Adaptive Path Blog

At our recent MX Conference, we set out to capture emerging insights from the speakers using our graphic recording skills. With 4-5 colored markers fanning out from between our fingers at any given moment (picture a wolverine claw), we illuminated the speakers’ talks with memorable visuals and colorful typography. (Pictures coming soon.) On the last day of the conference, as I was running around with a pack of sticky notes trying to identify common themes across talks, it occurred to me: What if the conference participants were involved in this process?

At every conference I’ve attended, I’ve heard people express that they get as much out of interacting with other attendees as from the speakers. Everyone has a story to tell, but there’s only so much people can articulate in response to the FAQ, “What did you think of the talk?” It’s made me think: As design researchers, we often use hands-on, participatory techniques to draw latent insights out of our participants. Why don’t we use these same strategies to draw out and capture conference participants’ ideas?

What are some activities that could encourage deeper conversations and equip people to document their thoughts? What could conferences do to give people something to “triangulate” around — besides the wonderful food? Here are a few I’ve seen (not only at conferences, but at social events, college dorm walls, our office bathroom, etc.):

Graffiti Wall: Put up a giant piece of paper with some initial structure and encourage collaborative graphic recording — where participants can add their own notes, sketches and insights to a giant mural. Stickers and collaging images and words could be provided as well.

Open Whiteboards: Write questions on giant sticky notes (e.g., “What is service design?”) and put them in the halls where people can write on it during breaks. It could give people something to talk about while providing a forum for expression.

Five Minute Madness: We do this in our staff meetings: Someone makes an audacious statement that they may or may not agree with (e.g., “Experience Designer is a meaningless job title.”), and we discuss it for five minutes. Something like this could also be done on giant pieces of paper.

Projected Messages: Have a computer hooked up to a projector where people can type (or Twitter) ideas and thoughts and see them projected. Providing a question or conversation prompt, as described in Open Whiteboards and Five Minute Madness, might encourage participation.

Birds of a Feather: Place a “topic card” on each of the dining tables, such as “design research” or “managing internal experience teams” and encourage people to find a table with a topic that interests them.

Thinking about conferences you’ve attended (or planned), have you seen (or thought of) any other interesting strategies for helping people get their thoughts out there?

Update: UX Evangelist David Crow explores these ideas further on his blog.

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Since I am from a rural town in Iowa, Eric Gilbert’s CHI paper/presentation about social media in rural life was of special interest to me. The U.S. census bureau defines rural as towns with a population less than 2500 people and lacking a direct connection to a metropolitan area (i.e people can’t commute to a city for work). Some social indicators of rural populations are that they tend to be older, with less education and lower income. Approximately one-quarter of the U.S. population is rural. However, as Eric pointed out, there is very little research on this segment of the U.S. population with regard to how they use technology.

Eric started out his presentation pointing out that rural people adopted America’s first widespread social technology - the telephone -very enthusiastically. People thought the device would reduce isolation and bridge social distance, which it did. However, rural people adopted the technology differently than their urban counterparts. Eric pointed to the telephone feature of, “party lines”, which proved successful in rural areas while highly unpopular in urban environments and sited the deep social ties as a perhaps the reason why.

Eric used the qualitative work of sociologists like Falk and most specifically the work of K.A Larson, “The Social Construction of the Internet: A Rural Perspective”, who conducted a qualitative study of internet use in the rural US. A particularly interesting finding from Larson’s work was that they found women to be the guardians of the internet in rural US communities.

From these studies, Eric created five hypothesis about how people in rural communities would use social media differently than their urban counterparts. He sampled data of 3,000 public MySpace users to test the following hypothesis:

1. Rural users will have far fewer friends and comments than urban users

2. Females will account for a greater proportion of users than urban users

3. Rural users will set their profiles to private at higher rates than urban users.

4. Rural users’ friends will live much closer than urban users’ friends

5 As compared to urban users, rural users’ distribution of friends will preference strong ties over weak ties.

At this point in the presentation Eric shared a slide of the United States in which he had randomly picked 50 urban and 50 rural users and plotted the distance of their friends. The map looked eerily like a red/blue map of the U.S. His point — rural and urban people don’t tend to mix when using social media. He pointed out that it is distressing that a nation politically divided along rural and urban lines has replicated itself online.

