Few would disagree that fundamental economic change is upon us. Business models are crumbling daily. From the auto industry to the banking industry, it is clear that old ways of doing things are no longer working. The market research industry is just as vulnerable to this shift, yet, like the auto industry before it, it is hardly aware of how deeply its business model is threatened.

The Long Disruption

The market research industry is built for the 20^th Century mass production model, which is rapidly disappearing. The “mass audience” is gone and a fragmented diverse populace has taken its place. This new “audience” defies the easy aggregation of summary statistics on which market research so often relies.  Chris Anderson of Wired figured this out long ago with his book The Long Tail.

The Economic Disruption of The Long Tail -- Anderson, Wired Magazine

He argued that technology lowered the cost of providing services to ever-smaller niches of people, making it possible to sell profitably goods and services that were once too specialized.

This technological shift also means the end of “appointment television.” Digital video recorders allow individuals to time shift their programming to suite them, and not the program executives at television networks.

The Birth (And Death) of Market Research

What does this all have to do with market research? Full-service market research firms are built for the blockbuster era, not for the time of the long tail.

Market research was heavily influenced by the school of “applied sociology,” lead by Paul Lazarsfeld. While at Columbia, Lazarsfeld pioneered many statistical techniques we use today, including the cross tabulation (Babbie and Benaquisto 2002) and the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Analyzer, a machine that records audience reaction to programming in real time (Mattlerart 1996).

The Lazarsfeld-Stanton Analyzer summarizing "the public"

CNN used a variant of this machine for the recent State of The Union address, showing real-time reactions from Democrats in blue, Republicans in red, and Independents in yellow.

The Lazarsfeld brand of insight is based on a fundamental assumption: that the “average” means something. An entry-level statistics course will teach you that average is dragged up or down by extreme values, and the long tail is nothing if not a collection of many extreme values. There is nothing meaningful about knowing that the “average American” rented 30 digital movies a month if, in fact, there were many thousands of Americans who rented none and a many tiny segments that rented somewhere between zero and 40 movies. The “average” is meaningless in this example, yet this ham-fisted approach to summarizing “the public” is what the market research industry is built upon.

Design Research for The Long Tail

Market researchers may argue that with proper segmentation, you can understand every niche within the long tail. This may be true, but to truly understand the diversity between people, your task is not simply to “summarize” the audience, but to delve deeply into the dynamics of what makes them different.

This is why design research is a better fit for today’s long-tail economic model. Context matters. Design research is all about understanding the context because it is rooted in qualitative methodologies, and ethnography in particular. Designers solve contextual problems. The award-winning Braille watch, for example, allows its users to check the time surreptitiously and quickly, something that is both polite and useful. A Lazarsfeld approach would not uncover the social subtleties of checking one’s watch, and certainly could not uncover the specific needs of the blind.

The Braille Watch by David Chavez

Dan Formosa details this limitation of market research in his insightful article in Interactions magazine. He argues that market research should focus on consumer response — after a product is designed. Design research, on the other hand, is about evaluating a product as it is being developed. I would go further; design research is about knowing what to build as well as evaluating the prototype.

Design research uncovers how long-tail niches develop and what differentiates them. It is not the equivalent to “market segments” because it provides specific direction on how to apply research findings. What are the dynamics of renting a movie? What motivates the “heavy renter”? What is it about her television or home that supports heavy renting? You cannot know the answer to these questions by simply providing a laundry list of demographic characteristics and psychographic survey results. You must know the context in which the long tail emerges.

Some may say that good quality market research would not make these kinds of mistakes. And they are right. Highly skilled social scientists are method-agnostic; they choose the right method for the right research question. However, full-service market research firms have become the GM of the industry — they keep building Hummers instead of Priuses. Focus groups don’t uncover contextual nuances, but they’re cheap and profitable. Surveys don’t get to the heart of why a product doesn’t work. Design research, using an ethnographic approach, provides “thick description” of the entire phenomenon of renting movies.

This is where market research cannot go. And this is where market research will fail, unless it rejects the “build another Hummer” mentality.

References

Babbie, E. and L. Benaquisto (2002). Fundamentals of Social Research. Scarborough, Thomson Nelson.

