Adaptive Path Blog

Clients often come to us to help them develop a better sense of their users. To do so, we venture into the homes of people who are using or may be using our client’s product. Armed with audio and video recorders, we interview them at length. In the course of these interviews, we naturally develop a sense of empathy for these people: We see their homes, we meet their housemates, we make eye contact, and we share a physical space for over an hour.

After the interview, we are tasked with the challenge of articulating what we saw, heard and felt. We rummage through our interview transcripts and notes using a variety of methods and tools. We then produce personas and story-scenarios that document the characteristics, behaviors and motivations of the people we spoke to. Done right, these personas and scenarios help our clients develop a sense of empathy for their users.

But ultimately, there’s no substitute for actually being there, talking to real people, and experiencing it first-hand. To that end, we always encourage our clients to join in on our home interviews. Sometimes, all it takes is a day out of their office and into the lives of their users for a new perspective to settle in. Sometimes, it’s the real, live response to a question they’ve been holding on the tip of their tongue that finally convinces them.

So to all our clients, present and future: “Please, come with us. Take a plunge into the world of your users.”

Dan noticed that on the Nov 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jerry Seinfeld brought the term “blog” to task.

“Is that the worst new word of the culture, blog? It’s so unattractive. It’s like something that you spit up and its, it has like, it congeals, and is, you know, and you kick dirt on it.”
- Jerry Seinfeld

Peter, who coined the term back in 1998 agrees with Jerry:

“I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”
- Peter Merholz, August 30, 1999, email to Keith Dawson

I’ll admit to being a total information visualization junkie.

When I’m stuck in a rut, shifting things around unlocks new perspectives. Reframing a problem can fundamentally change how I think about the situation and freshen my eyes to new possibilities. And having a full palette of visualization options is a great way to mix it up and uncover new patterns.

So, when I found the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, I got all verklempt. It’s a compelling way to preview different visualizations, and the organizing principle of the periodic table allows for a lot of metadata to be embedded in the summary view for quick reference.

Thanks to Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler of visual-literacy.org for this nice gift.

At Adaptive Path, many of us speak regularly at conferences. I’ve found that it is critical to understand the conference’s context, the organizer’s expectations, and any other constraints. Arming ourselves in advance with this information helps me prepare, tailor my message for the audience, and feel confident in my presentation.

When I first started speaking, I was just happy to be accepted. I didn’t ask too many questions. However, I’ve learned through experience (been burned once or twice) to ask some important questions of conference organizers before I agree to speak. Both the conference organizer and I need to make sure that my presentation will be interesting and useful to the audience.

Initially, I ask probing questions to determine if the conference is a good fit. Then, if I decide that I would like to speak there (and the conference organizer is still interested), I move on to more detailed questions.

I have compiled a checklist of questions I typically ask below. I hope this will be a useful reference to you. If you think of others I should add, please let me know.

The Basics

Some conference organizers are super busy or, for a variety of reasons, unable to share a lot of information. So, at the least, make sure you get these questions answered:

• Where, what, and when is the conference?
• What is my session about, how long is it, when is it?
• Who is the audience?
• How are you compensating me? (not necessarily $$$)

The Details

If you can have a full conversation with a program chair, you can ask a lot more:

First things first:

• Where is the conference? When?
• What is the conference about (generally)? Tech, design, something else?
• Who is putting it on? An academic group, professional org, or private group?
  This affects both what they expect of you and what you can expect compensation-wise.
• What is the topic you would like me to speak on?
• What is the topic *I* would like to speak on?
• Am I interested and available?

Then…

Audience

• Who is the audience?
  demographics, experience, interests, skills, level in organization, work context
• What are their motivations for attending?
• What is their experience level with my material? Familiarity with my topic?
• Are they the type to ask questions or sit back and listen?

Conference

• How many people will attend the conference?
• What are the themes of the conference?
• What other kinds of speakers will there be?
• Is this inspirational, academic or a hands-on conference?
• How long is the conference?

