yeah clap your hands to teeeenage muuusic!

ok so i actually like it a lot

my graze box has arrived! www.graze.com

(via neovenator)

lee lian and her newly knitted camisole. yay! tong tong chiang.

This is the Closed store.

Taken in Nuremberg, Germany.

Monopoly Revolution

When I finally succeeded in recruiting a participant a few days ago, I was elated. Okay, so it was someone I met on the London IA Ning group, but nevermind – she had still some experience in a domain I was keen on doing some research in.

I based my interview method roughly on the interview method outlined in Holtblatt’s Rapid Contextual Design book, which I was also reading for this month’s UX book club. Unfortunately, the book describes an interview method that’s suited more for researching existing corporate processes, which didn’t quite fit the work I was doing – understanding a completely new domain for which there wasn’t an existing application for. Thus, I focused the interview strategy on understanding the subject area – shared ownership.

Here’s an outline of the questions I roughly had in my head (I didn’t prepare a script, because I wanted it to be more open and conversational):

• How did you get into car sharing?
• What motivated you to do it?
• Can you explain the process of what’s involved? (activities)
• What tools/devices/media did you use/consume in your tasks and activities?
• Can you tell me the various social aspects about the whole thing, if any?

Actually, this is a pretty bad list of questions. When I was going through the data, I realized that I had missed out some very important questions, like -

• were there any problems you experienced in any way? how? why?
• can you explain to me in detail (about a particular activity)?
• how often did you schedule the use of a car? why?
• asking questions about the user’s technical abilities and expectations
• a storyline of a typical scenario of a common activity
• what did you enjoy most about using the service? why?
• what activity was particularly easy/user-friendly to perform? why?

I could probably go on, but the thing was – I used this interview as an opportunity to fail, because I needed to learn from my failures and reveal my blind spots. Of course, I didn’t try my best to fail – I tried my best to do the interview, but I needed to know how I could improve.

This became more apparent when I went through and talked my colleague through the things I learned during the interview. This is where more than one person in a research process can be extremely useful. One of the key things we looked for were gaps in the research – things we failed to address during the interview or research sessions. This helps planning for subsequent interviews and research.

I learnt in this exercise that interviews in user research isn’t just about learning about users (which is like ethnography). In fact, it’s more about problem solving, except that the user may not even know he or she is experiencing a problem. When problems aren’t obvious, it can seem very hard to convince yourself that there are problems to solve, but problems always exist. There’s always something you can do to make a user’s life better.

Screw the iPad - this is more fun :P

But, despite all that, that project was a failure from a UCD and “business” perspective. Firstly, the interface felt too much like Flickr. Then, our team was fairly novice so our interview data wasn’t very promising. This caused the personas to feel sort of half put together. The end result was somewhat lacklustre – in some ways, we could’ve delivered the same thing by getting inspiration from other websites and not having to use Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design.

However, to stop there would be to completely miss the point.

Introducing UCD – the first round might not count

I insisted on using a UCD process not because I wanted to deliver something spectacular, but because I wanted the team members to see the value of a UCD process. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was mainly just me who was keen on seeing the value of a UCD process (and to see if I could do it).

This is where I think a lot of projects tend to reject UCD – when they can’t see any results.

It’s easy to run a company with an “efficiency” mindset – it’s sort of built into the status quo. Everyone is reluctant to change – not just management. So, I didn’t just have problems with my line manager – I had problems with my team members. (thankfully, my interviewees were really helpful). No one except for myself was really looking to see this succeed.

So, of course – how could I expect it to succeed?

The process reveals not so much results, but opportunities

The effort of building applications is often a team effort – not just one UX person calling the shots. But valuable lessons can still be gleaned from UX failures, much more than they can from plain old technical failures – mainly because that additional perspective from the user is so raw and tangible that it almost creates some kind of “why haven’t we done this earlier” response?

When team members get thrown into a UCD process – they don’t realize the potential “failure” of the outcome, they look at the process and the value of that access to users they finally get – something they never used to have in the past. Suddenly, they realize it is possible to build applications based on user research, user feedback, and purposeful design.

Developers and designers all need to realize that there are many ways to build an application, and sometimes it makes sense to learn a new tool so that the right one can be used for the right job. Introducing UCD to a conventional software team can sometimes help them gain ideas to make things better.

I took those lessons I learnt from the failure with me, because you never unlearn an experience like this. You just get better. And now I realize just how much more UCD is like craft than science.

how to grill a cod fillet

blackened cod

Cod is yummy because it is bouncy, melts in your mouth, juicy and healthy all at the same time. You’ll need a fillet about 1 inch-ish thick to get the full flava, methinks. I used 2 medium-sized fillets, each about the size of two ipod classics put together side by side.

Here’s what to do:

Pour 5 tbsp. of mirin, 3 tbsp. of soy sauce, and ¼ cup of water in a small bowl and stir well. Marinade fillets in it for 40 minutes, room temperature, uncovered.

Heat up grill pan to medium. Wait for it to be hot. Put fillets on it. 3 minutes. Then turn. 3 minutes. Remove and place on serving dish.

Also, while fish is grilling - heat up a sauce pan - pour marinade and add 1 tbsp sugar. Reduce until marinade becomes a sticky sweet sauce. Once done, use it to pour over the fillets on the serving dish.

I also added some fried garlic to add some bite. Just heat up oil in a pan, toss about 5-6 garlic cloves (unchopped + de-skinned), and fry till light brown. Tops the cods withs the garlics.

Done.