Transcription Web Designer #1

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Interviewee: Web Designer #1

Location: USA

Duration: 50 minutes

Date: May 16^th 2010

*Okay to put transcription and use pseudonym for name and company

What is your job title or area of expertise?

Design researcher

How many years have you been in the design industry?

Technically three years now.  Including a graduate degree I guess.

Do your work mainly as a freelancer or in-house?

I work as a consultant. I mean I have done both, but right now I am working as a consultant.

How if at all would you label your workflow in reference to the volunteer position you emailed me about?

I think what I do in work maybe inspires and guides the sort of things I do for the nonprofit. So I think a lot of what I end up doing is inspired by techniques of participatory design that we use in our research. And I use it kinda to structure conversations and use it plan activities and define ? and also to think about my design skills. I mean I went to school to be an interaction designer and I use that as a way to think about what people are doing and how they should be doing it and why. What makes sense and how to make it easier.

For your web design projects, what % actually use Wordpress?

Like I said it is just the front facing blog is Wordpress, and then we have another site that we just started and that is using Drupal.

Could you tell me the name of nonprofit and type of work they do?

Yeah, they are called Company X and we are trying to work in the intersection of art and technology. And our mission is to connect artists and technologists together and help pretty much random ordinary people discover their creativity. And we do that by holding events and exhibitions, we have workshops where we teach specific kinds of skills, sometimes it is technical skills, or non-technical.

Recording blank for few seconds

..Sometimes it’s our own projects, where we show our thinking by example.

How did you become involved with them?

I think I was at one of their events when I moved to the city and I just basically saw an opportunity for me to sort of use my expertise and what I was learning at work and cross this over, and we are a really young organization, we are barely about three years old. We have grown really slowly, we have had to create our own presence and create a crowd.

As a growing organization I felt that it could use design thinking so to speak. So I thought I would test it out and see what I could do for these guys. So that is how I ended up with them.

So for this particular site, since you did not build the site yourself, I would like to hear about an issue you had to focus on at one point and how it was dealt with from start to finish.

Is that something you feel comfortable starting to talk fluidly about and I can interject where necessary, or would you prefer I provide markers for you?

When I came in the Wordpress site was already running, um it really didn’t have too much of a structure. I guess and it was just there and the thing that happened was that we really didn’t have a big glaring problem that needed to be fixed, nothing broke, nothing was majorly dissatisfactory of some kind, but what happened was we weren’t actually getting, we were not doing a good job of getting people through from our workshop description pages to making donations and signing up for classes. That was pretty much the point we said okay, we need someone to help us do this and there was a Php developer that somebody knew who was willing to help out, and it was somebody who had just started doing web design on their own, and had just spun off into their own thing.  They ended up taking our basic installation and filling in a few custom modules and maybe doing a bit of theming. What we had to figure out after that was sort of how do we make this work in terms of people and who has access and how do we change the way information is presented.  Which is something we have not quite solved yet. But really about the only kind of problem we have faced is with simple things like formatting the output or trying to figure out how, when the payment action happens on the site how do we control what happens after that, which we still haven’t sort of managed or bothered to be honest dealing with. We probably might do it if it was easier, it is almost like okay this is collection, a kaleidoscope of different modules, and part of thing is that if it works, don’t break it. SO we haven’t bothered making any major changes or fixes. NO serious problems or serious fixes.

What is encompassed in your regular maintenance duties for this project, or what do you do on a regular basis for them?

Mostly it sorta runs itself. There is a bunch of other stuff which is much harder to do. SO I do much more maintenance on the Drupal site, rather than the Wordpress site. On the Wp site, it is mainly making sure things are, the code and installation are updating and plugins and modules are updated, because we have people that change in a out of roles, and some people  basically swap in and out of the marketing role who end up posting to the blog. Managing those permissions and anything else that goes wrong. I get a bunch of forgotten password requests, those pop up every so often and their username and which email these used it with…

But really that is the bulk of it. I do a few tweaks and adjustment of settings.

