Today we protested outside the UXLX conference to Stop Lab Testing (Usability Lab Testing).

Why protest?
I co-founded Webnographer with James, because I believed that we needed new techniques and methods to carry out user research.

The lab testing method is over 20 years old now.  Since then there has been a large shift in the technology we use, and our behaviour. We have moved on from using a desktop computer in one fixed environment 20 years ago, to portable devices (smart phones, tablet PCs, and laptops) in a multitude of contexts today. This has changed how and where people access the internet, and how much distraction or attention is given to an interaction in a given environment.

With this huge shift in tools and behaviour, the methods we use to understand individual behaviours needs to change too.

We need methods that help evaluate behaviour in its multitude of contexts, environments, languages, and countries. We need to test products with a multitude of customers, not just 10 people in London, or Lisbon, or Berlin. We need to get feedback independent of where people are located. We need to test with large numbers of users in diverse locations to be able to quantify the impact of design changes.

As Marshall McLuhan said: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

This means that User Experience Research must be reshaped too. At Webnographer we are building those tools to help you understand people, so that you can make better products too.

To find out more, follow @webnographer on Twitter.

Two weeks ago, I organised for James and Sabrina to give a talk on User Experience at the Technology and Design week of the Management and Technology School of the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre.

It felt different to go back to Portalegre. This time I visited my old school not as a student but as an “outsider”.

On Wednesday, the talk started a bit late but the students seemed to be looking forward to it. James and Sabrina talked about User Experience and how we use Remote Usability here at Webnographer. The students in the auditorium gave me good feedback and were really looking forward to do something with us in the future.

I liked seeing my former colleagues of Computer Science and the Design students at the talk, and I was excited when I saw students of other fields of study there as well. This goes to show that not everyone has a silo of interests but instead have a  T-shaped map of interests: no one is too focused on their own field and will instead happily branch out their interests (and skills) into other related areas.

I was glad to see this because nowadays the T-shape of skills is crucial in a professional environment, specially in the UX business.

Photo by Daniela “Zariga” Correia

UXLX, the User Experience conference, is happening next month here in Lisbon. We have put an insider’s guide to Lisbon together for the UX people, consisting of inside tips assembled by the UX, Web and Start Up community here in Portugal.

The idea for the guide happened as last week I was visiting Porto, a city I have not visited for years. I had a nice dinner, but it was not exceptional. I realized that I was surrounded by tourists. I thought to myself: if only I had asked the insiders where to go I would have had a far better time.

Although UXLX is hosted in Expo, at the edge of the city and by the airport, which is a modern area, no one comes to the oldest city in Western Europe for the modernity.

Over the next month Gil, Pedro, Tiago, Rodrigo, and others will be blogging about where you can get the best food, what are the trendiest bars, and which art galleries you should definitely visit.

Downtown Lisbon is a fun, and lively place. So it is important if you are staying in Expo to get out and see the centre.

As the only largish UX company with an office in Lisbon, every year we look forward to UXLX. Together with UxLondon, UXLX is one of the big User Experience conferences in Europe. Bruno Figueiredo always gets some of the great names of UX to speak and to give workshops at the conference.

Anyway, we are looking forward to seeing you in Lisbon and we want you to have an awesome time when you’re here!

Photo of Lisbon by Safa Erişti

One of the most read newspapers in Portugal, Público just wrote an article about foreign people living and working in Portugal.

Our founders – Sabrina Mach and James Page – were interviewed for the article. The story brought up what I said in November that you don´t need to leave Portugal to get a hot job.

Sabrina was quoted as saying how sad it was to see intelligent people leaving countries like Portugal (and Ireland) – because they are the future.

James went on to quote what I said last November – that every tech job creates 5 jobs in the wider economy.

As of today we are now looking to fill three positions in the Lisbon office: Software Developer, UX Analyst, and an Office Manager.

Two weeks ago we held the first Geekdom Friday. It’s a once a month, open event where we talk about a technology related subject from which everyone – not just geeks – can learn and chat about.

My talk was about what I’ve learned from the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Although it is targeted at programmers, it contains lots of useful tips on problem solving that everyone can use.

On “Take Responsibility” the book covered why everyone that touches a project (regardless of at what point, or for how long) should make sure that they see it through, and not sit idly waiting for things to go wrong. Because they often do, and when it happens, one should “provide options, not make lame excuses”.

On “Fighting Entropy”, is about how to avoid chaos from taking over your project, covering the “Broken Window Theory”: all it takes is that one small part of the system gets messy or broken, to settle a sense of abandonment and more “windows” get broken without repair, just like in dark parts of big cities. It’s all about cleaning up the mess as soon as you notice it.

The book explains how quality should always be the main requirement of a project, while trying to settle for what’s called the “Good Enough” product: focus on it’s core before thinking about adding extra functionality.

In the talk I covered briefly the “Evils of Duplication” , where I mention the golden DRY rule (Don’t Repeat Yourself) which teaches us to never duplicate ‘pieces’ of knowledge, we talked about Prototypes and Tracer Bullets. While the first are disposable, often paper-based representations of the product (or parts of) used to test specific areas or ideas, the latter are build to keep, to test how the system holds together, to see if it ‘hits the target’ – you’ll have a trivial implementation that you can test to see how it behaves in practice. Once that’s verified, they act as the basic system ‘skeleton’ on which we can build on.