My session

• How long is my session?
• How many sessions will compete with mine?
• How many people do you anticipate in my session?
• When in the day will my session be?
• What sessions will happen before and after mine?
• What will the AV set up be like?
  they may not be able to tell you, so allow time to scout it out when you arrive
• What kind of room? How will it be set?
  they may not be able to tell you, so allow time to scout it out when you arrive

Logistics

• How will I be compensated (travel, hotel, meals, per diems, honorarium)?
• Who will book my hotel and flight?
• How many nights at the hotel will you cover?
  Most won’t cover more than two nights. Many will try to just cover one but you should definitely push for two nights - get rest before and recovery after.
• Will I receive a pass to the conference?
• When will you need my materials (abstract, bio, photos, etc)?

Good luck! Speak well!

Yesterday on Twitter, Robert Scoble posted that he is giving up on email in favor of posting in the public forums of Twitter and Facebook. His dialog, including my response via tweet, is below. Basically, Scoble’s argument, as I understand it, is that an message left in a public space may be responded to by anyone. Also, a public message can be viewed by anyone, so we all learn a little. This is what he calls “scale.”

Is he right? Is one-to-one communication dead? I think not.

Email still has a very secure place in our online world. Most of my “important” communication is aimed for just one or two select people. I don’t need to go onto the rooftop with a megaphone if I want to let my colleague know that his work is complete. I just need to email him and the rest of the world isn’t bothered with a message that means nothing to them.

Communication to a single person, or a select group, is still important and will continue to use the mechanisms that serve it best, like phone and email. There’s a place for broadcasting and there is a place for personal one-to-one communication. Using a broadcast tool like Twitter or Facebook to talk to a single individual fills up the space with unnecessary clutter.

Partial transcript of Scobleizer from Twitter, latest at top:

@seekground: but the advantage of public messages is even if I ignore you others can answer your questions. A lot of my email is tech suppor

Translation to the past 20 tweets: I need an assistant to answer my email. Outsource what you hate. I hate email.

………

@dharrels called me a “tool.” OK wiseguy. You want to answer my email? I didn’t think so.

dharrels: Scoble is twittering that he is giving up on email and only using Twitter and Facebook to communicate. What a tool.

Basically this is my gesture to the world: I am not answering my email and I’m not going to start. I’m overloaded. Tweet me.

………

If something really needs to be private than email is great. But most of my email doesn’t need to be private.

I always answer things in public space first. Why? Because those communications scale.

@arikb: yeah, email still has SOME value. But going down all the time. I far prefer people not send me private notes. Scalable communication.

PR people are the worst in the email regard. Speaker planners are close. I don’t answer a lot of my email anymore. If I did, I’d never do.

It’s amazing that in this age of Twitter that people still send email. I hate email. I hate direct Tweets. I hate Facebook messages.

How do you know what method of online conversation is appropriate for the message you want to send? I’ve seen some oddly personal, individual conversations happen on Twitter and I always find that jarring.

Twitter, like podcasts and IM status messages, is very dictatorial. It’s meant as a broadcast, not as a conversation. The communication is meant to be listened to or seen, not necessarily to be responded to. On the other side of the continuum is instant messaging and Skype, which are back-and-forth mediums and not so much about status, but more about conversation.

In the middle of the continuum are blogs, email, and social networking services like MySpace and Facebook, which allow for both types of communication. They aren’t as good as IM at conversations, nor as good as Twitter at broadcasting status, but are hybrids in between, useful for when you need explanation. It’s no coincidence that the messages on either end of the continuum are short, while those in the center are for longer communication — it is when you want to broadcast a message that is more than status, but less than a conversation.

Many times, the most effective interactions aren’t media- and or technology-based. They are just people, interacting with each other. I was reminded of this today at SFO, waiting for my flight to Las Vegas for the IA Summit.

I travel a lot. As I stood at the check-in kiosk, staring at the “delayed” notice flashing insistently at me, I got that sinking feeling in my stomach, felt my bags get heavier and my throat get drier. Travel stress set in.

I staggered over to the security line, boarding passes and ID in one hand, wallet in the other. My backpack and camera bag were falling off my shoulders.

