I was meant to give a talk sharing my story growing the UXD practice at Comcast for the past many years. I was excited to do this because I felt it could be useful to new managers and because it would help me be diligent about reflecting on that journey, which I wanted to do but had had difficulty committing to. Also, the timing was perfect. So what went wrong?

Bad choices all around

Things that contributed to the failed presentation:

* I was sick and feeling quite ill. 
I contracted a powerful stomach bug from something iffy I ate the night before. Cold sweats and trembling do not inspire confidence in your audience. I had also been on a panel the prior day and had already set an expectation with the audience on what my delivery style and energy level were. I could not live up to my normal. 

* I was intensely tired.
Because I was actively fighting the stomach bug all night long, I was unable to sleep and felt like my brain was in a haze. I was prepared and know the topic deeply, but I had a really difficult time recalling the order in which I had decided to expose the material and which specific points I wanted to make. The cues in my notes triggered nothing. It felt like having memory hiccups. Also, when I am excessively tired, English, my second language, doesn’t flow as well from my lips and I unknowingly omit words mid-sentence. I can’t hear it as it happens, but I know that must have happened.

* I took on unnecessary technical risks.
I prepared my presentation using OpenOffice and on my Dell Mini laptop. It was great for preparing but proved a poor choice when the projector refused to recognize my computer and the presentation would not display appropriately on PowerPoint on the computer I borrowed. All this happened 30 minutes before the presentation. I should not have experimented with non-standard technology since the visual aid was important, but not testing in advance in the final delivery space and setup is, always, a huge mistake (and I know better). Also, I did not have a plan B. Unnecessary anxiety piled on at the worst of times.

* I didn’t synthesize the story well.
This presentation did help me reflect on this journey as I wanted. I was able to gain perspective on the story in a way I had not seen it before. Unfortunately, I diverged too widely in analysis and ended up with less time to synthesize what I found into a cohesive story. I was sufficiently happy with where things were and it would still have been ok if the above factors had not added up, but they did, so the outcome was mediocre when contrasted with what I knew could have been done. Had I worked more on reducing it further to its essence, I could have managed the other issues better.

* Timing was disrupted.
Never allow external arbitrary inputs to break your planned delivery rhythm. Editing and being more concise in language on the fly are very doable, but only when you are feeling very comfortable in the flow of the presentation. I wasn’t comfortable, obviously, so when I was asked to wrap it up, I couldn’t figure out how and conclusion was completely derailed, which made the story seem like it did not have a real end.

I can’t have a do-over, so I’m going to re-craft this presentation and look for opportunities to give this talk elsewhere to see if I can tell the story I actually wanted to tell.

Things I am bad at:

I am not good at expressing my feelings. Oddly, I am good at reading other people’s feelings. It’s hard to reconcile how the two are possible in the same person, but I have years of data (aka experience and stories) to prove this. I have been particularly excellent at applying this professionally and have found the ability to distinguish subtle emotions key to solving problems and helping people.

For a long time I subscribed to the very limiting (and limited) perspective that emotions and feelings made people less adept to do what they needed to do. Almost every situation or problem I have encountered in my life I have tried to reduce to a logical problem. By framing something as a problem, you immediately set yourself up for success because problems have solutions. However, I have come to learn that not all things are solvable. More importantly, not all things require a solution. I only learned this when I came to realize how unsuccessful I had been at solving my own “problems”.

When you learn something significant about yourself you have four choices:

1. Deny it
2. Ignore it
3. Sublimate it
4. Address it.

I am great at doing #2 and quite excellent at #3. I don’t know why that’s how I respond to things but at least I’ve come to accept that is true since learning it. I am able to do #1, but I have a strong desire to learn about the world and myself so it doesn’t happen as frequently. The reality is that only #4 is a healthy viable option.

The past three years have been particularly difficult for me because I decided I wanted to figure out why I am bad at the items I listed above and chose option #4 as the path to understanding what I found. I don’t recall being more frustrated, dissatisfied, helpless and exhausted in my life.

In situations where objective problem-solving was the focus, I always perceived the expression of emotions and feelings as a weakness. It is much easier to solve a “problem” when you can discard what is “fuzzy” and that is precisely what emotions and feelings are. We may even have a shared understanding of what some of them mean, but because these things are by nature felt, the way I see it will never be the same as how you see it.

