28-11-2006 by Fabio Sergio

From data to wisdom.

In “From Data to Wisdom” Liz Danzico interviews Paco Underhill, founder of behavioral research firm Envirosell:

“There are a series of issues that come up in every job that we do (and characterize the changing nature of consumers).

And finally, and this is particularly poignant in an online community, is understanding what is global and what is local about the nature of whatever you’re designing for.
We often make the assumption in the design world that I can sit in San Francisco or in New York City and design something, and it will fit the markets that I’m designing for.
One of the biggest challenges that the online community faces is recognizing that somebody in a small town in Iowa and somebody in New York City often have completely different sets of needs and stimuli.“

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13-11-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Experientia interviews Anne Kirah.

Italian user experience design consultancy Experientia has interviewed Anne Kirah, senior design anthropologist at Microsoft’s MSN Customer Design Centre, on the importance of focusing on the real lives of real people:

“When Microsoft hired me eight years ago as the first official anthropologist, they weren’t sure what to do with me, so they had me design my own job.
I soon realised that Microsoft had until then the tendency to come up with feature and product designs within the confines of its own walls.
What went on in the minds of Microsoft’s brilliant software engineers and of people outside the walls of Microsoft, was not always very congruent … so I created the Real People Real Data (RPRD) programme.
My work on the RPRD programme was in fact the start of a revolution within Microsoft, and helped the company change from techno-driven to people-driven design.
I did of course have some impact on Windows XP but I am much prouder being part of the cultural change at Microsoft than I am of the products and features that have been impacted by Microsoft’s anthropological research.

I never speak about users.
Did you wake up this morning defining yourself as a user? No.
Maybe you woke up with an alarm clock, so you are an employee. Maybe you woke up with a baby, so you are a father. Maybe you woke up with your wife or lover, which makes you a spouse or a lover.
But you sure as hell didn’t wake up and say: good morning world, I am a USER.
If we create jargon to deal with our research, then we are no better than the engineers and anyone else who doesn’t speak the language of everyday people in their everyday lives and not so everyday people in their not so everyday lives or any combination thereof.
The kind of innovation I am involved with means changing the cultures at work by speaking the same language and culture as the people the company is innovating for.“

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02-11-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Innovation Hotlist 2006.

The Innovation Lab has posted its top-10 list of tendecies and trends for 2006:

“This hotlist comprises the prevailing tendencies permeating research, product development and service design within the field of information technology.

1. CUSTOMERMADE
When customers and users “infiltrate” the product-development work of companies or organisations and begin to design and create their own products and services.
2. GEO-AWARENESS
The filling station knows you’re on your way, and – via the navigating system in your car or your mobile – it will send you an offer on the petrol, and at the same time it will advertise the dish of the day in the station’s cafeteria.
3. THING CONNECTION
Thing Connection is the keystone of the 4A concept – Anytime connection, Anywhere connection, Anything connection, by Anyone.
Otherwise known as ”an internet of things”: when things communicate with each other.
4. VIRTUAL WORLDS
Welcome to another reality! Close to 400,000 people have already settled in the virtual world Second Life. There are more alternative digital worlds in the offing…
5. WEB APPLICATIONS - THE NEXT GENERATION
The Web, and not the PC, constitutes the new centre of the universe. This entails a shift from software to web-based applications where the overt and the social will come to play an increasingly substantial part.
6. DIGITAL PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Digital and virtual advertisement pillars. The digital billboard of the future will be blank space to be filled in with messages directed at specific target groups.
7. WEB VIDEO
Show me, see me! Moving pictures have taken the pole position.
8. MIXED REALITY
The fusion of digital, virtual and physical products is near.
9. EXPANDED SEARCH
Search engines are becoming more than just a match of words and numbers in a colossal database.
10. HUMANITARIAN TECHNOLOGY
Profit-generating technologies and humanitarian aid in one.“

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29-10-2006 by Fabio Sergio

12 values for technology.

