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Kiel Schmidt and I are in Portland attending three days of charrette training and certification with the National Charrette Institute. I was going to launch right into a recap of day one, and then I realized that I should not take for granted that it would be clear why we are here or what I hoped to get out of this.
In the past year or so, I have experienced a few things that made me want some more formal training in charrette methods. One was the Tower streetscape charrette that Kiel and I both blogged about. If you read our critique, you will see what we found lacking in that event. (So far, my experience at the NCI training confirms that the Tower streetscape process was seriously flawed.) Then, last summer, I went to an event held by the city in which firms competing for downtown specific planning gig were introduced to potential local collaborators. Several firms touted their experience and expertise running charrettes.
At the time, Kiel and I talked about our skills in community-based design research, and agreed that while we had a lot of experience, we could use more formal training in charrette methods. Since then, Kiel and Shaunt Yemenjian founded Spacio Design Studios, and we have looked for opportunities to bring the Institute of Public Anthropology and Spacio together on community-based design projects. So, attending the NCI training is part of a plan to increase our capacity to be a local source of excellent design planning and research.
I’ll try to blog more about the training itself and I’m sure Kiel with have a blog post up at some point, too.
Referring to my previous posting, we decided in the end to not issue any instructions to the participants about staying on the library website. However, when a participant went off the site, the moderators asked them why and then directed them back on to the library website. This way, we have hopefully captured a picture of the points on the site that drive people off while keeping the focus of the study on the usability of the site itself. Forty two Fresno State juniors participated last week and now were working out the coding procedure.
I’m in the middle of a usability study of Fresno State’s Henry Madden Library website. We’re gearing up to run 42 Fresno State undergrads through ten tasks on the site, from locating a book on a particular subject to finding information about special collections. The goal is to assess the extent to which the site is useful and effective at delivering access to information. Can users efficiently use the site to accomplish their tasks? We know the site does some things well, and that it has problems, but we’re excited to actually explore the depth of the site’s pros and cons with a statistically significant sample.
What’s fascinating and fun about this is the multidisciplinary nature of the project and the constant struggle to clearly define what we are doing. The team consists of three librarians, Allison Cowgill, Amanda Dinscore and Patrick Newell, plus myself and one of my advanced anthro students, Kim Arnold. The librarians know the site best, and they know what students need to accomplish on it. All have prior experience with library- and information-related research. I’ve found my own best contributions relate to how to handle live human subjects with both respect and a firm guiding hand. Plus, I think it’s helpful to the project to have non-librarians around who can probe the rationale behind the various questions. I have found myself asking, repeatedly, “What are you trying to get at when you ask a user to do this?” – forcing an examination of assumptions and goals. I hope I always have someone asking me those kinds of questions when I’m formulating projects.
Right now, we’re in the testing phase and the instructions to the users and wording of some of the questions are still up in the air. We’ve tested the protocol on each other, and on the moderators – five anthropology majors who will administer to the test to the actual subjects. Each time we’ve administered the protocol, we’ve turned up a new issue. One open issue we have right now is how to handle the well-known student practice of going off site to find resources that are on site. For example, we know that some students use Google Scholar to search for resources – a practice that sometimes brings them back to the library website itself. Another example: in a test session, one of the anthro student moderators playing test subject opened a browser page and used Google to find the requested information, and then tracked back to the library website – “found it.” So, in the test, do we prohibit users from going off site?
Right now, I’m leaning toward prohibition. We know students use Google and other tools to make the library’s website work for them. But this study is a test of the library’s website. If we’re going to gauge how well it works for students, we need to keep them on the site – even if it means short-circuiting their tendency to exit the site and come back from another direction. If a user struggles to find something, or fails to find it, then we’ll know that’s an area where we need re-examine the site’s architecture. If we let them go off site to solve the problem, we won’t be able to record the process through which they try to solve the problem using the library site.
This is an odd place for me to come down, since most of the work I do is highly strategic. I place a high value on trying to see the world from another’s point of view. In a different context, I’d really want to let the user go to Google and show me how they would really solve the problem. That’s real user practice and it’s significant. But in this context, I keep coming back to the goals of the study: this is a test of the library website, not a study of student search practices.
I can’t wait will our next workgroup meeting where we can hash out this and other issues. I suspect some of my colleagues will have different approaches to the issues. Like I said, these collaborative, multidisciplinary projects are FUN.
Comments and opinions are most welcome.