About two years ago I found myself incredibly frustrated due to my inability to address the things I set out to address. At the time I did not realize it was, for the most part, because they were all feelings and emotions. I also was surprised to find that most of the things that seemed hard in this category were all things about myself. Everything that was about the world and other people seemed incredibly easy in comparison to how hard it was to solve the “problems” in my internal dialogue. When you are bad at expressing feelings and emotions, you lack the right level of appreciation for the types of issues you are trying to solve within yourself.

Language is key. If you can’t express what something is, you can’t truly think about it. I literally had to start from scratch. What is anger? What is contentment? What is frustration? What is joy? I still suck at describing, even though I am better at spotting it. I will be eternally in debt to my wife who has always been incredibly patient with me in my awkward attempts to express my own emotions and figure out how to deal with these sort of things. It’s much easier to fight than to admit fault, to spin in frustration instead of making progress, to struggle and point at the wrong things as the source of issues than it is to get perspective and introspective enough to understand them fully.

Being aware of who you are and what you do is a really hard thing. I think a lot of people take that for granted. I certainly felt that way and in choosing to address it have only found further frustration. But I believe in the long-term benefits I can rip from this. It certainly is a leap of faith.

The point of no return is the point beyond which someone, or some group of people, must continue on their current course of action, either because turning back is physically impossible, or because to do so would be prohibitively expensive or dangerous. It is also used when the distance or effort required to get back would be greater than the remainder of the journey or task as yet undertaken. - Wikipedia

Allowing yourself to just experience a feeling or emotion and let it take it as far as it will take you is hard. That’s what made me think of the expression “point of no return”. If you allow it to just happen, you’ll come out the other side with something. It will never be the same because you can’t get back to where you were before, but you’ve learned and you are better for it.

I decided to write this up today because I’m feeling angry. I’ve come to learn that this is not something that happens very frequently, and when it does I am really bad at realizing that’s the case. In order to experience it I figured writing about it would let me make the feeling last. I was right. I am angry at a bunch of different things. And the urge to respond to this feeling with some “solution” is overpowering. However, there is one important lesson I have learned in these past few years: If you are able to acknowledge the feeling or emotion, sit with it. Feel it. That’s the only way to learn how not to ignore and sublimate it. Also: no judgment. There is no good or bad feeling, there are just feelings. If you make a judgment call you can’t learn from it.

I have about a hundred things I should be doing right now, but I’d lose a lot if I didn’t allow myself to feel the anger I am feeling. It’s a new emotion to my repertoire. Before I can learn what to do with it, I need to learn what it is. Clearly today my lesson is that anger is a constructive feeling because I sat down and allowed myself the introspection.

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I came to this presentation from Google on their Quality Score measure because someone referred to it by saying “Quality Score is a measure of user experience”. It obviously peaked my interest because it is precisely the qualitative characteristic of user experience that makes it hard to measure.

When you get to slide 4 you realize that Google knows better and defines Quality Score as “an automated measure of how relevant each of your keywords is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.”

It has nothing to do with measuring users’ experiences with anything whatsoever. I realize it sounds naive to be cranky about attention-grabbing people but it baffles me that people do this: misuse the notion of user experience to mean anything at all that they want. It is such a coward move. Be bold, say what you want to say!

More than that, I worry that people just have no clue what they are talking about. Because it that is the case, it is even more worrisome. If people engaged at this level of discussion (i.e.: what measures to use) don’t understand a basic thing such as what user experience means (at its most basic what PEOPLE experience when they INTERACT with something), then we’re all very far from being able to have progress in advancing the conversation about measuring success in the context of user experience.

If we agree that quantifiable data, specifically the ever popular web analytics, provide you with rich detail to tell you WHAT is happening, it is comforting to realize that it is the type of data gathering that we already do – design research – that provides the qualitative color to answer WHY said things are happening.

What I am finding, however, is that it is more valuable to START with the quantitative work and get to the WHATs and ask WHYs based on those findings, rather than trying to figure out WHYs in exploratory mode (even if the WHAT’s are going to emerge at one point or another in this quest).

My point is that it’s not sustainable as an approach. It’s inneficient to start digging deeper to answer the WHY questions if you don’t have a baseline of WHATs identified.

The problem is that it is not intuitive for designers to start where they are uncomfortable. We are super comfortable with qualitative approaches – they are our go-to tools because that’s what makes sense for design research. However, quantitative research instruments really help narrow stuff down, but they do require you to understand those pesky numbers in order to a) dig in and get to concrete answers and b) understand what it’s saying so you can ask “why”.