Social Technologies has just conducted a new study on the “values” that consumers will look for in products, services, and technologies over the next 10 to 15 years:

“Companies will need to embrace these principles in product design and marketing — and understand the emerging technologies that will be needed to support these values — if they hope to align with consumer needs and desires now and in the future.

The 12 values are:
Appropriateness, Assistance, Connectedness, Convenience, Efficiency, Health, Intelligence, Personalisation, Protection, Simplicity, Sustainability, User creativity.”

(via Putting People First)

Posted in User Research, Human Centered Design | No Comments »

19-10-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Interview: Jan Chipchase.

Starting this month Convivio will publish interviews with leading voices in the field of Human-Centered Design, focusing each time on one of the various areas of expertise that contribute to HCD’s multi-disciplinary milieu.
Interviews will feature people from all over the world, but with an emphasis on European voices.

The discipline under the spotlight this month is Research, and the first guest is Jan Chipchase, Principal Researcher at Nokia, whose personal insights can be found on Future Perfect, Jan’s wonderful photo-intensive weblog. As he says: “… if I do my job right you’ll be using it 3 to 15 years from now.”

Hello Jan, thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to participate… and for being the first one too.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found your current professional path?

I’m a member of the Mobile HCI Group in Nokia Research and have been living in and working from Tokyo for the last 5 and half years.

Soon after graduating I joined a team developing teaching software and pretty swiftly realized the limits of my design skills. That prompted me to sign up for a Masters in User Interface Design at London Guildhall University which led to a UI development job at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology before joining Nokia’s Usability Group and from there to my current position.
About 50% of my time is spent on field study related activities and 50% is spent on concept development.
Along the way there have been stints living in London, Berlin, Brighton and Bristol, a fair bit of travel and managing a small design company.
The general direction has been influenced by Guenter Wallraff, Weegee and Larry Clark.

A common experience with User Researchers is that they seem to be “always on”, detecting patterns and/or documenting all they see to fit it into existing research domains… or creating new ones on the go. If Future Perfect, your blog, is any indication you seem to confirm this impression.
Is this a natural trait needed for any effective (and passionate) researcher, or is it one of those “professional compulsory habits”?

This work certainly benefits from an element of continuous observation and assessment, but I don’t think being “always on” is particularly unique.
It’s common to meet researchers that are passionate about what they do, that don’t stop thinking about an issue just because they’re not sitting at a desk or in the lab.
I imagine you’d get a similar answer from an architect or fiction writer.

But if the opposite of being “always on” is “switching off”, how important is it to take time off? To understand and design for life it helps to have one yourself.

I do have a habit of trying new things to experience the experience - having my ears cleaned in a Hue barber’s shop springs to mind. Sitting in the chair mentally breaking down the composite parts of the experience – the tools he used including a customized razor blade and a miner-style head torch, the background chatter, Vietnamese pop music on the radio, the sound of motorbike engines passing by plus his running commentary of what was happening.
Breaking things down into composite parts is simply how I make sense of the world around me.

One of my assumptions during interviews as well as more ad-hoc conversations is that everyone has something interesting to say you just need to figure out what it is. More often than not the listener enters a conversation assuming the opposite, doesn’t take the time to properly hear what’s actually being said, or quite simply the listener doesn’t have the skills or cultural context to appreciate the subtleties of what is communicated.
Everyone can reflect on their life experiences but that most people don’t choose to, and only a few choose to do so in a public forum. The issue is not whether we are ‘always on’, but what we are always on to.
What is it that is noticed? How much time is spent in absorbing, or in reflection, or in applying what is learned?

The context to me replying to this email interview is a fairly typical example of the kind of moments that support reflection. (I’m sitting in a Tokyo cafe waiting for vaccination clinic across the road to).
Thirty-five minutes filled by reviewing and writing.

To follow your question to its source one of the more amusing aspects of posting material to Future Perfect and using sites such as Flickr are the extrapolation that readers make based on what is posted to the site.
People tend to take personal sites (blogs) as a constant flow of information, and the default design elements of tools such as Movable Type support this, but what ends up being documented is pretty trivial compared to the richness of everyday life.
Take one year’s worth of photos posted to Future Perfect as an example: collectively the 500+ photos probably took less than a minute of exposure time to capture (and that minute includes one 30 second exposure).
How much does that “photographer’s minute” and the text that accompanies it communicate about the year and contexts in which the photos were captured?
More importantly what is missing and why?