Mattlerart, A. (1996). The Invention of Communication. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

I am a big fan of MUJI, the simple Japanese housewares company. So I was quite interested to read a post by their art director Kenya Hara on the New York Times’s “Room for Debate.” Hara argues that Japanese people have

…a special ability to focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We tend to ignore what is not an integral part of our personal perspective. We ignore that our cities are a chaotic mess, filled with ugly architecture and nasty signage.

Hara believes that Japanese simplicity is a function partly of this narrow focus. Beautiful designs are better appreciated because of this focus, in Hara’s opinion. (Well known design guru John Maeda also weighs in and argues that the dearness of Japanese food is the primary issue).

A Beautiful Japanese Lunch: New York Times

Philosopher Dennis Dutton argues, interestingly, the American lunch box is of the same instinct: Americans have attempted to make their lunch beautiful but in distinctly different ways. Dutton leaves the symbolic interpretation of these competing “lunch beautifying” methods up to the reader’s imagination.

This reader thinks that by using exterior packaging instead of the food itself, Americans are not beautifying lunch as much as they are obscuring it. Indeed, they even commodifying it by making each lunch, regardless of content, look similar. The content of the lunch itself is irrelevant; whether it is fresh, healthy food or rotting, cheap, fast food, every lunch looks the same in a lunch box.

Perhaps this is indicative of the American spirit if industrialization. Mass production in the Fordist tradition (“You can have whatever colour car you like, as long as it’s black”) is an American value that has been spread around the world. Forget about the content of the thing, instead focus on its packaging, its marketing or its uniformity. This is what Ritzer means by the “McDonaldization of Society.” When the content of a thing matters less than how much of it is sold or how efficient it is to sell it, this is the height of capitalism — and perhaps of American culture.

This is perhaps the essence of why Americans can accept truly horrible food, while the Japanese and the French famously reject it. But it doesn’t explain why Hara thinks Japanese aesthetics are ruled in part by the ability to “focus” on one thing.

Is the Japanese form of capitalism less in need of obscuring and masking than the American? Is ugliness more tolerated by Japanese society and therefore, less of a threat to its form of capitalism?

“But how many people did you talk to?” If you’ve ever done qualitative research, you’ve heard that question at least once. And the first time? You were flummoxed. In 3 short minutes, you can be assured that will never happen again.

Folks, qualitative research does not worry about numbers of people; it worries about deep understanding. Weber called this “verstehen.” (Come to think of it, most German people call it that too. Coincidence?). Geertz called it “thick description.” It’s about knowing — really knowing — the phenomenon you’re researching. You’ve lived, breathed, and slept this thing, this social occurrence, this…this…part of everyday life. You know it inside and out.

Courtesy of daniel_blue on Flickr

You know when it’s typical, when it’s unusual, what kinds of people� do this thing, and how. You know why someone would never do this thing, and when they would but just lie about it. In short, you’ve transcended merely noticing this phenomenon. Now, you’re ready to give a 1-hour lecture on it, complete with illustrative examples.

Now if that thing is, say, kitchen use, then stand back! You’re not an Iron Chef, you are a Platinum Chef! You have spent hours inside kitchens of all shapes and sizes. You know how people love them, how they hate them, when they’re ashamed of them and when (very rarely) they destroy them. You can tell casual observers it is “simplistic” to think of how many people have gas stoves. No, you tell them, it’s not about how many people, it’s about WHY they have gas stoves! It’s about what happens when you finally buy a gas stove! It’s about….so much more than how many.

Welcome to the world of verstehen. When you have verstehen, you can perhaps count how many people have gas stoves. Sure, you could determine that more men than women have them. Maybe you could find out that more of them were built between 1970 and 80 than 1990 and 2000. But what good is that number? What does it even mean?

When you’re designing, you must know what the gas stove means. You must know what it means to transform your kitchen into one that can and should host a gas stove. You must know why a person would be “ashamed” to have a gas stove (are they ashamed of their new wealth? do they come from a long line of safety-conscious firefighters?). You must know more than “how many.”

So the next time someone asks you, “how many people did you talk to?”, you can answer them with an hour-long treatise about why that doesn’t matter. You can tell them you are going to blow them away with the thick description of what this thing means to people. You are going to tell them you know more about this thing than anyone who ever lived, and then, dammit, you’re gonna design something so fantastic, so amazing that they too will be screaming in German. You have verstehen!

See my discussion about sampling methods in qual and quant research for more insight into the reasons why “how many” is irrelevant in qualitative research.