In short, WHATs before WHYs are more efficient than WHYs before WHATs, but that requires designers to start with unfamiliar tools to then apply familiar tools. If it was the other way around I think it would be much easier for designers to bridge both approaches and come out the other end with more useful insights.

In other words, since we don’t particularly feel an attraction to numbers (to put it lightly), why would we start there? It’s such a leap from how we think about problems that it is counter intuitive. I don’t believe designers reject the notion of starting with Quant approaches (WHATS) to expand with Qual approaches (WHYs), but it’s inherently counter-intuitive to think that way.

How can I help designers do this when it goes against their nature? That’s what I’m working on right now. More on this later.

[I'll update this with a link once it's published]

My question is an old concern about how new practitioners are being introduced to User Experience Design and Research practices by being fed a multitude of methods and not given much support about how to decide the right circumstances to use them.

It is not sufficient just to know how a certain method works. It is also not sufficient having used that method once or twice. What is it about our experience as practitioners that makes us better or worse decision makers? How do we choose to dedicate time and money to an 8-week long project to produce personas instead of a different approach?

What distinguishes the practitioners that not only choose methods and know how to apply them, but choose the methods that are most effective for a given problem?

A few years ago, Jared himself told me a story about an experiment where two distinct research teams (unaware of each other I believe) were given the exact same research goal and employed the same methodology to achieve it, and came up with different results and findings.

When that sort of thing happens, I wonder: Can we really trust our methods? But more importantly, if we accept that our methods are not really scientific and that we can’t really have a high level of confidence about the results we end up with, how do we choose one over another?

Somehow we just do. But some do better than others. Some do MUCH better than MANY others. If you have the opportunity to work with practitioners with enough experience and knowledge, you see excellent arguments for why to do A versus B for a given set of circumstances. So yes, only experience will help one make better choices, but everyone’s experiences are different. As a way to try to educate new practitioners we coach and mentor by teaching the methods and also giving advice such as “be flexible” and “don’t marry a particular process” and “figure out what kind of problem you are trying to solve first”, which are all excellent advice, but not strategic enough and often not practical enough that it can really help someone make a decision when they are faced with a new challenge.

Jared’s opinion is that our field is still too young and we haven’t yet been able to articulate the criteria we use in that decision-making process. I agree, however, it worries me that many think they are advancing in their practice because they know more, when in fact, they just learned new methods, but don’t really have the skills to assess risks, and benefits, between choosing one over another.

Being a runner gets you to the finish line, knowing which way to run wins the race. I really hope we become better equipped to pass on knowledge about how we make choices and why because, paraphrasing Jared, knowing a lot of recipes a restauranteur does not make.

It’s bad. I have used a number of different services and they are all bad. So when my friend Kit Seeborg told me about her new start-up, BumperTunes, I thought, they could definitely help with the lousy quality music these services have to offer!

So, in the spirit of encouragement for Kit & team, who are really focused on the podcasting market rather than conference calling, I just wanted to share what I have to listen to between 5 to 10 times a week (sometimes multiple times in a day):

please-help-my-poor-corporate-ears.wav

Update: If you have other examples, please record and post here! It’s easy. On Windows, just go to Programs > Accessories > Entertainment > Sound Recorder (fire up your lovely conference call tune and hit record)

Since I listed my number of my chi.mp profile it’s been receiving the most ridiculous calls. Like the one above. Where do we go from here?

The list software we use is Mailman, which is extremely popular and very good at one thing: delivering mail. I guess they chose a pretty appropriate name for it. Other than that, it’s pretty sucky.

My intention when I started to take a look at our discussion lists was to understand how extensible our technology was to support any future plans (indexing archives, subscribing to threads, integration list subscription with membership profile, RSS subscription, etc). What I’ve found is a messy legacy that needs to be at least normalized before we can think of expanding its capabilities.

Here’s a list of all the discussion lists we have:

From this list it should be easy to tell that we (the IA Institute) have not been big on naming conventions. I created some of these lists at one point or another as I volunteered in different initiatives, but I didn’t even know all of them were out there. I would love to be able to go to the IAI website and just know what’s available (right now the site shows a partial list).

Some of these lists, I am sure, are dead. But somebody forgot to pull the plug. Also, between managing subscribers and moderating discussions, there is this horrible thing called the discussion list interface. Mailman as I said before is good at one thing and that’s not its user interface. It’s impressively adequate in terms of multi-lingual support and is flexible enough that you can customize presentation to fit your website (We have tried before), but if you don’t have a standard way to to do in an organization with such high volume, this mess is inevitable.