“If you are carrying mascara, toothpaste, mouthwash, hair gel, whiskey, vodka, liquid makeup, lipstick, lotion, or any other liquid it must be under 3 ounces and you must remove it from your bag for inspection. All liquids must be under 3 oz in size. This means that if you have a 9 oz tube of toothpaste with only one ounce of toothpaste left in it, you cannot take it through security. If you have water bottles you must…”

Like a town crier, the TSA officer’s booming voice listed the things you could bring and the things you couldn’t. He cracked some jokes. People giggled. They asked him questions.

He went on and on. “He thinks he’s funny,” I muttered. But I wasn’t laughing — I was tired and annoyed. Just as I began to feel like some sad proletariat in an anti-utopian novel, I heard the following exchange:

“Do they make you say that stuff?” a passenger asked. My ears perked up.

“No, but it seems to help.” the TSA officer said brightly. “We have this sign,” he gestured towards a sign I had completely missed, “but it turns out nobody reads the sign and nobody listens to recorded voices.”

Standing there, stressed out in the security line, I was reminded:

I can design all the signs I want.

I can record James Earl Jones dramatically reading liquid requirements.

I can make web sites, pamphlets, and kiosks.

But, if harried air travelers don’t listen to recorded voices and they don’t read the signs, well, I might as well be Sisyphus, pushing a giant rock up a hill for all eternity. And I’ll bet a bazillion dollars those harried travelers aren’t checking the web site for liquid regulation updates.

As the TSA officer reminded me, people will listen to a human being, especially a funny one, standing right in front of them. If he tells them what they need to know and nicely answers questions they have, well, the travelers might actually listen. His solution may not be elegant or flashy, but it worked.

Dan’s recent blog post about Twitter has gotten me thinking about social connections and the differences in expectations on a PC vs. a mobile phone.

It seems with regard to social connections on a PC, more is better. Linked-in, Myspace, and the like — it’s a good thing to have lots of friends.

Twitter is interesting because it lives with its feet in two worlds — PC and mobile.

I see my Twitter page on my PC = good. I have friends. I’m popular and well-connected.

I monitor Twitters on my PC = fun. Interesting to know what people are up to.

I get texts on my mobile phone from all those people = bad. I am overwhelmed and annoyed with information that isn’t relevant to me.

Interesting. Why good and fun on a PC, but annoying on my mobile phone?

Here are some thoughts:

Inviting someone into your online social circle affords you both the ability to keep in touch, but also earns you a little chunk of social capital. Look — I have 200 friends! However, there’s a tax with that connection — connecting is an implicit way of saying, “You’re important and I want to know what you are up to.” But as we have all experienced, monitoring the constant IM pings, emails, blogs — and then factoring on top of that the ebb and flow of daily life — keeping up with the constant chatter and requests for attention from friends online can be overwhelming.

The constant requests for attention can be overwhelming but the PC affords us a level of control. People don’t carry their PC around with them at all times so the expectations around the requests for attention are different. I “check” my email and RSS feeds. I “log on” and “log off” to IM. I’m pretty free with giving out my email address because I have some semblance of control over responding. The PC affords us a lot of control and in some ways allows us to create an identity that reflects not necessarily who we are, but how we want to be perceived (very social and well-connected — somebody with a lot of social capital).

But the mobile phone is a different animal.

I carry it with me everywhere I go. I don’t give my mobile number out to just anybody. I answer it when it beeps and rings at me. When it beeps or rings, I expect whatever is on the other end of that request for attention to be important. And when it is not, I’m usually annoyed.

In some ways, the mobile phone keeps me honest — or at least my behavior is a more accurate reflection of the social connections that are really important to me. I don’t like getting calls or texts from people I don’t know and I don’t like getting a bunch of Twitters from people that I have a loose connection to.

Maybe that is a key difference between the PC and mobile. Honesty.

Maybe the delta between how we want to be perceived vs. who we actually are and how we live in the world is less forgiving on mobiles. Maybe mobile phones require us to be more honest about our relationships to others. Maybe on the mobile, it’s not about the number of friends, but the depth of the connections to those friends.

Or maybe I’m just bitter I don’t have more friends on Twitter.

In his post yesterday, my colleague Dan pointed out some of Twitter’s flaws, including the potential of twitters to verge on banality, as well as cause attenuation conflicts. While I’ve been a fan of the service since launch, I’m not blind to those flaws. More than anything, I’m excited to see the evolution of the product — I’m waiting for all of these little bits of ambient data that Twitter shoots back and forth to resolve into something more meaningful.

