where Steve Portigal comes in. Armed with his method of interviewing, years of experience, a sustained devotion to the hard problems that our culture throws off (not just at Evergreen State College), and a penetrating intelligence, Steve could capture much of what we need to know about Evergreen, and he could do it in a week. And that’s saying something. Steve is like a Mars Rover. You can fire him into just about any environment, and he will come back with the fundamentals anatomized and insights that illuminate the terrain like flares in a night sky. Using his gift and ethnography, Steve Portigal can capture virtually any world from the inside out. Now we can recognize, enter, and participate in it. Now we can innovate for it, speak to it, serve it.
And if this is all Steve and ethnography can do, well, that would be enough. But Steve and the method can do something still more miraculous. He can report not just on exotic worlds like Evergreen, but the worlds we know—the living room, the boardroom, the not-for-profit, and the design firm. This is noble work because we think we grasp the world we occupy. How would we manage otherwise? But, in fact, we negotiate these worlds thanks to a series of powerful, intricate assumptions. The thing about these assumptions is that, well, we assume them. This means they are concealed from view.
We can’t see them. We don’t know they are active. We don’t know they’re there. Ethnography and Steve come in here, too. They are uniquely qualified to unearth these assumptions, to discover, in the immortal words of Macklemore, those moccasins we all go walking in.
This is a wonderful book. Steve can teach us how to improve our ability to penetrate other worlds and examine our assumptions. Ethnography has suffered terribly in the last few years. Lots of people claim to know it, but in fact the art and science of the method have been badly damaged by charlatans and snake oil salesmen.
Let’s seize this book as an opportunity to start again. Let Steve Portigal be our inspired guide.
—Grant McCracken
Chief Culture Officer, Basic Books
Culturematic, Harvard Business Review Press
INTRODUCTION
I had my first experience in user research more than 30 years ago, going on-site to classrooms and homes to see if people of various ages could tell the difference—blindfolded—between different colors of Smarties candy (a candy from Canada, where I grew up, that is similar to M&M’s but with a broader color palette). It turned out that the youngest people, with their taste buds least affected by age, could tell instantly.1
As a tween, the initial impact of this science fair project was only on my snacking behavior. Implications for my career arc did not surface until many years later when I found myself in Silicon Valley with a fresh master’s degree in HCI. This was an awkward point for me: I had no design portfolio. I hadn’t conducted any usability tests. I hadn’t created any interfaces. I had no design process. I had no awareness of how software (or any other product or service) was produced. All I had was a nascent point-of-view about people and technology. I was very lucky to end up working in an industrial design firm that was experimenting with actually talking to users, whether to validate design ideas or to work at the “fuzzy front-end” where innovation could take place, “left of the idea.”
Even as the company was exploring how to do this sort of work, I was invited to apprentice in the emergent practice. At first, I was allowed to review videos but wasn’t sent out on interviews. Then I was sent into the field but only to hold the camera and observe. Then I was allowed to ask just one or two questions at the end. And so it went. After a while, I was leading interviews myself, training other staff, and even lecturing to students and clients.
While it’s tempting for me to be nostalgic about that time period as one that had a special focus on learning, I don’t think anything has changed for me. Nowadays, I travel widely to interview users and to teach others how to interview users. In the past few weeks, I’ve led a number of training workshops and interviewed a bunch of fascinating people. (I called home from the field to report that, once again, “This is the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on!”) Maybe it’s my researcher nature, but having fresh stories from the field to share in the workshops and having refined thoughts about how to interview to take with me into the field is pretty damn wonderful.
My best wish for you is that learning about how you learn about users will fuel your own passions in some similar measure.
—Steve Portigal, March 6, 2013, Montara, California
CHAPTER 1
The Importance of Interviewing in Design
User Insight in the Design Process
To Interview Well, One Must Study
This is a great time for the design researcher. Within user-experience design, service design, and to a lesser extent, industrial design, user research has gone from being an outsider activity, to being tolerated, to being the norm. Across industry events, conferences, online forums, school curricula, and professional practice, there’s a tacit agreement that designing for the user is the preferred way to think about design. As with any generalization, there are exceptions. Maybe you aren’t feeling the love right now, but you probably can agree that things are much better than they were in the past. To design for users, you must begin with a deep understanding of users. If you don’t already have that understanding, you need to do some form of user research.
TIP YOU ARE NOT YOUR USER
You may be a user, but be careful of being seduced into designing for yourself. Jared Spool calls that “self design” and identifies the benefits and risks at www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/07/22/uietips-self-design/. I think he’s too easy on self design. Lots of niche companies make the snowboards, outdoor equipment, and mixing gear that they, as enthusiasts, would want. But some have trouble expanding their offering in an innovative way, because they are so caught up in being the user.
NOTE GAINING INSIGHT VS. PERSUADING THE ORGANIZATION
While doing ethnographic research in Japan, I sat with my clients while they conducted another study. They brought users into a facility and showed them the most elegantly designed forms for printer ink cartridges. They were smooth, teardrop shapes that were shiny and coated with the color of the ink. They also showed users the existing ink cartridges: black rectangles with text-heavy stickers.
Can you guess what the research revealed? Of course. People loved the new designs, exclaiming enthusiastically and caressing