All of Eric’s hypothesis were proven correct using quantitative analysis of the MySpace data.

Eric’s conclusions were that both rural and urban people use social media, but they use it very differently. He found that rural social networks span other rural social networks, creating limited access to social capital for rural people. Borrowing from Larson, people in rural areas say they want to reach beyond their communities, but in practice, they don’t.

Eric’s design implications for the HCI community:
1. Build for incremental trust
2. Introduce urban and rural people to each other through social media. Online has the opportunity to introduce people… something that telephony did not.

He closed the presentation with the assertion that a rural perspective could she new light on technology use. He also wondered out loud if wireless networks are so different than party lines.

Eric’s study made me wonder if his findings were unique to the US population or if they could be extrapolated to rural/urban communities throughout the world. Paul Dourish made the comment that many of the dimensions that define “rural” populations mirror how we define class and that he could potentially substitute the world “rural” with “class” — meaning that rural could actually be a socio-economic class. Danah Boyd has also gleaned some interesting insights around how issues of class have played out in online social networking. Through this lens, Eric’s paper proves that socio-economic behavior patterns in the real world are replicated in the online social media space — classes don’t tend to mix.

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Evangeline Haughney from Adobe Systems gave a great talk on using comics to communicate qualitative research findings. She noticed that readers of research reports are usually skimmers and get bogged down with traditional research reports. She wanted to find compelling way to communicate findings and was inspired by Kevin Cheng’s work on creating comics as a design tool. She figured if comics could communicate design, they might also be able to communicate research findings.

Evangeline admitted that like many of us, she is not a skilled drawer. But a $20 software tool, Comic Book Creator and the help of a graphic designer allowed her to overcome what she lacked of drawing skills.

Some of the structural attributes of comics proved helpful:

Evangeline took cues from Manga comics and included reading directions in the comic.

Comics generally start with some context setting — “It was a dark and stormy night…” this narrative device proved helpful in setting the context for the research findings.

The design language of comics expresses emotions of joy, anger, frustration — communicating the emotions of users from research is part of what gives research reports their power.

Comics also provide a format for layering complex data — which is something that is often the output of research studies.

The result:
Evangeline hand delivered all the comics to stakeholders within Adobe and a typical response was, “Wow! This is really cool.” Not something most researchers are accustomed to hearing after presenting research findings.

Initially Evangeline thought the research comic books would be viral and people would pass them around. Instead, like the comics we know and love, people tended to hoard them. As a result, she wished she had printed more.

Comics as a research report format probably aren’t the best choice for every culture, but it’s definitely a creative format idea for communicating research.

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Susan P Wyche of Georgia Institute of Technology presented a paper Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya. The presentation focused on a study she conducted in Nairobi, Kenya. She referenced compelling statistics about the growth of Pentecostal Christian faith in Africa. Using compelling growth statistics, she made the case that in order to understand emerging markets, it is necessary to understand the role faith and spirituality play in the lives of people in these markets.

She also shared how the use of sketching in her fieldwork proved helpful in the questioning process. One audience member explained it best in that we often view design as a method or a process to inform system building. However, in this case, design proved a useful method in deciding what should and should not be designed.

The sketches Susan used in the field opened up a dialogue with the the research participants. They provided an opportunity for participants to reflect and discuss how the depicted ideas would fit into their world view.

I’ve heard of sketches being used in the field to provide insight into acceptance or perceived usefulness of a concept. Susan’s paper provides evidence of another use: sketching as a method for gaining cultural understanding.

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Allison Woodruff of Intel Research presented the findings of an extensive contextual research study of people throughout the US who had made significant changes to their home in order to support a green lifestyle. She noticed most research to date focused on activism so the goal of her study was to understand the daily practices of individuals committed to green living in order to understand how HCI could help promote positive personal behavior. Her presentation contained compelling video clips of participants from the study who relayed the “why” of their daily practices in relationship to their home and their desire to be more green.