You have been living in Tokyo for a long time, and travel constantly to other countries: how has this affected your work and insights?

Perspective, it provides perspective.
However, the cliché that “travel teaches you as much about yourself and your own culture as it does about others” is only partially true.
Travel is an opportunity to learn but it’s not the same as the ability or willingness to learn.

Do you think that “immersing” oneself in another culture is helpful or even essential to fuel the research process?

By “immersing” I’ll assume you mean being in context for extended periods of time combined with a degree of acceptance from the community or individuals that you are immersed with.

Yes, thank you for phrasing it much better than I ever could.

One of the assumptions of contextual design processes is that two weeks, two days or even two hours spent in the context of whatever or whomever we are researching is better than none.
A degree of immersion is certainly useful (and it’s certainly driven my own research), but I wouldn’t say it’s essential without first knowing what was being designed and by whom. It’s also important to keep some perspective about being in context and from there immersion; on a very practical level what can one expect to learn from short periods of time spent in another culture or context?

The perception of those “immersed experiences” also plays a role when it comes to communicating the research results.
Its one thing to say that you conducted qualitative research in a 3rd tier city in northern China, it’s another to show the richness of that context through a video of an interview conducted in a two room family apartment.
The extent of to which you were engrained in that context can be implied by the body language of the participants in the video or the degree of access you have in their home.
Diary techniques such as the everything-I-touch-diary can extend our reach and understanding into contexts which many readers would assume to be off limits, for example taking a shower, lying in bed, or sitting in a nightclub bathroom (all situations from which we have collected self-reported data).

In a recent study we wanted to understand the complete 24-hour flow of everyday life so we embedded researchers in participants’ homes for a couple days. It was an interesting exercise both in terms of understanding the user’s perspective, ethical considerations and the immense responsibility that comes with having access to the minutiae of peoples’ lives.
The study yielded interesting and relevant data but I certainly wouldn’t argue that it’s necessary to have that level of immersion on every project.

The extent to which the research team spends time in context is an issue I struggle with even on something as seemingly routine as deciding where to stay during a field study.
Our default accommodation is often a multi-national hotel chain with everything that that entails, but except for the financial elites in many of those societies you’re cut off from the people you’re researching.
But on the other hand to function effectively the team needs to work from a safe, clean environment that supports interaction with team members, home bases and the other people that are part of our working lives.
These demands create conflicting needs. My ideal situation is to book locally owned guest houses situated close to the communities where the research takes place though it doesn’t always work out that way.

This is probably a good point to raise the issue of cultural translation. Access to situations and contexts is important but how do you know you’re drawing the right conclusions?
It’s a particular challenge when spoken communication is through an interpreter. In many ways we are only as good as the local researchers that we partner with.

Yes, I have also had a chance to hear similar considerations from English-speaking researchers conducting their activities in Italy, assisted by an Italian researcher and/or translator.
This also brings to mind the old saying that when a book gets translated a good translator actually ends up rewriting the book, the whole activity actually being more of an interpretation than a literal adaptation from the original.

In terms of scope do you favor exploring large domains looking for emerging patterns or rather conduct field studies focused on specific interest areas?

For projects with a broad scope there is an element of not knowing where the value is going to come from which can be pretty daunting considering the resources that goes into making a multi-cultural study happen.
Generally I prefer to go in the field with a specific interest area, for example Mobile TV or illiterate contact management, clear topics that can be researched and delivered. During the project-planning phase I try to ensure methodologies that allow us to collect data on related issues and I always leave enough time to scout new topics.
The role of research is to explore the boundaries of what’s out there. It’s typical for some research to continue existing trajectories whilst others are at more of a tangent to current practices.
Tangent research topics tend to have higher risk, but taking (and managing) risk is an important part of successful research portfolio.