And one time we switched hosting providers, so I had to handle the migration and make that work.

How many people are usually involved in the project at one time then?

Um, we have about 30, and 20 steady volunteers. And it probably about 5-7 of us who are really core to this and different parts of the process. In the beginning we were all over the place and everyone did everything, and now we are starting to really specialize and switch roles. So increasingly, we have few people involved with the WP install, whereas, earlier there were probably more.

*people growing into and switching roles common for nonprofits as volunteers move in and out and the nonprofit itself learns what processes work best for them

You stated in your email that you participat in driving the dialogue between workflow and site design, could you elaborate?

So one of the things that we have to figure out how to do, and this specifically relates to the workshops that we hold. All but instructors are volunteers and so we have people who teach workshops for us that don’t do anything else and so that pool is growing and shrinking and changing over time. We have gone from doing one-off sort of workshops to really thinking about a curriculum and structuring a series of workshops together so they have great depth on a topic. So we have started to have more regular workshops, the same workshop starting every so often. And with all of this we start to have challenges of doing things like maintaining rosters of people who maintain our workshops frequently, tracking how many folk attend what kind of workshop and which ones go well. And so what we ended up with was a two headed solution that is really not satisfactory. The way we do it is that we have a bunch of different worksheets in Google docs, and there is a workflow associated with that. I had to sit down with a couple of other folks and do that, and edit and track the information and so on. And then part of that information ends up going to the Drupal site and part of that information ends up going to the Wordpress site. And I have to sit down with the people who update the Wordpress site to figure out how things like the workshop description, once the workshop was planned and finalized, and structured in terms of cities and seasons of the workshop and all other necessary information of the workshop have been set, we figure out how to get that information quickly and easily over to the person updating the Wordpress site. And also, trying to get our instructors to rely really on the Drupal site for coordination, instead of trying to do things entirely over email. So that is why, it is two headed solution, it is a little bit here and little bit there. When ideally, it would be best to have a single something that would go directly from planning and coordination, the actions of planning and coordinating, and writing the initial lesson plan and things like that, and following that through cleanly into the public facing aspects. So since tech does not allow us to do that right now. I am part of the process that says who sends an email to whom, and who is responsible for updating what kinds of information and what sort of information should live in the public site and what should live in the internal site. So that is probably the strongest example, we are starting to do this sort of thing with other aspects of our work, so you know we are starting to figure out other certain kinds of information that we should be putting out on your blog. So again, with the workshops, there is a workshop planning guide that is on the website. And that was, once we figured out how to hold workshops , what each instructor had to do, and how they are to work out a lesson plan and sort of all the instructor’s workflow, we basically wrote that down, and put that on the external website, so any potentional  instructor could come in and see approximately the amount of effort its takes to teach a workshop. As we have had people who have never taught a workshop before.

How do you think your particular organization, because it seems to be very involved, inspires greater investment in keeping it updated?

Honestly, I don’t think it does. To tell the truth. I think we have a very standard aspect, for the WP site right now, that is pretty much all our workshops, because that is most constantly changing aspect of what we do?

Recording fuzzy here.

And that is sort of planned out, because we have a marketing and workshops coordinator that handle this in tandem and um it’s almost like the because we are still figuring out who we are and what we are doing, end up being on our personal blogs and Twitter, and Facebook and that sort of thing, and it doesn’t really become part of the group identity in terms of those thing quite yet. So what we tend to do is make announcements, workshop announcements or exhibitions updates, of that sort, but it doesn’t really tend to be anything more than that.  We don’t’ feel that the blog is the right place yet, to do things like present a collective mind, or yeah, so it’s really, I really don’t know why that is, I am not sure if it is a cultural or organization problem, or if it is just a question of I really, whether the expense of time and effort is too much, or maybe they will only go to it once a month if they really have something to say.. just makes it not interesting enough to us??