Yesterday, I (Anthroguy, aka Hank Delcore) had the pleasure of visiting Jeffrey Scott Agency for a guest lecture to the JSA staff. The visit grew out of my recent acquaintance with JSA’s Director of Client Strategies, Jim Lowe. Jim is doing some great strategic work on behalf of JSA clients using a variety of market research methods. Meeting up — a link facilitated by Travis Sheridan — Jim and I quickly discovered common ground in the use of strategic information to inform the design and marketing of client products and services.
My talk to the assembled staff focused on the use of ethnography to get at the implicit, contextual level of users’ experience of various product and service areas. I used some examples I’ve laid out in a previous posting, as well as some drawn from the Library Study we did at Fresno State and a recent advance in hearing aid design. As Jim and I discussed before my visit, the puzzling thing about this kind of work is: how do you translate strategic information into the actual design of effective, experientially rich products and messages. In other words, what exactly takes place in the space between the collection and analysis of the design/marketing data and the final product. The data is advisory: it never actually “tells” you what the final design should be. So, typically, the creatives, ideally in conversation with the data, work their magic and come up with the final message or design.
I don’t think any of us really know what that “magic” is. Afterall, this is art we are talking about, whether it’s a carefully crafted radio spot or a beautiful product. What I can say, however, is that the chances of a smooth and effective shift from data to design get better with close collaboration among project managers, research types and the creatives themselves. This was what I tried to leave with the folks at JSA:
“Product or account managers, researchers and creatives – we need to keep each other close, perhaps even closer than our own kind. In the Library Study, we had the interior design students attend the design workshops [on the interior spaces of the Henry Madden Library] to see firsthand how we gathered the information. Afterwards, we all sat together, anthropologists and interior designers, and watched the video we shot of the students making their designs in the workshops. We hashed out the meaning of the way they placed the blocks and the meaning of their explanations for their choices. This was frustrating, puzzling, time consuming, exciting and rewarding. But in the end, we need to be in each other’s business as much as possible. There is no substitute for crossing boundaries and hashing things out, together, despite (or because of) all of our different specialties and interests. I am sure that there is no other way to excellence.”
Thanks to Bruce Batti, President of JSA, and to Jim Lowe, for the chance to exchange experiences with the strategic end of client services. The staff that gathered was attentive and engaged and we had a lively discussion afterwards. Looking forward to more collaboration with JSA in the future!
In a recent posting on the Harvard Business blog site, anthropologist Grant McCracken explains why the idea of a “new normal” — “the idea that when income, credit and confidence return, Americans will not return to our free-spending ways” – is off base. He believes that once the immediate crisis is past, American consumers will resume breakneck consumption rates.
Why? In short, because we as Americans have developed an enduring set of practices that involve making and maintaining social lives through consumption. These practices are not ephemeral, and we will not simply slough them off in the face of the “Great Recession.” They run deeper, and they’ll be back soon enough.
In his short piece, McCracken paints a portrait of “Susan,” a composite of consumers he has known through research. Susan has a garage full of stuff – so much that her cars are relegated to the driveway. She just spent $45,000 to remodel her kitchen/dining/living room into a single “great room” so she can better socialize with dinner guests and not feel “like a servant” in her own home, shunted away in the kitchen while her guests yuck it up on the other side of a wall between her and the living room.
Let’s review some ways we might interpret Susan:
Susan is a shallow, grasping materialist whose life is empty and meaningless, and so she is trying to fill it with stuff.
Susan is just exercising her god-given right to spend her (or her family’s) well-earned money however she sees fit, and who are we to criticize her.
Susan is a status-seeking machine. This is all about display. Susan is asking us to look at what she has, can afford to have, etc. – and to register her relatively high position on some scale of social hierarchy.
To some extent, McCracken turns away all of these options in favor of a less sound-bitey, but more satisfying, conclusion: Susan’s consumption practices are acts of personal and social self-definition. From the garage to the great room, her consumption enables her to enact, socially, the kind of person she wants to be. (By the way, McCracken focuses on someone with quite a bit disposable income, but this process of personal/social self-definition can hold in different ways all across and up and down the socioeconomic spectrum.)
In an exchange with a commenter to the piece, McCracken sums it up nicely: “Americans are especially interested, for several technical reasons, in using the object world, their material culture, to [define themselves].”
What I like about this post is that it represents classic anthropology. McCracken is trying to see things from Susan’s point of view. He resists easy judgment passing. He’s sympathetic to Susan; he credits her with being as much a smart, self-aware person as his readers and commenters.