To some extent being the first amongst your peers (or your client’s peers) to conduct field research in a given area makes it easier to spot and document items of interest.
Some things are obvious, it’s just that no-one has looked or asked those questions in that context before. Assuming that the research findings are both new and relevant to the client’s interests, one of the highest compliments is when they say “that’s so obvious now”. The comment suggests that we’ve picked up on behaviors that are subtle enough to be largely invisible but common enough to be understood.
By saying “it’s obvious” the listener has already has bought into your view of the world which is half the battle of communicating the research.
A simple example of “obvious behavior” is in breaking down the reasons why so many people leave objects in taxis, the behaviour that people adopt to reduce the risk of forgetting (which we called the “Point of Reflection” in one of our studies), and why despite this behaviour people still forget.

Let’s look at research in the larger scheme of things for a moment.
A Human-Centered Design process should ideally have User Research as one of its ongoing activities, informing and validating the various phases of product development, but from what I’ve heard from researchers in the recent past there’s a certain amount of frustration regarding how and when it is actually integrated in the process.
I’ve sometimes heard it explained as “throwing your findings over a wall”… never to see/hear how they will be actually applied.
Leaving Nokia aside do you share similar concerns regarding the current fit of research-at-large in current product/service development processes?

User researchers don’t have a monopoly in understanding everyday life. It’s natural for researchers to assume a degree of ownership over ideas and concepts that they generate, but it’s important to recognise the limits of the research itself without buy in from other members of the design team and the organisation as a whole.
What steps need to be taken to make research relevant?
Who needs to buy into the research results for it to make a difference?

My colleagues are smart and I trust that they apply the research to their own context. A lot of the back-end work we do is about getting the right data to the right person in the right format at the right time.

If there is frustration in the way research is enterpreted then much of the blame falls on the researcher: not taking the time to understand the design needs of the research team; an inability to clearly communicating ideas, and not making the effort to re-package research results to arising needs.
Walls are there to be climbed over and once over the other side, knocked down (with the help of the rest of the design team, naturally).

That’s a fantastic answer Jan, and one that should apply to all team members in any multi-disciplinary context.
All too often I’ve heard complaints from usability engineers or interaction designers or project managers that others in the team/organization “don’t understand them and what they do”, but not as often I’ve heard the same people question their own willingness (and even ability) to shape a shared vocabulary to ease and foster dialogue with their colleagues.

Talking about dialogue and interaction among team members let’s also briefly look at the role participants usually have in ethnographic studies, which is often quite passive, as they are observed conducting their daily activities.
Participatory design practices, which are increasingly common these days, see people play a much more active role in shaping products and services.
Do you see this competing or integrating with the type of work you tend to be involved in?

We tend to apply a variety of research methods in a single field study ranging from observational techniques (observations, shadowing, diaries, logging) to being more interactive (in-depth or ad-hoc interviews, walk-throughs, role play) and yes, we sometimes actively engage participants in the design process.
Observations only take you so far in understanding what. To understand the why and the details of how you need to communication and engage with people. Deciding on what approach to adopt for any given project is dependent on understanding the resources that are available, and the people you have access to.
Good participatory design is dependent on participating with the right people, so the smart question is: who are the right people to work with, and what level of access will you have?
The bottom line is not to be hung up on using one method or another, but in figuring out what you’re trying to achieve and what resources and participants you have at your disposal.

Any chance you could be convinced to share a few secrets regarding how to find “the right participants”?

Unless absolutely necessary, avoid recruiting companies.

Ethnography and anthropology are current buzz-disciplines in the industry, and articles such as Business Week’s “The Science of Desire”, have both highlighted innovations fostered by the adoption of research practices in various industries, but also somewhat cautioned about potential misuses and pitfalls.
Is it maybe again a problem of “cultural translation”, only in a different setting?

A crude answer is it depends to what extent these words are appropriated, hyped, used and abused… but this is an answer coming from someone who doesn’t claim to be either an anthropologist or an ethnographer.

Shifting the focus onto methodologies, which are in your opinion the most effective ones when it comes to conducting field studies in a non-academic environment?
Any tips for others working in similar positions elsewhere?