I am not quite sure why that is the case. That is really how it is. And I think part of it is also, that we ended up with a site that is not really friendly to random thoughts. And it is almost like, and this for instance is a problem we haven’t really fixed, and looked at it in the eye and figured out really what to do with it. We usually are, the things that we need to find really quickly are the workshops, and the event announcements, and what we ended up with in terms of site design, is that we ended up with sort of a main slot, and the most recent posts ends up being there. And then there is a sidebar of most recent workshop posts, and so usually the main post that stays up there is something related with a workshop we particular want to promote or event we want to drum up and keep alive. And so using the blog really as a random collection of chronological ideas would really destroy that because it would remove that significant sticky post we want up front. I don’t think anyone has really thought about it, but I think it I part of the problem as to why we don’t do this more often.

And it’s almost like; we have sort of backed ourselves in a corner in respect to that. So those things are sort of going to together, the slight lack of interest and real group identity and this rather silly setup we seem to have.

That organization is sort of specific to Wordpress, so do think then that is Wordpress’ “fault” as it is time based?

Yeah. Honestly, you know why we picked Wordpress for this? We basically said, we picked Wordpress because it had the easiest post editor. Like the WSIWIG text editor and that was really easy for people to use. And um it was basically the interface that sold it. And when I was faced with the decision, with what do I recommend Drupal or Wordpress, or whatever and at the point Drupal, probably still, was not very easy to use. And I did not want to take a critical piece of our public facing technology and make it hard to update. So yeah, I think part of that is definitely Wordpress because I do think it is really designed for the sorts of things…it basically supports one kind of content. And it does not really give you the freedom to separate or not easily at any rate, you can’t really design a separate area of the site, a separate visual structure that is just for you know big updates, and then a separate visual area that is more for less significant ones. Unless you sit down and do some Php coding and stitch modules together, and that stuff. And even then it is not a very elegant solution. On the other hand there really is nothing easier to update. That does make it really easier to insert media and pictures. So it is sort of compromise.

Do you offer instruction on how to use Wordpress for people in the organization, or do they learn on their own, or how do they learn how to use it?

I think mostly a mixture of self taught plus “Wedesigner #1 omg how do I do this”, so think that it is easy enough that people start doing their basic things when they first get it,  and so they immediately start updating posts and doing stuff, so it is at the point that when they start to do something more complex  um you know reorganizing the pages or managing the content, in someway, that I typically get called in to do that. Like I said we don’t really do anything that complicated and our content does not really change. It is a very simple, linear sort of updating process. So I think people get up to the stage where they can comfortably post and attach pictures and all that, but it’s at things like: can I have a gallery on this page, and sometimes I even have to sit down and figure out how to that. It is a learning process for all those involved.

Now I would like to move on toward your role as design researcher.

You said that the beginning that you had a masters in Interaction design, yes?

Actually, HCI – Human Computer Interaction.

Does Company Y often do the research for building of websites or what sort of projects do you normally take on?

Our work is really very like upfront, generative research, we are looking at opportunities for new product development and we are really with very fuzzy spaces. So we have clients who come to us and say “what is the future of tv” , alright lets go out and talk to people, it can get very tactical, for instance we have done work for company that makes garden chairs, and we have helped them make a better garden chair. So we don’t do what is considered in the industry User-Experience for websites. We rarely work directly on the software level.

How does ethnography fit into your work then?

Um, sometimes it doesn’t. Actually about half the time it doesn’t. For instance in my personal work. I spent, when I was in grad school, one year with a research group studying cognitive science. They were looking at interdisciplinary cognition in, sorry cognition in interdisciplinary environments, so I was spending 6 months in one lab and about 8 months in another, sort of hanging out, and doing regular interviews, and what would technically be called ethnographic field work. So obviously now, I don’t have that sort of luxury anymore in my work, but it is sort of like we had to do a lot of things in very short period of time, and with much less rigor than is afforded in classic approaches to ethnography, so what we really had to do was really keep the spirit of ethnography and maybe not the exact letter. So I would use, my interviewing technique is ethnographic, so I tend to be a little looser, be less structured, to follow my hunches, and what people are saying more often. The way I reuse their terminology and frame things different, so the interviewing style is the most obvious way in which ethnography becomes part of my work. But in a less obvious way, it is guiding the overall research design doing things like saying, you know if we are going to construct a participatory activity, how can we maximize the amount of information present in, actually coming from the participants, versus something given to stimulate. So for instance, if it is a card sorting kind of thing, how can, to what extent can we ensure that the names and ideas are actually coming from the participant? And at an even higher level it influences the way I frame the research question and how I try to get the clients to think about the problem.