DT has a great post over at Design Sojourn that discusses Six Sigma methodology and how it relates to design. He cites Tim Brown at IDEO who argues that Six Sigma is essentially Newtonian, while design thinking is quantum. In his own design work, DT expressed doubts about using Six Sigma:

After studying the Six Sigma process, I point blank said: �There was no way any of my designers are going to be judged on the quality and success of a design based on how many sketches or iterations we did before we deliver it.�

Both Brown and DT cite Sara Beckman, who recently discussed the topic in the New York Times. Beckman reviews how Six Sigma focuses on incremental improvements, while design and design thinking focuses on big changes. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Six Sigma, it’s a method pioneered by Motorola, which aims to reduce the number of errors to 3 in one million. The “six sigma” refers to six standard deviations. The number of errors should be at the extreme end of the normal curve, or between + or – 3 standard deviations, represented by the Greek symbol sigma.

I argue that design is more complementary to the “interpretivist” paradigm of qualitative research while Six Sigma is positivist. Interpretivists don’t believe the world is a static place. They see reality as being continuously created by you, me and other social actors. There is no such thing as “The Truth” in interpretivist approaches, just different versions of the truth. Typical methods of interpretivists are ethnography, in-depth interviewing and discourse analysis. Positivist research, on the other hand, assumes that reality is static. Positivists believe that “The Truth,” is out there to be discovered. Typical methods would include quantitative surveys.

Designers should focus on interpretivist methods, therefore. They should uncover different versions of the truth using observation and interviewing, as well as deep reflection on symbols and their meanings. Surveys and other quantitative methods are more Six Sigma in that they can measure improvement over time. Designers ought to consider measuring improvement, but starting with qualitative approaches is best.

My article on understanding organizational culture is now up on the interaction design site, Johnny Holland. The post provides an overview of key factors in organizational culture and how these factors affect an organization’s culture. It’s specifically intended to help designers understand their clients’ business culture and to avoid the all-too-common trap of “missing the social” in a design project.

It�s happened to all of us. We walk into what we think is a Web redesign project, only to find we have unwittingly ignited the fires of WW III in our client�s organization. What begins as a simple design project descends � quickly � into an intra-organizational battle, with the unprepared interaction designer caught in the crossfire.

Read the whole post.

In an earlier post, I examined how text is transformed when it is created and shared in digital form. In this post, I argue that time itself is transformed when it is represented in digital format. To illustrate, consider my experiment with my Filofax.

Yes, I said Filofax. I still have one. I haven’t filled it with inserts in years, even though that was actually one of my favourite end-of-year rituals. I would make a special trip to the stationary store, just to buy the next year’s worth of calendar. In the process, I would review last year’s appointments, marvel at how much I had gotten done and how fast time had passed. I would linger over favourite appointments, which seemed, at the time, inconsequential, as recorded in my scribbled hand.

I bought a 2009 insert for my Filofax and inputted only two weeks’ worth of appointments. It took me 20 minutes.

Analogue time "reckoning"

The time it took me to enter in all these appointments was more than just scribbling. It was reviewing, remembering, considering. I could not physically enter overlapping appointments. There simply wasn’t room!

Now compare this to the same amount of time, as rendered by my iCal:

Digital Time "Reckoning"

There are overlapping appointments, my husband’s appointments easily inputted into mine, meetings from people I barely know, all dropped into my life automatically. Worse, I carry this around, automatically updating it, second by second, through my iPhone.

Sociologists use the term “time reckoning” to describe how we collectively understand time and make it intelligible to ourselves. There was a great hullabaloo about “clock time,” when clocks came to replace the seasons as our primary way of time reckoning. We forgot we didn’t know how long a minute actually was — we actually now think we can tell how long 23 minutes and 42 seconds is (spoiler: we can’t, especially when we’re enjoying ourselves!).

Now we have “digital” time reckoning, which bears almost no resemblance to how we actually experience time. If you have the misfortune of using time tracking software like TimeControl, then you will likely recognize this fantastical, farcical, FrankenTime:

Screenshot from Microsoft's TimeControl

According to this, a mythical interaction designer named Joseph Gardner spent 8 hours and 20 minutes on Sunday “design interface.” Ignoring the assault on proper grammar for a moment, let’s take a step back and understand what this means. First off, Poor Old Joe was working on Sunday. Notably, TimeControl allowed this kind of time use, despite the fact that it likely broke overtime laws. But secondly, how long is 8 hours and 20 minutes? Did Joe forgo the need for bathroom breaks? Was he glued to the chair for precisely 8 hours and 20 minutes? How long did he actually spend in that chair anyway?

