such as a survey or questionnaire, requires a qualitative decision making process a priori: choosing the kind and extensiveness of the questions. This is an area where qualitative field work can prove its worth by lending confidence and scientific credibility to that process (rather than leaving it up to some graduate intern).
2. Quantitative Doesn’t Mean Numeric
   It is true that quantitative summaries and comparisons may be easier to retain than long lists or narratives. So find things to count in your qualitative data and measure them qualitatively. What does this mean? Using qualitative quantifiers like ‘rare’, ‘frequent’, ‘improbable’ and similar words to describe your findings makes your results as memorable as the quantitative “10%” but avoids an all to common pitfall that qualitative researchers fall into. The pitfall is the temptation to say something like “80% of the people we researched did not like this feature” and when asked what quantity that represents you are forced to say “8″ because you interviewed 10 people! Hardly a statistically significant sample in quantitative terms but very significant if positioned as “Oh yes, we observed that use case taking place frequently. Here is why they do it…”
3. Reliability Does Not Imply Validity
   It seems like a no-brainer but the central point is that just because your data sources and collection may be reliable and traceable, does not imply that your conclusions are valid. Reliability (achieved through scientific rigor) is important because it sets the baseline for validity, i.e. reliability is a pre-requisite for validity. However to produce valid conclusions you need to be careful not to base them on personal bias, gut feelings, hunches, false correlations or invented cause-and-effect relationships. How do you do this? Well, experience helps but also triangulation (i.e. use several methods to arrive at the same conclusion) and judgmental heuristics (i.e. have different people carry out the same analytics to ensure the interpretation is the same or similar).
4. Forget the Blank Slates, Fill ‘em Up
   The way to be objective is not to pretend that you can go into the field with a ‘blank slate’, or a completely open mind. Rather, acknowledge your background, assumptions, expectations, objectives and domain knowledge (as an individual and as an organisation) and map them out to create what David calls a ‘focus structure’. Doing this will achieve the goal of being ‘open minded’ because when you observe something that doesn’t fit into your pre-defined categories – and you will – it will stick out like a sore thumb, forcing you to acknowledge it and give it due attention.
5. Deliver Compelling Field Findings: Behaviour and Conditions
   “Be Compelling!” Thanks, but how? Two invaluable tips based on the fundamental point that the big advantage of qualitative research is its richness. First, focus your reporting around behavioural characterisation. While quantitative work characterises and segments a market or demographic, qualitative work characterises and (tries to) explain behaviour. If you can show and shed light on why somebody is behaving in a particular way you’re well on your way to being compelling. Secondly, focus on conditions and once again avoid the “8 out of the 12 users we interviewed did such and such”. That is precisely the kind of statement that is itching for a smart-ass quantitative dissenter to pipe up… and she would be right! Showing frequency in this manner is not your job. Discuss instead the conditions at which something happens, how likely those conditions are to be ubiquitous (or not) and what’s at stake when they do occur.

This short review hardly scratches the surface of the wealth of information and examples David brought to the table and I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for his (and his colleague Susan Dray’s) sessions in any HCI conference coming to a town near you.

Oh, and once again thanks to Red Gate for both sponsoring the 23rd British HCI Conference and for sending me along!

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Finally, at long last, the EU is heading towards a trade ban on tuna fishing in the Mediterranean.

The timesofmalta.com positions this as a “Blow for Malta“.

What sort of editorial commentary is this?

[Update: It seems timesofmalta.com changed the title of their article to "Blow for Malta bluefin tuna trade". Still not great but better.]

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I am pleased to report that yesterday’s experiment worked. The bold claim that something cool was ‘dead’ more than tripled click-throughs… and all from the usual sources (there’s your control Mr. Quantitative Dissenter).

Is it ‘lazy journalism’ as one commenter said that makes journalists go for the tabloid-like headlines? Or are they simply giving us what we want: headlines that satisfy our morbid desire to see others fail?

(Although there might be a case for saying WordPress did indeed flatline a little!)

