Interviewing Users. Steve Portigal

I was just looking at YouTube in a brave attempt to keep in touch with popular music, and I found the musician Macklemore doing a hip-hop celebration of the thrift store. (“Passing up on those moccasins someone else been walking in.”) Google results indicate that Macklemore is a product of Evergreen State University in Olympia, Washington. And this is interesting because Evergreen produces a lot of ferociously creative kids—wild things who care nothing for our orthodoxy, and still less for our sanctimony.

Now, our curiosity roused, we might well decide to go visit Evergreen College, because as William Gibson put it, “The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Evergreen would be an excellent place to look for our futures. But it wouldn’t be easy or pleasant. We would struggle to get a fix on the sheer volcanic invention taking place here. Our sensibilities would be scandalized. We would feel ourselves at sea.

And that’s where ethnography comes in. It is, hands down, the best method for making our way through data that is multiple, shifting, and mysterious. It works brilliantly to help us see how other people see themselves and the world. Before ethnography, Evergreen is a bewildering place. After ethnography, it’s a place we “get.” (Not perfectly. Not comprehensively. But the basics are there, and the bridge is built.)

And that’s 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

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