Some of her findings were:

Living in a green home is like living on a ship
People in this study developed an immediate and physical relationship with their home. The green friendly homes were like a ships — participants needed to remain aware, make constant minor adjustments in order to maximize efficiency. While at times burdensome, participants in Allison’s study also spoke a kind of fulfillment this consciousness provided.

Continuous Computation
Participants in the study enjoyed the modest mental challenges that result from their lifestyle choice. They felt that green was about being mindful — and engaged. This engagement wasn’t viewed as a burden, but a pleasurable puzzle that engaged their mind.

The Path
Allison spoke of how the participants in her study acknowledged the commitment required to being green — that it was not a single act but a lifelong relationship to change. Their relationship to the lifestyle had grown from an ardent hobby to an organizing principle for their life.

Individualism as a driver
Allison pointed out that the participants expressed a strong drive for uniqueness and a desire to differentiate themselves from the rest of society. These folks were proud and viewed themselves as independent thinkers.

Implications for the HCI community
- Provide people with tools for personal action.
- Provide focus. It’s easy for people to get overwhelmed with all the choices and often recommendations about how to be more green are confusing and/or conflicting. Provide people with the tools to focus on one or two things and provide depth — breadth will grow from a feeling of success.(depth vs. breadth learning)
- Engage people mentally. People like the modest mental challenges that come with the mindfulness of being green.
- Provide people with the tools to debate and decide for themselves. Support the complex decision-making process by helping people understand trade-offs.
- Change the circumstances. Directly target large-scale corporations and government.

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Recently, we had a discussion on an internal mailing list about eyetracking, specifically around why we didn’t use it as a research tool.

Brandon:

First, lack of availability of it and familiarity with it as a research tool.

Second, I find it difficult to interpret the data. So someone did look at something first, second, third, and then ignored some of the rest of the page. I think a good information designer could have devised the flow of the eye on the UI on their own. What I value is the interpretation, which I can get from a few participants “thinking aloud” when walking through a prototype.

Andrew:

I agree that the data may be difficult to interpret, or, at least read into great detail. But, eye tracking can help identify hot spots on the screen or interface that enable the designer to refine the placement of important content or interactions.For example, having the 3rd spot on Google’s Adsense ranking is often desirable. It’s the top spot on the right hand column of ads. Studies have shown that eyes are drawn there more than eyes are drawn to the first and second ad spaces at the top of the page. This affects how some companies buy ads.

Same goes for understanding car dashboards. Knowing where users eyes rest or gravitate towards when faced with continually distracting circumstances helps designers focus on those important locations.

Peter:

Long ago (when I was at Epinions), I looked into eyetracking as a research tool. It was prohibitively expensive. Since that time, I’ve done quite well without it, and haven’t felt the urge to go back. And you rarely hear about eyetracking leading to crucial insights.That said, I just finished watching a presentation that should probably be considered must-see at Adaptive Path — Jensen Harris’ talk at MIX08 on the development of the UI for Office 2007. It’s long (the presentation is 75 minutes, with another 15 for Q&A), and remarkably detailed. Jensen shows many paths considered but not taken, and explains how they got to where they did.

Among the tools Jensen’s team used was eyetracking. When you’re making detailed UI design decisions, eyetracking contributes to some crucial understandings. He showed a movie of someone trying to find the Find feature in Office 2003… It was pretty much all he needed to persuade the Office team that a serious reorganization of the features was necessary.

Todd W:

I did a good bit of eyetracking work a few years ago (even published some papers) and was left with the feeling that it’s not really worth the expense except in very specific situations.Consider my experience: We were evaluating different interfaces for searching video content and wanted to know whether text or still images were most helpful for different tasks. People weren’t good at reporting where they looked, what they spent the most time on, or what was most helpful. Eyetracking helped us figure out that text was still more important to them than a still image — though a small animated clip was most helpful. We spent thousands and thousands of dollars on equipment and many hours getting it to work — these systems are horribly complex and unreliable. I came away feeling that we could have gotten to the place we did much faster and cheaper by just iterating quickly and evaluating all of our concepts with users. While they may not be able to explicitly articulate what they are doing, over time you can figure it out with some trial and error.