Is your ethnography backed by anthropological theory after the method is carried out, or how is your data interpreted and processed?

You know to tell the truth, there really isn’t much theory that we end up using. Which is something I am trying to remedy. There really is unfortunately for us, x company used to have anthropological researchers , but we don’t anymore. But because my training is not in Anthropology, I can’t off the top of my head really say hey “yes there is this framework or theory that we can use”. Often it is something that comes along on the way and I will try to do some secondary research and try to find something, but it’s not very structured in that sense. That being said if you do grad school in HCI you do pick a few basic theories along the way and they tend to get applied all the time in my work. Probably the most obvious and biggest thing that gets used is theories around identity and what that means and how is it expressed in different ways and how it is expressed with technology or not with technology. And what should our clients be doing about it. Should they be concerned about it or not. If they are not concerned with it, should they be etc…A lot of theory around that tends to be as far as I can do. Because my coworkers are from a much more traditional design background and their theory orientation is much less than mine is. They are much less interested in doing that. So toward the end, it ends up being trying use what anthropology theory I know, and framing the question and interpreting the results, but for the most part its freeform because I can’t get other people to think with theories, I can only do it myself.

For the designers who don’t know any anthropological or ethnographic theory or methods, where or what data do they use to make their design decisions. Or what is their role in the research? (since company does not do design, just research)

We are all researchers, we all just come from a different perspectives and variety of backgrounds. And so for people who have more of  design background, I think they are going by more their instinct and making interpretations and framing their interpretations. Obviously we don’t make stuff up. So it’s almost like saying, okay we got all this data, we have gone through it, sorted it and organized it, and worked it out, but beyond that the instinct and the experience of having done things like this in the past, we look at what level this sort of information is going to be useful at. How abstract do we need to make it? How do we structure or provide a framework that would make sense to people? How do we, what parts of this do we really need, enrichment for the kinds of data, or forms of expressions, and that is really where their decisions are made and where their experience comes in. So somebody who has a communication and graphic design background is going to be thinking about a more visual background and connected frameworks and someone who has had more of an industrial design background wants to see how they can represent their information as inspirational design ideas or statements of framing opportunities. So I think we all have slightly different ways of dealing like that.  But most of it is , I am a designer, I am a x this is what I wanna do this is what I have been doing for the past x number of years and therefore this is the way to tell the story, or this is the story exists.

Actually once you are a consultant and you keep doing projects over and over again, they are just for different clients, so you are after awhile you are like “I know what we are going to find in this particular project” because we have done it before. So there is some of that too.

What do you think then about the idea that the design world should be answerable to the academic world if they are using let’s say again, ethnographic methods?

What do you mean answerable?

Maybe peer reviews in a way, following manuals written by anthropologists rather than designers, maybe against the idea that designers should be able to formulate their own methods and pull from wherever necessary.