Digital time allows to represent time in impossibly tiny fragments, and to work impossibly long hours. This kind of time would never be recorded in one’s Filofax — there simply isn’t room for all those hours. Moreover, the time it takes to record one’s time in a Filofax also requires one to contemplate the implications of 8 hours and 20 minutes of work on a Sunday.

In short, the difference between analogue and digital time is that digital time is even less like cognitively experienced time than “clock time.” Digital time can be schedule effortlessly, without any thought to the physical need for sleep, food, or relaxation. Digital time is a faster, manifold version of clock time, one that makes it possible for use have multiple, synchronous events.

The digital availability of social information has lead many to think it’s a crisis of privacy. It is not; it is a crisis of identity management. Designers of online profiles should think about privacy as the management of identity, which can be an easily damaged piece of social information. Users who can control access to any “stigmatizing” social information have absolute privacy.

Social theorist Erving Goffman’s work on identity can help us design better and more private online profiles. What is “stigmatizing” social information? This is the tough part: it changes depending on who is involved. For example, a teardrop tattoo may provide status inside a prison, but on the face of a defendant in a court room, it is a stigma. Goffman points out that social actors conceal “stigma symbols” in some contexts, but these become “status symbols” in other contexts.

Designers of online profiles should recognize then that what is “embarrassing” changes depending on the context. There is simply no way to predict all the possible social contexts that any given person will find themselves in, so there is no way that a designer can accurately predict a “privacy breach” of digitally available information. Hence the confusion and hand-wringing over Beacon, Facebook’s privacy-busting advertising system. Instead, designers should create a framework for users to manage their identities.

How is identity management achieved? Designers should offer users the following:

1. Concealment tools: users should be able to disguise or conceal any single piece of social information. This means that “my interests” should be singular items that can be turned on and off.
2. Low-burden social network filtering: some social information only becomes embarrassing in particular social contexts. Designers must allow users to sort or filter their social contacts depending on how they know them. Make this interaction easier and low burden, and users will happily sort their friends from their family, their co-workers from their acquaintances.
3. Reduce the ability to collate social information: Goffman points out that one of the main problems for stigmatized identities is what he calls “know-about-ness.” How much access do people have to the sum total of an individual’s social information? How readily accessible is all of that information? How easily collated is it? For example, if your golf buddies can find out that you like to cook, you take Japanese rock gardening classes AND you take tap dancing on Friday nights, the sum total of that information could be stigmatizing (but only while playing golf). Good designers would make that collation difficult.
4. Allow quick, effortless and PERMANENT erasure: We are only now learning how embarrasing a decade’s worth of personal information can be. All too often, designers make it too difficult for users to easily delete their personal information. Make password retrieval easy. Do not require people to remember ancient email addresses. Provide 1-800 number access for “identity emergencies.” And finally, put users’ social information firmly in their own hands, not on your servers.

I’m currently forming research questions for an ethnography of Toronto-based technology and design workers. I am working through this question: is Twitter a “place”?

In her 2000 book Virtual Ethnography, Christine Hine argues that there are two analytic strategies to see “cyberspace.” First, one can view it as a “place,” where social norms emerge. Or second, one can view it as a cultural artifact. The second view allows us to see the designers behind the technology. Think of it as a hermeneutics of a technology, which allows us to see what assumptions its designers about their users (this is an approach that will make sense to interaction designers).

I believe Twitter to be a place, but one that is heavily influenced by its architects and its users. In other words, its design sets the stage for certain kinds of interactions, just as prisons, malls, and casinos do. The architecture of Twitter, which includes its dozens API-driven applications as well as its simple, Web-based interface, is constantly evolving by its network of users, API application designers, and the company of Twitter itself.

This approach suggests that Twitter has “interpretive flexibility,” which is how technology theorists argue that design is determinant; users decide how a technology will actually be used, within the confines of the material form of that technology.

Do you believe Twitter is a “place”? What kind of place? Or is Twitter a technology or technological artifact?

We all use personas in everyday social situations. But, like in many design projects, we use to them to typecast instead of to evoke empathy. Personas, like stereotypes, often result in discriminatory behavior. When used in design, personas can create poor design that disempowers and alienate users.