Personally, I do wonder if perhaps Susan is grasping and materialistic in ways that I (again, personally) find disheartening. But McCracken’s point is that, whatever your judgments are, Susan is so much more than that. She is an American socio-cultural creature whose life is sensible and meaningful to her given her time and place. (By the way, I don’t mean “meaningful” in some cosmic sense; I simply mean that that she does what she does for reasons that fit, given the rest of her context. She is not an idiot or a dupe.) Morally judge her if you will, but if you want to understand her, leave your judgments at the door.
By the way, McCracken mentions a just-published book called Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What, by Lee Eisenberg. I bought it and I’m in the middle of it. If you’re deep into retail, marketing, or the science of consumption, you won’t find much new here. It’s breezy and a bit over-general. But, Eisenberg is a fun writer and he’s concentrated lots of stuff in one place, with half the book on the current state of the “Sell” side, and half on the “Buy” side. I recommend it. Eisenberg mentions this fun website – check it out, too.
[Anthroguy (Hank Delcore), TheAnthroGeek (Jim Mullooly), and two other Fresnans (anthropology alum Alecia Barela and current anthro major Kim Arnold) are in Philadelphia presenting papers at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. They will share a panel with two former Fresno State anthro students, Michael Scroggins and Anne Visser, now pursuing graduate studies at Columbia and the New School, respectively.]
On Nov. 23, I (meaning Anthroguy, aka Hank Delcore) visited the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA, to give a talk and do some knowledge exchange with colleagues in user experience and product planning. Nelle Steele, an old friend from grad school in Madison, WI, facilitated the visit. Nelle works on a user research team associated with Microsoft Office, obviously a massive MS division. It was fascinating getting an inside look at MS workspaces, organization and work style.
Being Thanksgiving week, many people were gone and others who had planned to come excused themselves due to looming deadlines. (Jonathan Grudin had accepted an invitation to come but unfortunately couldn’t make it.) One thing others have noted about MS was confirmed during my visit: this is a hard driving, “type A” organization where it’s all about what you can deliver. One designer brought some sketches to work on while I spoke — which I thought was great. He had a meeting the next day and had to have something ready.
The purpose of my talk was to fill the MS folks in on design anthropology at Fresno State and the work of the Institute of Public Anthropology. I ran down some curricular innovations we’ve fielded recently and described some recent IPA projects with ArcHop and the Library Study.
My other goal was to gauge how well we are prepping our students — anthro majors, business, engineering, etc. — for design-oriented work at places like Microsoft. What I heard was that we are doing lots right. One UX research manager singled out our emphasis on interdisciplinary teamwork as crucial — that’s the reality at MS, but the weakness of many highly capable experts from all fields. The other important thing we do is to help students, in their IPA-related projects, make the leap from data to design insight to concrete recommendation. MS and many other organizations demand you justify your existence by pointing to real impact, which means it’s not enough to produce good research — you have to effect change and drive implementation.
One thing I took away that I need to work sensitivity to product life cycle more into our curriculum and IPA practice. You have to know where you are in the product development cycle to know what kind of recommendations are helpful — our students need to know more about that. One product planner also noted that it’s helpful to know how to think about the links between the product and the larger strategy behind the product or even the entire organization.
This was all good stuff. It was helpful for me to see a slice of how Microsoft works and hear from some people on the front lines. On the Microsoft side, they seemed excited by the IPA’s emphasis on design research and the rich educational experiences our students are receiving. We discussed some possible points of collaboration between the IPA and Microsoft — we’ll see how those develop over the next few months.
Thanks to Nelle Steele for making my visit happen!
Greeting from Chicago, where I (Anthroguy) am attending the CEO Conference with some colleagues and students from Fresno State.
What does anthropology have to do with the market “hit rate” for new innovations? Blogger and design anthropologist Eva G:dotter Jansson answers this question nicely in a recent blog posting. Jansson makes an extended argument for the value of design anthropology and ethnographic user experience research for increasing innovation hit rates in the marketplace. The secret to hitting? Know what users really want and need. The method for finding that out? Ethnographic research – research that takes you into firsthand, face-to-face contact with users in their natural habitat, where you can observe, interact and talk with them around and about the product or service area in question. From Huggies to Lexus, user experience research has delivered the results (see Jansson’s posting for details).
Jansson cites two main sources to back her anecdotal evidence. First, she touches briefly on Standish Group’s CHAOS Report, an annual report on IT project success and failure rates. The 2009 CHAOS Report recounts the worst project failure rate in a decade. More importantly, a consistent finding across CHAOS reports over a 14 year period is, in Jansson’s words, a “lack of deep understanding of the user’s context and expressed and hidden needs.” As Mitch Bishop said over the summer: “When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects? The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.”