You know to tell you the truth, I think all that sort of putting up the rigor flag is, it seems like boundary protection to me. Because, if nothing, I am a hybrid creature, I have an undergraduate degree in computer science. I worked at a furniture company doing research for them. So my metric was doing eventual, the end result of the research. And what the impact was and how it was done. Most of the time, honestly my experience has been, that the real problem with methods and the discussion on what methods should be used and which one are right, is not so much that there are methods that are misapplied  is that the questions that are inspiring the research or project are badly framed. And what that is that is actually an organization problem, it is not a research methods problem, it is the problem of the organization that comes up and says this is what I want to understand and the thing they want to understand and the way they have framed the question around what they want to understand is not well done. Or conversely they have a good research question, a good perspective on it, but they don’t really have a good way to socialize that knowledge once the research is done and insight done and the knowledge is found. Or the team that does the research does not really know how to do it.  Or doesn’t really know how to, produces outputs that are more socialized, more usable. I am not going to say actionable, because they always are, but it’s a question of whether people bother acting on them. So it’s this question of, who should be allowed to do it, or what the right thing is, or accountability or who should be allowed to claim it is also counterproductive honestly. I would much rather see better awareness of which methods are to be use and why and probably more understanding on what some of these things are, so it is more not that I feel that designers need to explain themselves to academia, it more that designers need to learn a little bit more about where academia has come from and why it is saying the sorts of things that it is saying so that they have, a more clear approach to doing research. I don’t have a problem with people claiming something in ethnography that is not ethnography, I think that is beside the point; I think the point is that they manage to understand the ethnographic or whatever process. We are talking ethnography here, but we may as well be talking about the ??? Have they understood why they are doing something and what is the relationship between the method and the kind of knowledge it is going to reveal and knowing about the boundaries of that knowledge? And really saying, this is what I am comfortable saying. But beyond that, I am not comfortable saying, but saying it is possible to say this based on the data and it’s not possible to say this other thing. And I think that is maybe where we should be have a dialogue around.

Could you describe co-creation in your own words, and what it is in terms of your organization?

For us it is more of a guiding principle, that says we don’t want don’t pretend to be and are not going to be the experts on all things related to the research, so what we try to do is partner as much as possible with our clients, and get them involved with the whole research design process and each step along the way, and that involves the interpretation process as tightly as we can make it happen given distances and all that. And obviously also with a, in terms of the participants in our research we try to think about how much can we put the task of coming up with what is the meaning of whatever thing we are studying as much as possible in their hands and giving them as much ability as and as many different ways to express and articulate. Unfortunately, what it isn’t yet is in our work is it does not mean we are able to be the organization , say the corporation that needs the design done to the people that are going to be affected by the design are, or who are going to be affected by the products basically act as the people who facilitate that interaction over a long period of time into the beginning of the project during research. That rarely happens. I guess co-creation in a sense is very short spurts of co-creation. Focused around specific kinds of design and knowledge making activity.  As opposed to a co-creation around the whole process. That starts from inception all the way through to making something and fixing it and selling that and all that stuff.

What are its main differences between participatory research or design?

I think that last bit is probably what I am going to say. I mean you know there seems to be two distinct senses between participatory design. We do it, then we talk about it, I think that we end up using tactically, we end up using participatory design methods. Um which is in terms of expression,  articulation, and structuring …blanked out…in the sense of actually setting up a design process and being part of the process from start to finish and shepherding the stakeholders from start to finish. Because like I said, we don’t do design. We don’t end up with that aspect, even though it is closely related to what we want to do.

Could you describe Flash immersion?

I don’t know what counts as flash immersions, because our clients always accompany us into the field. Because of the sorts of work we do, it’s usually big picture, general research we actually have clients who come back to us over and over again. And they are sort of generally familiar with an area. They are generally comfortable going into people’s homes. The kinds of knowledge change that will happen to them when they go in the field. I don’t think those guys really count as beneficiaries of immersion for us. But we do have occasional clients who we realize; okay these guys really need to be in the field. And we will try to take as many of them as possible. And to expose as many of them as, to do as wide a range of experiences as we can. So typically when we have decided that someone needs immersion, we will go beyond bringing them into people’s homes but take them around the city go to a market place and see things related to what they are studying, and try to do that.

But because our clients don’t always need that, we don’t end up doing that very often.

End conversation summary…design research to be done in nonprofit as have more to benefit from them due to building of relationships.

*I felt a lot of questions I asked in this interview could have been more creative, and I should have emailed the organization itself for answers instead of making my interviewee recite them to me. At the same time, it was more interesting to hear a description in a nonbusiness setting.

Tags: Anthrodesign, design ethnography, designer views, ethnography, Nonprofit, relationship technology user, ucd, web design, wordpress, workflow
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