Increasing the contextual value of Twitter messages should happen without impacting my normal use of Twitter; any changes should ideally dissolve into current behavior. I’ve been saying for a while that presence and status go together like chocolate and peanut butter — they combine to define part of your online identity. So why not simplify matters and get the systems I use to communicate them to work together?

I was thinking about this during SXSW, when I experimented with sending SMS to both Twitter and Plazes at the same time. I knew that if I sent “at casino el camino” to both systems, I could simultaneously let my friends know my status and log my location for my presence history on Plazes. Even better, the friends that I have on Plazes could query “Casino El Camino?” to Plazes SMS to see who else was there (without having to spam everyone on Twitter).

What I’d like to see is Twitter integrate some of how Plazes parses SMS, since it is already using a structured grammar to get valuable bits of context from the messages I send it. In full disclosure, defining the Plazes SMS user experience is the first portion of the work I’ve done with Plazes to launch. The team and I worked hard to make it both easy to use and extensible — it employs a grammar of “at”, “in” and “on” phrases to allow natural expressions of location. I believe that an integration effort between the two products would allow the Plazes’ parsing mechanism to listen in on my twitters, so that when I send “having a martini at Pony Bar” to Twitter, it could be parsed to pull out the location data. Even better, it could do so without requiring any change in how I normally write.

Of course, not every message would include an “at,” in” or “on” but the ones that did might contain a place that Plazes knows about, that it could log to its system and associate with my account. And there’s the value add for this integration — my normal behavior of broadcasting status now generates a presence stream that can be archived, queried, and used to help me coordinate my activities and interactions with my friends. For those who don’t want the service, simple options for turning location-parsing on or off should be implemented. To encourage people to use both services (and bring their communities closer together), I’d love to see both Twitter and Plazes adopt OpenID for sign in.

As we move away from overly-centralized collaboration and coordination tools, I’m encouraged to see lightweight platforms like Twitter and Plazes emerge and become popular. I believe the two provide naturally complimentary offerings, and any form of cooperation between them could benefit a whole host of users.

The Twitter Effect

Originally uploaded by odannyboy.
If anyone ever asks for an example of interaction design changing behavior, I will simply point them to Twitter.

I signed up for Twitter about six months ago, but frankly never used it. The whole idea of people sending me lots of small text messages about the minutia of their daily lives seemed, well, pointless and annoying. It’s also painfully addicting, in a very narcissistic way. The picture above was a fairly typical sight at SXSW, with people breaking off face-to-face conversations to make and read Twitter posts. That’s The Bad.

The Good is that at SXSW, in crowded environments with a large group of mobile people trying to coordinate over a small city, it really proved invaluable. It alerted me to parties, dinner gatherings, pool swims, good conference sessions, etc. It was the perfect lightweight tool to keep you clued in to what was happening.

The Ugly I just discovered yesterday, and it finally forced me to turn Twitter off again. My friend Sean figured out how to send his Twitter posts to his blog. So now, not only am I getting his Twitter posts on my phone filling up my inbox, they are also now filling up my RSS reader. That’s pretty ugly.

In my (limited) world view, unless I have a deep connection with you that I want to maintain all the time (and for me, this is a very small number of people), I don’t need to know everything about your life. I only want to know major thoughts and events (at most) that you have taken a reasonable amount of time to write down. That’s why I subscribe to your blog. I want to know your filtered life.

This is not to bash Sean or Twitter, which as I’ve noted above, is a useful tool in certain circumstances. But it’s missing some crucial controls that would make it less addictive and attention-draining, like nuanced groups the ability to switch individuals on and off. But they are on to something — this idea of lightweight status. One can easily see a service like Plazes that would automatically SMS friends when I move to a different location.

Side note: Why did Twitter take off, when Upoc, which has basically done the same thing for the last 6 years, never really did? One reason I can think of is that Upoc might be, well, too sophisticated and overly designed. You can do a lot more with Upoc than you can with Twitter. But Upoc never seemed to be (although it is) the powerful, raw tool that Twitter is. Twitter’s fawning press must be really annoying to them.