Why is it so hard to get the user’s needs right? In my own experience, and that of others in my field, managers often rely on marketing to tell designers of all types what the customer wants or needs — yet, ironically, marketing often don’t know customer needs very well. Or, to put it more subtly, they know a certain kind of something about customers: they know what customers say they want. However, since people often have difficulty articulating needs, this kind of verbal report is unreliable. At its worst, taking verbal reportage of customer needs straight to the design process results in feature-listing, over-loaded products, eventual customer and/or user dissatisfaction, more feature requests, etc. (And the difficulties multiply when the customer and end user are not the same.)
Ethnography aims for the a deeper understanding of user needs, at a more general and hence more basic level than the feature.
Which brings us to the Doblin Group, a leading innovation consultancy. Doblin founder Larry Keeley has been touting for years the value of design anthropology in increasing hit rates. Going back to 2005, he told Nussbaum On Design that “companies can increase their innovation effectiveness by 35% to 70% or 9 to 17 times the norm. The norm, of course is the incredibly low 4.5% ‘hit’ rate of successful innovation that companies generally have. Keeley said that ‘if you just use anthropologists, you can triple your innovation effectiveness by three times.’” Blogger Jansson cites Keeley’s figures approvingly. The hit rate boost from using design anthropology/ethnographic research makes perfect sense to me – after all, there is no other method that gets at user needs and desires any better. But, I’m still trying to track down the data on which Keeley bases his numbers. If I turn anything up, I’ll post more.
By the way, thanks to Tim Stearns and the Anthrogeek for encouraging me to blog about this. Actually, what happened was, the Anthrogeek and I were taping The Pulse radio show (dated 10/24/09) with Tim when Jansson’s blog came up and the Anthrogeek told the listeners to tune into TheAnthroGuys for more. So, here’s that “more” A-geek promised for you.
Recently, I spoke to a locally respected and experienced business advisor about the process of learning about consumer needs. I said that I thought you can’t simply ask people what they want because most people can’t articulate – at least not in a verbal Q&A context – a clear vision of future products and services. He said, “Hank, I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that.” He went on to describe how he had once complained to his wife about a glaring blind spot in consumer electronics – a spot that was in fact filled years later.
These kinds of consumer anticipations certainly happen, but they tend to fall into a few categories. Sometimes, when we’re deeply engaged in a product area, we produce good ideas – ideas that others are also having and acting upon. Many people engage home electronics regularly and deeply, and so it makes sense that consumers will have all kinds of ideas for improvements and innovations – good ideas that often do make it to market. Of course, if the consumer in question is an aficionado of the product area in question, then they are even more likely to produce great ideas. (However, even in consumer electronics, breakthrough products take more than simply asking people. The iPod, for example, was the result of a long process of research and development by Apple researchers; simply asking people what they wanted from a good MP3 player could never have resulted, in a straight-line fashion, in the wildly popular design of the iPod.)
But most product areas are not like consumer electronics. We engage many products and services sporadically and superficially. Some, we even use grudgingly, hoping to be done with them as soon as possible and with as little engagement as possible (like laundry detergent – see below). And, most consumers don’t develop consciously articulated ideas about problematic products and services. Instead, they either simply put up with the flaws of existing offerings, or they develop workarounds that help them to avoid the problem.
One of my favorite stories about the inability of people to talk about the problem with existing products concerns the genesis of ColorGuard. A few years ago, I met a market researcher from P&G. She told me that P&G spent many years surveying people, asking endless questions about laundry and detergent. Their findings revealed the obvious: when people do laundry, they have cleanliness in mind. So for years, P&G focused their detergent development efforts on cleaning power. Then, P&G started sending teams of researchers into peoples’ homes to observe laundry and other household routines. Through observation, they learned that many people were turning dark clothes inside-out to protect the color from fading. P&G research participants had never told P&G that they were struggling with fading clothes. Afterall, they had developed a workaround to address the problem. Also, since most consumers were not chemical engineers, they probably had trouble conceiving of a possible engineering solution to the problem of fading clothes. However, armed with the observational data, the P&G researchers went back to their chemical engineers, who developed ColorGuard.
I am not suggesting that people are stupid or that they lack good ideas. I am suggesting that people are often not very good at consciously articulating their needs and desires vis a vis future products and services. If there is one thing that the past century of scientific research on human behavior has taught us, it is that most human knowledge is tacit and implicit. (If it weren’t so – that is, if we held all our knowledge at the level of conscious recall – we’d probably keel over and die from the mental stress.) Thus, consumer desires tend to be encoded in behaviors (e.g. workarounds) or buried under a few layers of consciousness. (The Handbook of Marketing Research [2006] by Grover and Vriens has a good discussion of tacit knowledge. Chapter 4 is online: see especially pp. 110-117.) In most cases, you cannot simply ask someone what they want and expect to receive to very insightful answer.