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Is “Advertising Dead“? Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki seem to think so. Michael Arrington thinks that RSS is dead and one of his guest authors thinks that comments are dead. ‘Traditional media’ is also dead (it seems to have died twice in fact) and in case you haven’t heard, Facebook is also dead.

What is it about entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts that just makes them drool at the thought of somebody else, ideally someone successful, failing miserably and dying. It could be the “Male Killer Gene” that Guy Kawasaki often rants about (but then ignores). More likely, it is simply link bait, which is a sad thing for the A-list tech bloggers to have to do because it’s just the first step to becoming Rupert Murdoch lookalikes.

Of course, they’ll be rich by then so perhaps that’s the plan. Anyway, blogging, wordpress and technology are not dead… I just wanted to see how many people click.

Update: See the results!

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Dhane Crowley of DesNDev.com kindly asked me to answer a few questions on why WordPress can be a useful tool to companies having – or wanting – a web presence.

Q5: What would you say is the single most important aspect of creating a Website – aesthetics, function, or something else?

Usability. If a website looks great but I can’t find the search feature the site is useless. If the search feature works but presents the results unintelligibly the site is also useless. Usability means making it simple for a user to accomplish a task or get information and requires equal focus on form and function.

Q6: Why should a business use WordPress to power their Websites?

WordPress allows you to manage a website’s content and function independently of how it looks and without specialist knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP etc. Writing or editing a blog post, article, event or product page is as easy as writing an email in GMail or Yahoo! Mail.

You can read my insightful answers to all 10 questions on his blog.

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Growing up in Malta in the eighties the Lockerbie bombing was something it was impossible not to hear about on a regular basis. This is because of an alleged “Malta link“. But as is typical with misty childhood recollections, I never really found out where Lockerbie actually was (I used to think it was an airline at first) until I moved to Scotland last year. My personal childhood and Scotland “links” thus made me take a sort of personal interest in the events leading up to, and following, al-Megrahi’s release and I confess my gut reaction was not in his favour.

The reasons for this are the obvious ones: the man was part of a plane hijacking that resulted in just under 300 innocent deaths. Like many people I don’t believe terrorism should be rewarded and having a criminal and justice system that ferrets such people out and locks them up is a good thing. Therefore, after decades of work and effort, releasing the only man ever convicted of this atrocious act does seem like a mockery of all things we believe to be good.

However, the moment the venomous anti-Scotland public outcry gained momentum, my professional-issue Go-Against-The-Grain circuit filter kicked into high gear.

The Scottish authorities responsible for his release must surely have anticipated the strong resistance and political fallout to such a decision. So why even consider it in the first place? Well, as the Scottish Justice Secretary explains, the principle of release on compassionate grounds is part of the Scottish legal system. What this means in simple terms is that any convicted criminal with less than 3 months to live may be released before his or her full prison term expires.

The deciding factor of such a release is compassion. Unlike other ways of reducing a prison sentence – good behaviour, remorse, parole – this is dependent on the captor not the captured. In other words, while good behaviour and parole say something about the guilty party, compassionate release says something about the people dispensing justice.

That the people of Scotland (as represented by their legal system of course) can even feel compassion for somebody like al-Megrahi, despite his terrible actions and their consequences, is to my mind a wonderful thing. It is to Scotland’s credit that such a person can be released and in no way a validation of his, or his collaborators’, actions.

The compassionate release of al-Megrahi does not make a mockery of the justice system and anti-terrorist efforts. On the contrary, it sets a judicial benchmark to which other nations should aspire.

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Even weirder than the LinkedIn one.

Very cool new feature showed up in my Google Reader today. If you’re like me, you probably can’t help adding more and more RSS feeds to your readers but in reality I hardly read 5% of them. If I spend a day away from Reader the unread count easily adds up to 1000+. So this feature promises to be very useful at simply discarding outdated stuff.

On the whole, I love LinkedIn for its design, layout and usability… but don’t you just love it when this stuff happens? :-)