Lessons from Hawaii

At the end of June through the beginning of July, I took advantage of Sentient’s sabbatical benefit and took off to Hawaii for two weeks in the great outdoors.  Unplugging for a full two weeks was a little bit of a challenge – I went through email withdrawal for the first couple of days.  Once I did unplug, I was able to regain some perspective outside of my computer and smartphone.

Lesson #1: You have to get dirty to find the best views.

On Maui, we drove the road to Hana and saw LOTS of waterfalls.  By far the most fun we had at one was in Pua’a Ka’a State Park.  However NOT at the lower falls that you just stroll to on the park’s walkway; instead, the upper falls aboe that one.

Lower Falls

Upper Falls

 Our guidebook, Maui Revealed by Andrew Doughty (which we highly recommend), clued us in:

“There’s an awkward trail on the right of the upper falls. It first leads to a short path to the top of the falls, but if you go past it for 5-10 squishy minutes (it’s usually muddy), there’s a much heavier untapped falls and pool just above the diversion ditch that’s taking much of the lower falls’ water. When the trail gets to the elevated waterway (viaduct), you have to walk along it (which those afraid of heights will hate), then across.  Only 100 more feet upstream is your prize.”

Awkward, squishy and muddy are all understatements – the whole trail was practically a slip-n-slide.  At one point my hiking shoes were completely submerged in mud. These were new shoes when I left for Hawaii, and after this hike, they looked like this.

There were at least 3 different times where I wanted to turn back – crossing the viaduct was one of them.

But being the only person swimming in the waterfall’s pool was definitely worth all the work.

Takeaway: Don’t be content with the status quo – find new trails in your work.  From a research perspective, this could mean:

• Using a new technique to understand the desirability of a design described in the paper Measuring Desirability: New Methods for Evaluating Desirability in a Usability Lab Setting (WORD DOC) by Joey Benedeck and Trish Miner of Microsoft
• Trying a new platform from 20|20 Research with a mobile population that lets you reach respondents via text message
• Reading this month’s edition of Quirks to learn more about social media research (PDF)

Lesson #2:  The human mind tries to relate new things to things it knows.

We also visited Mount Haleakala, the dormant volcano on Maui.  Going up the 10,023 feet, I saw terrain and vegetation that reminded me of the alpine climate I have seen in the Colorado Rocky Mountain National Park.  However, there were some plants, like the silversword, that I had never seen before.  We were also lucky enough to see one that was blooming – something that they only do once in their lifespan of 50 years before dying.

And then there was the crater.  This was terrain that I had never seen before, yet my brain still tried to relate it to something – namely what I imagine the terrain of Mars to look like.

Takeaway: When presenting something new, make it relevant.  For example, relate new research findings to things that your audience might be familiar with – previous research, industry news, etc.

Lesson #3: You’re more interesting when you’re moving.

Starting to wonder if I spent any time in the ocean?  Well yes, we went on a snorkel trip to Molokini.  We saw all sorts of coral and fish.

On the way back to Maui, some dolphins started swimming around our boat.  The captain stopped and the dolphins came to check us out.  They played a bit, and then started swimming away.  When the boat started moving again, the dolphins were immediately back, in front of the bow, and racing the boat – we were much more interesting when we were moving.

Takeaway: MOVE on your findings.  At Sentient, we are always customizing and finding creative and actionable ways to interpret and present research that allows our clients to:

• Know the why behind the what
• Easily distribute market intelligence throughout the organization
• Take action and build consensus based upon market research
• Have complete confidence in the analytics and validity of implications

Ideas On Usability Presentations

So, this could be considered a lazy blog post - a blog post about another blog post. And, this other blog post is about other posts and presentations on usability, so this could be considered extremely lazy on my part.

However, click here for the Useful Usability blog and get links to 5 Radical Ideas From Usability Presentations. There is stuff in here for UX professionals, iPhone developers and tips on presenting research findings. All good stuff.Share it this post around and let us know what radical ideas you have for presenting usability research.

Here is a quick link to the first presentation covered:

Usability 2.0

View more presentations from Greg Bell.

The Power of Mobile Market Research

As advertising to the public via mobile phones becomes more widespread, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for other marketing activities – including market research. Market research will need to keep pace with location-based marketing services like FourSquare, wantANDfound, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Placecast and many others. Emerging as the latest medium for reaching consumers, how can mobile research technologies be utilized to gain deeper and richer insights into behavior and drive innovation? Think about it, what if customers could give feedback anytime, anywhere to improve products and services – right when the issue happens or the idea arises!

A relatively new tool we have come across is QualAnywhere from 20/20 Research, Inc. QualAnywhere allows you to build panels or do one-off recruiting and then interact with respondent via their mobile phone for surveys or qualitative chat. A few examples 20/20 Research gives as ways to utilize this methodology includes:

• Conducting studies about eating habits DURING the lunch hour
• Conducting studies on shopping WHILE participants are likely to be at the grocery store

Interacting with respondents at the POD (Point-Of-Decision) is a rarity, but when available adds to the research validity and actionability. How do you conduct research at the POD? I would love to hear about it and how it helped your research.

The Power Of Doing Nothing

It is time for some Sentient employees to take off! Don't worry they will be back. We have Julie reaching her 3+ year mark and Kristen is in year 4. At Sentient we provide a little extra time off (you must take 2 weeks without email or contacting the office) and $5,000 travel allowance after 3 years and then every 3 years after that. The only catch is that we get to keep their computer and they can't call in to the office or contact us.

As we are fond of saying:
We all want to be proud of our work. But as important as our next project is, we know that it’s not our greatest gift or the greatest good that we can do. We have to work for a living, but it’s the living that defines us, not the work. 

Well, this is part of that "living" thing we strive for. So, Julie will be gone part of this Summer and Kristen in the Fall. I could try to explain the benefits of this, but I think this video from TED says it very well. (Though we have not figured out how to take a year off just yet.)

New ways to "research"

While it may not be “classic market research,” social media is bringing new ways for businesses to connect with customers for communication and feedback.

Interesting case in point – I was eating dinner at Tarka Indian Kitchen last night, and I saw that they had a well placed call to action to facilitate feedback from customers.

As my camera phone lacks the focus of an SLR camera, what you are looking at is a table tent that is found on each table.  On one side is the wine list, and on the side we’re looking at is an invitation to “Share Your Experience” by reviewing them on Yelp.  The final paragraph invites customers to submit their review immediately using Tarka’s free Wi-Fi connection.

With this open-ended approach Tarka is accomplishing several things:

1. Driving user-generated content about their restaurant by encouraging reviews
2. Gathering unstructured feedback from customers
3. Advertising that they have free Wi-Fi
4. Gathering point-of-purchase feedback from those that login at their table using their smartphone or laptop

Pushing customers to post reviews creates a wealth of data for Tarka.  What to do with this? One could use text mining (analyzing and categorizing unstructured data, e.g., reviews and other text), set up social media monitoring dashboards such as Yext or a myriad of other services that are starting to pop up and trying to take all of this user-generated-content (UGC) and structure it to help businesses make more informed decisions.

A tool we use to gain a topical level of understanding when looking at focus group data and other unstructured text is wordle.net.  With it we create word clouds where more frequently used words are displayed in larger font sizes and less frequently used words are displayed in smaller font sizes.  We have used this successfully to showcase brand attributes, political campaigns and many other areas. This can help identify broad perceptions and opinions people may have.  Below is the resulting word cloud when we feed Tarka’s Yelp reviews through it (note this is just a quick rundown – it has not been cleaned or edited of “nonsense” words such as conjunctions).