Take a different kind of design challenge: showerheads. Think you know what you want from your showerhead? You may be able to say a thing or two, but most of your interaction with your showerhead is encoded in your body movements. You probably use it without thinking about it too much, though your body movements tell a story about how the showerhead works or fails to work for you. Ten years ago, a team of researchers from QualiData Research, Inc., in New York, tackled the shower product area for Moen. They set up cameras in research participants’ showers to observe their behaviors (I’m not lying about this). They then looked at the video and did follow-up interviews, and concluded that a large proportion of us shower not primarily for cleanliness, but for relaxation. The problem was, peoples’ movements often resembled an awkward dance as they tried to aim and adjust the showerhead for just the right flow, pattern and direction. Existing products were simply not satisfying the powerful, but tacitly felt and enacted, desire for a relaxing shower. QualiData took their findings to Moen, which developed the Revolution Showerhead. Revolution solved some of the problems discovered in the research by, for example, putting the adjustment dial below the showerhead so it’s more accessible to the user, eliminating much of the dancing the researchers recorded.
Business Week awarded the product a Silver Idea Award for Research in 2005, noting: “Within eight weeks of its introduction at Lowe’s, the Revolution Showerhead became the number one selling showerhead (despite it being the most expensive showerhead they sell)…”
Henry Ford is widely quoted as having said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’.” Whether he said it or not, the point is well taken: if you seek visionary breakthroughs or even modestly successful innovations, you should do more than simply ask people.
On Tuesday night, MW Steele returned to the Tower District to present a first draft of a redesigned Tower streetscape. The draft design is in part the result of a design charrette that Steele and the city put on last Saturday.
Tuesday night was a good chance for us to get more information about the process Steele used to take the input from the charrette and come up with a design. It turns out that after the charrette was over, Mark Steele and Diego Velasco stayed in Fresno to look at the results. For example, they showed us pictures of them laying out and looking over our designs in the corridor of their hotel.
Steele definitely showed that they are serious about community input for their design. They broke the charrette results down into a list showing how many tables asked for what features. They also came up with six guiding principles that any design should follow (e.g. historical continuity, pedestrian friendly, etc.).
One of the most intriguing items they presented was an interpretation of the unique layout of Tower streets. They called it “The Zipper,” referring to the way north south streets do not cross directly over Olive Avenue, but instead dog-leg, creating a zipper pattern when viewed from above. The only streets that go straight through are Van Ness and Wishon, the old streetcar routes.
Steele presented one design rather than a set of alternatives, apparently because the input seemed to lead in one clear direction. The major features are a north-south pedestrian corridor from Fulton just south of Olive to the businesses along Fern Street, liberal use of sidewalk pop-outs, and two traffic circles at Van Ness and Olive and Wishon and Olive.
The north-south pedestrian corridor was a big hit with the 80 or so attendees Tuesday night, but the traffic circles generated some concern. I for one am very skeptical about the utility and authenticity of traffic circles on Olive Avenue. (City Traffic Engineer Bryan Jones spoke approvingly of circles as traffic calming devices.) The biggest problem with the proposed traffic circles is that they do not fit the historical context of the Tower. You can see a recent piece by the Fresno Bee’s Mike Osegueda and the large number of comments for some of the issues involved.
Mark Steele reported that sidewalk pop-outs and traffic circles were among the most popular features that came out in the streetscape plans that participants developed Saturday’s charrette. However, the materials we had to work with virtually assured this outcome. In addition to maps of the Tower business core and paper cutouts and stickers of various street features, we were also provided several sheets of paper with a few specific features on which to elaborate. One was an intersection with pop-outs and the other was a traffic circle. Not surprisingly, these features cropped up in a large number of designs we produced at the charrette.
Check out Kiel Famellos-Schmidt’s posting on the draft designs for more.
ElicetE made a really good point in a recent comment to the Nouveaux Pauvre posting.
I think the best thing anthropology can do is try to understand the problem. If we can get to know the homeless community and understand their basic needs, maybe we can start finding solutions for them.
The question then becomes: How can anthropology do this?
Felicia Salcido’s recent posting on this subject illustrates one response that practicing or applied anthropologists can do to begin to answer these questions.
Does the past century of anthropology hold other secrects or applications we have not yet discussed?
TheAnthroGeek
anthroguy
Felicia Salcido
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