We all like to know how to treat people appropriately. We tend to use what social theorists Berger and Luckman call “typifications” when interacting socially. When we go to the store, to a meeting, to a party — we need to know how to act with people. We genuinely want to make people feel comfortable and we want to feel comfortable ourselves.

But to use a typification often has the unintended consequence of being condescending. Elderly people are spoken to in loud, exagerrated tones. Women are assumed to be physically fragile. Men are considered to be sexually aggressive. These typifications are stereotypes that affect how we, in turn, react. Elderly people may react angrily, for example, at the implied loss of their faculties.

Designers often make the same mistake when making personas. Personas are tools to evoke empathy. But poorly created personas will simply regurgitate stereotypes instead of actually answering real needs. When a site is designed “for women,” it should allow women (and all of its users) to define their experience, according to their needs. Women may have more need to juggle schedules, for example, so interactive experiences should allow them to adopt such features.

An interactive experience should not, however, force me to be treated as a “mom on the go” simply because I’m a woman. And honestly, if there’s one persona phrase that makes me want to vomit/go on a murderous rampage/re-design the design process, it’s the dreaded “mom on the go.” Show me a mom NOT on the go, and I’ll show you a mom who forgets she has children.

Worse, don’t treat me, a childless woman of 38, as a “mom on the go,” simply because YOUR data tell you I should have children. Instead, empathize with me. Allow me to satisfy unmet needs, should I so choose. DO NOT force me to adopt features and functionality that are appropriate for what you think I OUGHT to need.

As a woman, I am frequently “treated” to “gentle” behavior. People will open doors for me, or perhaps allow me to pass first out of a crowded elevator. This is not because I require it, nor because I expect it, but because it is believed that women still are the “gentler sex.”

Defeating the problem of personas as stereotypes is to put yourself in the user’s shoes. In other words, don’t forget that personas are empathy tools. Allow her to choose her experience. Provide her the features and functionality that she MIGHT like, based on your qualitative research. But under no circumstances force her to adopt features or functionality that reproduce what someone “ought” to be.

Forcing people to adopt behaviors is as far from empathy as one can get. Interactive experiences that foist “mom on the go” fantasies onto real people risk alienating their users at best; at worst they perpetuate sexist stereotypes.

What do product designers need to know about their end-user? This post provides a broad-stroke overview of the kinds of questions you should answer before you design a new product, particularly new technology products.

The “value orientation model” of anthropology is a great starting point for product design. Your product has to fit within a person’s existing value system. Think about the automobile for example. Is your end-user an SUV type or a Smart Car type? Here’s how to narrow the focus.

1. Human nature: Describe what the typical end-user believes about human nature (e.g., humans are generally good; humans are generally bad; humans are neither good nor bad). Hint: SUV drivers may think humans are generally bad, so we need to protect ourselves with BIG CARS.
2. Time sense: Describe the typical end-user�s relationship to time (e.g., focus on the future; focus on the now; focus on the past). Smart Car drivers may think that the future matters, so they buy smaller more environmentally friendly cars.
3. Person-Nature relationship: Describe the typical end-user’s orientation to nature (e.g., nature is to be dominated; nature is to be revered; nature is to be ignored). SUV drivers think nature should rule them. Just kidding.
4. Social relations: Describe the typical end-user�s relationship to others (e.g., individualistic or �dog eat dog�; collective or: �we�re all in this together�). SUV drivers are definitely dog-eat-dog. Hence the BIG CAR.
5. Space: Describe the typical end-user�s relationship to space (e.g., people control space; people live in harmony with space; space controls people). Smart Car drivers may believe that people should live in harmony with space, so they buy a smaller car, to park in urban settings, but also a car so they can conquer space and drive to the country for the weekend.

An additional set of questions around technology devices is also critical for technology designers:

1. What is the typical end-user’s primary interactive device? Surprise! It may be a TV remote control!
2. What other interactive devices does the typical end-user have?
3. What is the primary frustration the typical end-user has with his or her current primary device?

Do you know the answers to these questions? If not, how will you know whether you’re designin for an SUV driver or a Smart Car driver? You can find out the basics to these questions through a few simple steps:

1. Review any secondary value-based research, including omnibus surveys.
2. Complete quick and dirty observations of your primary end-users.
3. Survey a larger group of your primary end-users.
4. Summarize and segment these findings to create value-based design personas
5. Design a fabulous product!