Читать книгу Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries - Steve Portigal - Страница 25

Several years ago, a colleague and I traveled to Sweden, Indonesia, and China for a study of storage practices in homes. We were particularly interested in observing everyday activities related to the “stuff” one owns, like clustering, archiving, organizing, disposing, sharing, holding, recycling, and so on. The goal was to gather useful insights from the analog world to better understand how people might deal with data in the digital one.

In each city, we recruited a number of participants to be interviewed twice and to complete a cultural probe during the week between the interviews. The first interview (about three hours) started by focusing on baseline data for the first 60–90 minutes, and then shifted to a home tour in which we would go room by room, observing the environment and asking questions arising from what we noticed or from what the participant indicated during the baseline interview. During this part of the first interview, we would often find ourselves opening drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, and the like, with participants’ permission, of course.

There is nothing more fascinating than seeing what people do with their stuff. To some extent, you see yourself and your own behaviors in action, and in other cases, you have to be prepared to find the most obscure things in those drawers—so obscure that even their owners are perplexed when they rediscover them!

I have fond memories of a young and bright Swedish woman laughing with puzzled surprise when she discovered the enormous amount of candles she managed to accumulate and that all those candles were in the same drawer as a flyswatter she did not recall owning. I still giggle when I think of a beautiful Indonesian family taking us in their storage room, to discover they had six to seven identical broken appliances. I still remember the puzzlement of the husband, trying to work out how on earth that accumulation happened. And again, I always smile with affection and admiration when I think of a Chinese painter and his lovely wife showing us their feng-shui based order of things.

During this quite long study (a bit more than two weeks in the field for each country, long for corporate research), one of our many adventures was about a Chengdu-based participant, often code-named “the interviewee from hell.”

It all started in the morning at 9 a.m.—the first interview for that day. We rang the bell of an apartment, but no response. After a few minutes, we tried again, but still nothing. We started feeling edgy, as we did not want to be culturally inappropriate or pushy. Yet suddenly the door opened to reveal a young pajama-clad woman with puffy eyes who was evidently just out of bed.

The young lady, who here will remain unnamed, looked at us evidently annoyed, flashing “how dare you wake me up” eyes, and asked us what we wanted. The translator explained that we were there for the interview, and she told us she was pretty sure we were one day early.

My colleague and I began thinking of ways to accommodate her interview another day, but the participant let us in—even though we feared this was not the best premise for the best interview.

After the usual preambles and consent form sign-offs, we set up our video gear and proceeded with the first part of the interview. I should have immediately realized something was off when I saw the participant clutching her mobile phone with great intimacy—the glued-on-my-body type of intimacy. But no, her behavior did not immediately ring the “this is going to be a disaster” bell, and we started with the interview, with me taking charge of picture/video taking activities.

There is something rather cool about framing another human being through a camera. You observe little details even more deeply. And now, all the little details immediately rang the infamous “this is going to be a disaster interview” bell. For the rest of the interview, the following scenario occurred over and over again:

• Colleague asked a question while participant checked her phone (text, emails, Internet).

• Participant responded with “yes,” “no,” and “hmm . . . I think so” type of answers.

• Our facial expressions were incredulous.

• Participant continued checking her phone, rarely looking up or even acknowledging someone was asking her questions.

This loop goes on and on. After a while, we tried to send a subliminal message by asking whether she would prefer to meet another time since she seemed busy (read: distracted and totally unengaged). The young lady looked at us (finally!) and said, “No, it’s fine. Let’s do it now.” (Read: this is tedious already; you interrupted my beauty sleep, so let’s get it over and done with it.)

So . . . we went on. After a while, I started having the giggles, intrigued by the evidently dysfunctional situation. I felt tempted to suggest we refocus the interview on her mobile phone usage (evidently her passion), to learn something useful instead of pushing a cart into such a void-of-usefulness corner. But I didn’t suggest it. Instead, I kept going. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I was so entertained by her behaviors that I wanted to see how far she could go. Maybe both. Hard to tell—these things happen fast, and it is often easier to think about the right thing to do retrospectively.

Anyway, the rest of the interview continued along the same lines, with the exception of the home tour part, where my pictures were not of a user handling her phone while on a couch, but those of shoulders hunched over a phone. During the tour, the verbal part of the interview shifted from yes/no answers to a number of grunts and monosyllables.

After three hours, we finally left. We looked at each other in total puzzlement, unsure if we should cry, laugh, or have a meltdown. We would have been totally entitled to have one. Instead, we kept our cool and moved on (aside from a few colorful words that I won’t put in writing). It was a testing-your-patience-thresholds kind of day.

But the fun part was not over yet, because after a week, we had a second interview scheduled!

This second interview was definitely much more colorful. Instead of taking pictures of a participant and her phone, I managed to take pictures of serious multitasking in action: for instance, send texts and check your social network on the phone with the left hand while checking the stock exchange on the laptop with the right hand. And do not forget the yes/no/grunt answers and minimal level of auditory attention paid to us.

If you were to ask me what I learned from this participant, I would say lots.

If you instead asked: Did you learn anything useful for your project? Not a thing would be my answer.

Regardless, this experience led to a good story to share and helped me have a different appreciation for researchers’ thresholds.