If it’s not clear from the rant above, many lists still have our old organization name (Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture) and are hosted at ibiblio.org, which provides free discussion lists. Another issue: We host our site and systems on Dreamhost. Their Mailman implementation doesn’t allow me to go directly and finagle with the lists directly (like merge archives or modify the code) so I have to ask them to do it, which means any changes may take a while.

Now that I’ve bitched about the current situation, here’s what I believe needs to happen:

Do you have experience with discussion lists? Drop me a note if you have any advice or suggestions. I’m particularly interested in systems that have discussion lists associated with member/profile management associated with other services. Anyone has experience with Drupal; any Drupal modules for discussion lists?

In an attempt to resolve the issue, I’m trying to figure out ways to encourage my illogical brain to get rid of some of them. I did a major clean up last year before I moved to the new house where I gave away 22+ pairs of shoes, but big events like moving to a new place don’t happen everyday. This time I’m attempting something new: I’m taking a picture and writing a blurb about each one of them. Then they can go on their merry way and I’ll have a memento if I ever miss them (which rarely happens, but I suspect is one of the reasons why this is challenging).

So here goes (a lot!):

The Cruella DeVils – You always got all the attention you wanted. I will miss you my beauties, but you have seen more glamorous days and I’m just not as evil as I once was. Besides, I have cats now, it wouldn’t work.

The 375s – In these days of over saturation an 80′s/90′s revival, nobody can really comprehend the awesomeness of owning your first pair of red shoes. I think you came with me to every concert I attended for a full decade. We danced like crazy. You rock.

The Militant – You were always too large for me, but that didn’t stop us from being chased down by cops down rua Maria Antonia on my college days. We’ve been to raves together — and every time I wondered why I was wearing heels in a pasture in the middle of nowhere.

The MoMAs – You were once an exhibit at the NY MoMA, not the most common thing in the life of a pair of sneakers. My obsession with Acupuncture shoes started with you (and I’ve enjoyed every one of your brothers as well). Every single time I wore you somebody complimented me on your beauty. Thank you for the good times.

The Informals – We’ve been together for 15 years. That’s crazy. You need to move on. I need to move on. Don’t worry, I’ll never forget you. Every time I see a pair of shoes with spool heels in voluptuous dark green suede I’ll think of you.

The Yellow Adidas – Your yellow lip really annoys me. Goodbye.

The #1 Open Toes – I have always hated open toe shoes, until you came along. You opened the world to me for new possibilities and I thank you for that. But you are literally falling apart. I’m sending you to a shoe farm upstate where you’ll be very happy.

The Futsal - None are as hard to say goodbye then you my dearest. We scored together many a game, but it’s time I face the truth: I haven’t played in over 10 years and I don’t know that I have ever seen a futsal court in the US.

The Workaholics – The most comfortable heels of all time. I have worked you hard — I’m surprised you still look this decent — Going from meeting to meeting. running across buildings. In the rain even! You made me look good never reminding me I was wearing you.

The Lacostes – You are so frigging comfortable I am having a really hard time letting you go, but I’ve beat you up real bad lately. Besides, you’re really short and makes me drag my jeans to the floor. Not cool.

The Others – Let’s face it: I never really liked you. When I’m with you it’s like I’m trying to be somebody else. This is what’s best for both of us. I am sure somebody will love you very much.

The Roos – You are pretty and light as a feather but what was I thinking? You’re half a size too small. Of course, I only remember that after we’ve been walking for two hours so I curse you every time. Sorry about that.

The Ice Princess – How cool is it to have ice-colored shoes? Very, I say. Your amazing height made my legs look fantastic. My wife thanks you very much.

The Black Adidas – I think I’m so fly wearing skater shoes. The truth is, I just look silly. You are not comfortable and I don’t look good on you. You are not helping me grow up either. One of us needs to go.

The Faux Maga Patologica - I bought you and your brother black on the same day. He reminded me of the shoes Magica De Spell (Maga Patologica in Brazil) wore in DuckTales. You never lived up to it (though you were always super comfortable).

The Red Adidas – I have to share a secret: I only bought you so the 375s wouldn’t get old too quickly. I know, I’m sorry. But you know what, you don’t get old! I have taken you off road and into the water and look at you! Unfortunately I can’t remember the last time we were together and I really need the closet space.

The Workaholics #2: Your beauty faded as fast as I walked on you. Sorry for the abuse.

Now to visit Goodwill… Goodbye all of you!