The allure of eyetracking was that it gave you statistics — great for academic papers — and cool images of sight paths. It counts as EVIDENCE in a way that other forms of quick and dirty research don’t — sounds like this was the big win for Jensen Harris.

Eyetracking is helpful when you need to know something extremely tactical at a very precise level of detail. But we should think very hard about the payoff. There’s a great deal of overhead and it’s difficult to make this a flexible, nimble process.

Given Todd’s concerns with the cost, I looked around a bit, and found some attempts at using simple webcams for eyetracking. I’d love to know more about such low-cost approaches.

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The talk I gave last fall at the Institute of Design’s 2007 Design Research conference is now available as a video!

It’s probably one of the funniest (and most fun) talks I’ve ever given. Enjoy!

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In the newest issue of Interactions magazine, Steve Portigal laments the use of personas. His point essentially is that personas “invite misuse” and therefore they should be avoided. Peter has responded, pointing out that Steve has thrown a baby or two out with the bath water by conflating personas with poorly conceived personas. To some degree it becomes a war of analogies, with Steve saying personas are like guns (i.e. inviting misuse and dire consequences) and Peter saying they are like movies (i.e. just because most are bad doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the activity of movie-making).

But neither of them addresses the underlying issue that is at the heart of all this fear and loathing, use and misuse. The power and danger of personas is their realism. Good personas use this realism to drive authentic understanding deep into the heart of an organization. As humans, we are highly attuned to observing, interpreting, and relating to other people. Good personas take advantage of this tendency and focus it on “people” that are highly relevant to a design, business, or engineering task. I have seen this have profound positive effects on organizations.

The issue is that personas are not real. They are realistic but, in the end, fictional. Knowing Steve, I can say that he is very uncomfortable with that element of fiction because of how it can affect the people creating and using personas. When handled poorly, organizations can begin (or continue) to talk about real people as characters or stereotypes. And that, as he would probably say, “freaks him out.” As it should. We all hate to see organizations misunderstanding the people they are trying to serve.

But does this potential really outweigh the benefits? In my experience, personas have always improved an organizations understanding of their customers because, if nothing else, they become a tangible and explicit artifact for focusing and catalyzing discussion about customers. While this may not always be inspiring, it moves things forward. Incremental change is better than no change at all.

Of course, Steve’s essay also raises an important question, what is the alternative to personas? (Peter makes this same point.) If we agree that qualitative, contextual, and in-depth research is important and necessary, how do we capture and communicate the things we learn in the field beyond giving people a mountain of raw video and audio to go through for themselves? (Assuming that video and audio actually substitutes for being in the field…). Steve says that we should “tell stories.” But every story told is an approximation. Details are left out or reordered to support a larger theme or message. This is true in journalism as much as in romance or sci-fi. In the same way, some level of fiction is necessary when it comes to personas. Personas are meant to represent archetypical customers or users of a product or service. Representing archetypes requires a certain level of aggregation and synthesis.

In my whole career, I have seen few things that inspire strong reactions like personas. Enthusiasm & excitement as well as fear and loathing. So, I can’t fault Steve for his strong reaction. Personas blur the line between truth and fiction, which can be disconcerting. But this all highlights the fact that personas are more a medium of communication than a tool. So, Steve’s gun analogy isn’t really appropriate. Peter’s movie analogy is better. Or consider painting, which actually had/has a movement called Realism. I think it’s a mistake to throw out the idea of painting or of Realism just because someone’s first attempt looks more like a toddler’s scrawl than a Rembrandt.

P.S. Congrats to Steve for such a provocative first column!

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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.”

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The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).

We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!

Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.

Some of my favorite pics:

Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…

There was lots of writing on walls…

Though some groups preferred the floor…

And lots, and lots of stickies…

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