In deciding what methods to use we always start with the participants and their need to be comfortable with the research process.
Given that we want to collect data from pretty much every context where the phone is used from when people get up to when they go to bed, and techniques such as wallet mapping can expose very sensitive data.

The tip is to keep the process simple for the team and transparent for the participants.
We work hard to ensure in-depth participants have sufficient control over the data that is gathered (the same principle works with ad-hoc participants such as street interviews though the process is a little different).
Participant control comes from a variety of techniques such as entrusting them with research team recording equipment, de-mystifying the technology that has invaded their space and more subtle techniques such as researchers remaining in lines of sight during home visits. More concretely we offer in-depth participants complete control over the data that is collected.
Towards the end of a session, after any rewards are handed over and before any data consent form is signed, we encourage participants to review all digital data we have collected on them and to delete what they don’t want us to have, no questions asked. Most participants delete one or two photos but no one has yet asked us to wipe everything.
We also like to follow up the study by sending participants a copy of the digital data that we retain, essentially the original data filtered to remove photos we consider inappropriate or overly sensitive (this can range from photos that include phone numbers or drying underwear it really depends on the study).
Knowing that the process is largely a positive experience for participants positively changes the way data is collected and handled.

You seem to be suggesting that a secret for conducting effective research is to treat people being observed as people, or as team members, and not just as “participants”, which sounds like a perfect way to frame the end of this exchange Jan.
Any infamous final word of advice for someone interested in following your footsteps?

Surround yourself with smart, committed people.

Sounds like the kind of suggestion that goes well beyond research and actually applies to all contexts, and I couldn’t agree more.

Thank you for your time and insightful answers Jan, looking forward to keep reading your reflections on Future Perfect.

Posted in User Research, Human Centered Design, Interviews | 6 Comments »

14-10-2006 by Fabio Sergio

To Read the Consumer’s Mind.

Fast Company’s “To Read the Consumer’s Mind” is an intersting interview with Ziba’s creative director Steve McCallion on the way “deep consumer research” has become a critical part of their design process:

“We don’t negate the intuitive part of the design process.
That’s where a lot of breakthrough creation comes from, and we certainly don’t want to miss that flash of brilliance.
But in a commercial design shop, where clients expect you to repeatedly deliver a high level of performance on a vast range of projects, you can’t just rely on your gut all the time.

Informed intuition is a systematic way of filling up your decision-making process with a deep understanding of whom you’re designing for, so you make smart decisions as opposed to guesses.“

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01-10-2006 by Fabio Sergio

The soul of the Chinese consumer.

Business Week’s “Inside Lenovo’s Design Quest” reports on how design consultancy Ziba effectively used ethnographic research to help Lenovo address the specific needs of its chinese customers:

“To create product experiences that would connect with China’s consumers, the team needed to understand three cultures: China, users, and products.
To build these connections, the team developed an approach called ‘Search for the Soul’, which integrated immersive experience (live-the-life), rapid ethnography, and method acting to uncover latent needs and wants.
The goal of the evaluation was to determine how design could benefit Chinese consumers, the goal was not to determine a single direction but to identify which design elements were valuable.

Five technology tribes were identified: Social Butterflies, Relationship Builders, Upward Maximizers, Deep Immersers, and Conspicuous Collectors.
Each of these groups has vastly different needs, ranging from the need to connect to a broad social network (Social Butterflies) to the desire to seek escape through fantasy and immersion (Deep Immersers).
The definition of rich, psychographic tribes gave Lenovo’s senior management and marketing teams a common language and a common vision of the future.
The research gave them a defined segment map (based on behavior, attitudes, and values) to guide the development of appropriate products for target consumers.
Future product lines will now be organized around the needs of specific ‘tech tribes’.“

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21-09-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Designing for Illiterate Users

Jan Chipchase’s “Designing for Illiterate Users” (6 MB, PPT), is a wonderful new study recently presented at UIAH in Helsinky:

“Don’t frame the question by ‘designing for illiterate people’, think about the skills that are necessary to use the core features on a device, something which we term device competency.

