Ethnographic Fieldguide

From http://picography.co/

I’ve gushed before over Just Enough Research before, Erika Hall’s outstanding primer on UX research and thinking about research in a broader commercial sense, but this morning I came across a hidden gem.

In re-reading Chapter 5, I came across a link that I had missed before, to the Helsinki Design Lab – specifically their Ethnographic Fieldguide, a concise, delightfully Finnish document that outlines a manner of thinking and approaching research from an ethnographic perspective. What does that mean?

Ethnography aims to get under the skin of human behavior, to better understand the world and the specifics of the cultures we live in. The focus of the research can be anything from current cultural tendencies, to changing values, attitudes and norms, or concrete human behavior and its motivations within different situations and contexts.

You can find the Ethnographic Fieldguide, and learn more about the HDL, here.

November Reading Roundup

Another month, another missed Reading Goal – here’s the rundown:

– I finished Drive, thanks entirely to the rare foresight I executed in buying the audiobook. November was a pretty crazy month for travel (we drove almost 1000 miles in November), so being able to listen to Drive in the car really saved me. I’m still counting it toward my reading goal!

– I only finished about a third of Antifragile, but I have discussed it with more people than any other book I’ve read in 2014. I’m excited to finish it – it’s the kind of book that I think about a lot, even when I haven’t picked it up in a while.

– These are both great recommendations, and my hat’s off to Jeremey and Ian – thank you both for such outstanding reads.

– Another factor in missing my reading goals is that I received the first four collected volumes of Hellblazer for my birthday, and like any lifelong comic wonk, I couldn’t simply let them sit there. I finished the first two, representing 604 pages of non-reading-goals reading.

– In all, in November I read 456 (.42 Infinite Jests) reading goal pages and 604 (.55 Infinite Jests) outside pages. That’s almost an Infinite Jest, so even though I missed my specific goals, I’m happy with the overall page count.

More Speaking Resources!

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In my ongoing quest to find and share resources to make myself and others better speakers, I sometimes find things that are useful, helpful, or just interesting. Here are two things I’ve recently come upon that have moved the needle on my presentation game: specifically how I build slide decks and what I put in them.

10 Tips on How to Make Slides from the folks at TED – if anyone knows anything about great slides, it’s TED.

In pursuit of their sixth tip, Use photos that enhance meaning, I’d like to introduce you to a resource I borrowed from Dave – a collection of collections, a meta-collection if you will: Stock Photos That Don’t Suck.

The featured image on this Post is from that list, specifically from New Old Stock.

Five Things I Learned About Live Chat

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This last weekend I made the move from our Akismet support team over to Team Hermes, a group of Happiness Engineers who cover live chat (that is, text-based chat support) for our regular paid users (That is, neither VIP nor Business), as well as covering in-app mobile support.

So, I spent my full work day yesterday deep in the live chat mines. Over a work day, I did 45 chats – not terrible for a first day! With only a single day of experience under my belt, here are a few early-stage insights on live chat as a medium of hospitality:

    1. Live Chat is very good at what it is very good at. Live Chat is, so far, good at two things: behaving like a human-powered search bar, answering questions with documentation or blog post recommendations, and debugging complicated problems with multi-step questioning. The trouble is when an operator has multiple chats that cover both flavors.

 

    1. Live Chat requires a different sort of focus than email or forum replies. Replying to an email allows a Happiness Engineer some space to explore and investigate and ensure that the reply is 100% correct as-is, a neatly-tied package that is ready to go. In Chat, there is a lot of uncertainty, and the need to balance multiple chat customers at once means you must be able to not only laser-focus on a single customer, you have to be able to switch between cases quickly with little time for recall.

 

    1. Live Chat requires a different mindset than email replies. Given the short time span between responses, there is no wall of authority in place: if an HE doesn’t know an answer, they have to admit it and then move forward with collaboration, a back-and-forth between the HE and the customer. In an email response, the HE would have time to research and be certain of their authority before replying. I like this ejection of ego from the equation; Live Chat feels much more “Let’s figure this out!” to email’s “Here is a solution.”

 

    1. Live Chat is not ideal for every problem: there were a few cases where I had to ask folks to seek support through other channels. These cases were big browser problems, where we needed full traceroutes to determine the underlying issue, and broad CSS customization, which, while something I _can_ do, would not be to the benefit of the rest of the folks waiting in the Live Chat line. Plus, our CSS Support Forum folks are so darn helpful!

 

    1. Live Chat would be a great tool for proactive, rather than reactive, support. I know that some companies use Chat on their sites as a sales lead generation tool – I think that in the pursuit of hospitality, offering Live Chat in an educational format would be a really outstanding application. Identify members of your team who are especially patient and tend to excel with new customers, and then create a Chat property specifically for the educational area of your site. Having a live human to work with might really change the onboarding process, and would at the very least help to illustrate where folks are getting caught up. In that way, educational Live Chat would serve both our user-facing hospitality needs as well as our hospitality-driven UX improvements by acting as chat-based user testing.

 

Today’s my second day – we’ll see how long the above remains true!