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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 even lecturing to students and clients.

While it’s tempting for me to be nostalgic about that time period as one that had a special focus on learning, I don’t think anything has changed for me. Nowadays, I travel widely to interview users and to teach others how to interview users. In the past few weeks, I’ve led a number of training workshops and interviewed a bunch of fascinating people. (I called home from the field to report that, once again, “This is the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on!”) Maybe it’s my researcher nature, but having fresh stories from the field to share in the workshops and having refined thoughts about how to interview to take with me into the field is pretty damn wonderful.

My best wish for you is that learning about how you learn about users will fuel your own passions in some similar measure.

—Steve Portigal, March 6, 2013, Montara, California