Consider the different types of literacy that users do have.
To what extent do risks & consequences affect device exploration?
Why iconic support and voice prompts can be part of a solution but are far from being the solution, instead look to a range of solutions on the device, on the network, and in user’s ecosytem. The eco-system can be anything from (task or device) literacy classes to posters on walls.
Last but certainly not least that it is better to solve the problem (illiteracy), than design work-around solutions for dealing with the problem (illiterate users stumped by text driven device interfaces).“

Posted in Interaction Design, User Research, Human Centered Design | No Comments »

29-07-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Ruthless focus.

In “Ruthless Focus on the Customer” Business Week’s Jeneanne Rae looks at how “… companies and brands are discovering how superior customer experience keeps ‘em coming back for more.“:

“In this new age, customer experience will decide the winners and losers in almost every industry imaginable.
Here (are the main reasons): Raving Fans, Loyalty, Premium Pricing, Differentiation.
Great customer experiences start with the “moments of truth.”
These moments of truth occur at the key touch points in a customer’s journey with his product or service environment.

Entrust your customers to co-create their own experience.
The next level of value for product and service companies is not only mass customization, but co-creation of the entire experience.
Use an eco-system approach to orchestrate numerous business models that drive customer value.
The starting place for customer-experience design is not a company’s existing set of manufacturing or operating competencies, nor is it necessarily the traditional distribution channels. The customer doesn’t care about these things; customers care about what they want when they want it, and they turn to the easiest place to get it.“

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22-07-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Changing frameworks in HCD.

In “A New Framework” Adaptive Path’s Todd Wilkens calls for an end to the decades-old framework that has been used for understanding people:

“There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing products, web sites, or monolithic centralized systems.
As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s better to think of our projects in terms of services and systems rather than products.

This is not just a semantic or linguistic game I’m playing.
I’m not just substituting one set of words (i.e., behaviors, motivations, contexts) for another (i.e., tasks, goals, states) while maintaining the underlying structure.
The models we use to understand and talk about people greatly influence how we can understand a problem or situation.
If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design.“

Posted in Interaction Design, User Research, Human Centered Design | No Comments »

23-05-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Experience Design. New Levels.

In “New Levels of Experience Design” PingMag’s Matt Sinclair interviews Liisa Puolakka, Nokia’s Head of Brand Visual and Sensorial Experiences.

“(In User Experience Design) I think the main thing is that rather than just designing an object you take a more holistic approach.
That means the design language and how it relates to other products; how does it feel to use, both rationally and emotionally.

The main thing is to start with an understanding of the user, the consumer, and the life they are living.
What’s important is a sensitivity to what’s going on, observational skills, and the creativity to distill those observations into stories, themes and product possibilities.“

Posted in User Research, User Experience | No Comments »

11-05-2006 by Fabio Sergio

The (User) Persona Lifecycle.

A comprehensive book on User Personas has just been published by Morgan Kaufmann: “The Persona Lifecycle. Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design“, by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin (via Peter Bogaards).

Here’s what none other than Don Norman had to say about it:

“Personas personified. The definitive word on why personas are better than people in guiding your designs.
Filled with case histories, sidebars, and helpful, useful guidelines as well as deep, penetrating analyses.
A big book, and for reason. This book is unique in that it is truly for everyone: the practitioner, the researcher, and the teacher.
Did I say this was essential reading?
Well, it is: if you use personas, if you have thought about using them, if you don’t even know what they are, this is the book for you.”

A free sample chapter can be downloaded here (PDF, 768 KB); excerpts below:

“Why is it so difficult to be user centered? The problem is threefold.

Once we do understand the user,and even if we effectively communicate that understanding, we still have to tackle the difficult challenge of incorporating that information in the design of the product.
To take it a step further,how do you get them to empathize with user perspectives and take them as seriously as those elements that affect their own daily development jobs?
You need a variety oftools to make this happen.
This book offers one such tool that,although immensely popular and frequently discussed,until now has been only loosely described to practitioners.
Enter personas.“

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09-05-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Understanding Experience.

A bit oldish but still very valuable: Jodi Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee’s paper, Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems (PDF), presented at DIS 04.

“Understanding experience is a critical issue for a variety of professions, especially design.
To understand experience and the user experience that results from interacting with products, designers conduct situated research activities focused on the interactions between people and products, and the experience that results.
This paper attempts to clarify experience in interactive systems.
We characterize current approaches to experience from a number of disciplines, and present a framework for designing experience for interactive system.
We show how the framework can be applied by members of a multidisciplinary team to understand and generate the kinds of interactions and experiences new product and system designs might offer.

Our research has led to a common way to understand experience, and to understand how social interaction and collaborative product use influence the individual’s product experiences and the meanings those experiences come to
have.
We offer an understanding of the experiences of the individual and co-experience as a sensitizing concept to help in interpreting meaning from a social interaction perspective.
This process needs to be visual, empathic, and emotionally driven to be ultimately successful in supporting inspiration and gaining insights into user experience.“

Posted in User Research, User Experience | No Comments »

04-05-2006 by Fabio Sergio

People. Research. Nokia.

Mobile phones are quintessentially personal objects.
Whether they are referred to as personal shrines or remote controls for life they have become indispensable prostheses that assist us in our daily stroll through life.
In light of these considerations it’s not surprising that the current market leader, Nokia, keeps in constant touch with how the world perceives and uses mobile phones (sorry, multimedia computers, as Nokia now wants them called now), and also with how emerging socio-cultural needs could be met with networked handheld devices.

Jan Chipchase, one of Nokia’s researchers, runs Future Perfect, a wonderful blog where his world-encompassing research activities are documented with an enticing stream-of-consciousness flow of words and pictures.
The “publications” area has many interesting, visually inspiring presentations.

“Out There: Using Field Research to Inform and Inspire” (PPT, 3MB) and “Exploratory User Field Research in the Nokia Mobile HCI Group” (PPT, 3MB) are both rich introductions to Nokia’s research process, documenting people’s whys, whats and wheres to “figure out what the world is like today to understand how it could be tomorrow”.

“Mobile Essentials - What People Carry and Why” (PPT, 2MB) is a fascinating look into what people carry while on the move.
The study was conducted in 4 cities across the world and involved shadowing 17 people in their daily activities.
Researchers identified core mobile essentials and extended mobile essentials, together with the problems people encounter to remember to have such items on the way out of their houses and the strategies they adopt to avoid forgetting them.
The study was also presented at DUX 2005, and a version with detailed written explanations was published on AIGA’s Gain, where it’s also available for download (PDF, 380 KB).

Mobile Essentials can be nicely integrated by a paper presented at Mobility 05, “Where’s the Phone? A study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces” (PDF, 340 KB) and by “Physical Personalisation” (PPT, 1MB).
The first one is study conducted in Helsinki, Milan and New York that looks at where people store their mobile phones and how these habits can (negatively) impact receiving calls and the like.
The second study is a review of 6477 used mobile phone covers in Japan, that shows how people customize not only visible but also invisible parts of their handsets.
We are complex creatures indeed.

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03-05-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Ethnography. Implications for Design.

A few days ago Paul Dourish, author of “Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction“, presented a though-provoking paper at CHI 2006: “Implications for Design” (PDF, 324 KB).

Dourish expresses a quite critical point of view on the role that ethnographic research has been playing in the world of user-centered design(-at-large), possibly undermining some of its very methodological principles.
Well-worth reading.

Here are a few excerpts.

“ Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI.
Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design.
Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that “implications for design” may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.
I want to explore the ways in which the “implications for design” may underestimate, misstate, or misconstrue the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation.

In that spirit, then, my argument is certainly not that design recommendations are poor things to include in ethnographies.
What I do want to suggest, however, is that the presence or import of “implications for design” are not the appropriate criterion by which ethnographic contributions should be judged.
What matters is not simply what those implications are; what matters is why, and how they were arrived at, and what kinds of intellectual (and moral and political) commitments they embody, and what kinds of models they reflect.“

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