Often Prototypes and Tracer Bullets are mistaken for each other, although they serve a different (yet useful) purpose: think of “prototyping as the reconnaissance and intelligence gathering that takes place before a single tracer bullet is fired.” (quote, p. 52)

In the end, having a pragmatic approach to problem solving is all about constantly reminding ourselves of the big picture. Think about who will use what you are building, take responsibility for it, learn from mistakes and be prepared for them.

More to come next month!

Photo of David Thomas was taken by James Duncan Davidson

Last week Lisbon hosted three great events for Portuguese talent and entrepreneurs: Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon Conference, Sapo Codebits, and Startup Weekend. So I thought this could be a great opportunity to promote our most recent campaign and try to expand our team, but most importantly to keep great talent in Portugal.

Too many people are leaving the country

According to the 21st of November issue of VISÃO magazine, more than 600 thousand people have left the country since the beginning of the crisis. And we now have over 100 thousand people that have a degree but can’t find a job. Also, roughly 30% of Lisbon MBA students leave Portugal to go to Startups in Angola, Mozambique and Brazil, according to Mbwana, Founder and Managing Partner of Savannah Fund.

If you leave Portugal, 5 other jobs will be lost

What happens when a Developer leaves Portugal? 5 jobs in local services will be lost! This terrifying statistic comes from Enrico Moretti of Berkeley University who analysed data from 8 million workers in 320 metropolitan areas. His finding: for each new high-tech job in a city, five additional jobs are ultimately created in local services. This means, for every tech job lost, 5 additional jobs will disappear as he explains in his book “The New Geography of Jobs”.

Change things!

So what can I do to change that? Events like Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon, Codebits or Startup Weekend are a great start.

Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon promotes entrepreneurship in Portugal. Startup Weekend helps people to take the first steps in developing their ideas, and to starting a company. New  companies create the most new jobs, and will ultimately pave the way out of the recession.

Join Webnographer

A few months back I joined Webnographer. It has been a constantly challenging experience, and that’s the fun of it! Everyday is different and I’m always learning something new and pushing myself further. Reaching my limits and establishing new ones.

If you’re interested in joining our team and get a hot career here in Portugal, please find more about our job opennings here: http://jobs.webnographer.com

This annual worldwide series of events, organized by the User Experience Professionals Association, promotes awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design.

The theme for this World Usability Day is Usability in Financial Systems. World Usability Day 2012 will serve as an impetus for creating greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate financial systems around the world. It will be held on Thursday, 8th November 2012 and Webnographer is happy to announce that will be hosting the event at their office in Lisbon!

If you are interested in user experience and usability, come and join us at Webnographer to talk about what matters most and learn some tips.

When: Thursday 8th November 2012, 7 pm to 11 pm
Where: Webnographer Research, Rua Artilharia 1, N 67 1ºD, in Lisbon, Portugal
How do I sign up for this? Sign up now via Eventbrite to secure your place.

Photo by World Usability Day

Next Tuesday at 7 pm, James will be giving a talk at Beta-i ‘s October edition of Beta-talk on “Why Portugal?”. Why did Webnographer start up an operation in Portugal. What are the challanges, and what the differences between doing part of a start up here in Lisbon, compared to other countries. He will contrast working here with the experience of working in Ireland where the other part of Webnographer is, and London which is where he is from.

Beta-talks are organized by Beta-i, a non-profit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship and connecting entrepreneurs on the most varied ways.

This event will be a good opportunity to check in with real entrepreneurs, to learn something from them and do lots of networking, all of this in a relaxed environment loaded with inspiring people.

When: Tuesday 16th October 2012, 7 pm to 8:30 pm
Where: Anfiteatro do Complexo Interdisciplinar do Instituto Superior Técnico – Alameda, in Lisbon, Portugal
How do I sign up for this? Sign up now via Eventbrite to secure your place.

Photo by João Carvalho

You could have the greatest idea for a Start Up in the world, even have the best team working together to build a great product. If you don’t have traction, you’re not going anywhere. Traction shows a potential investor that your Start Up  is “going places.”

Next Tuesday 16th October 2012, James will be giving a free workshop on Traction organized by Webnographer and Beta-i at Startup Lisboa, the incubator. The workshop will give you the tools to create “Traction” for your Start Up so that you can raise funding, or bootstrap your way to success. It will cover why a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) matters, what do VCs really want, and how to build momentum.

Tech Entrepreneurs, you shouldn’t miss this.

When: Tuesday 16th October 2012, 10 am to 5 pm
Where: Startup Lisboa, Rua da Prata, N 80, in Lisbon downtown, Portugal
How do I sign up for this? Sign up now via Eventbrite to secure your place.

Photo by Startup Lisboa

We recently worked on an exciting project with Travelport, a leading provider of global travel distribution systems. Travelport asked us to carry out a usability test on a new product that they had developed for travel agents booking hotels online, called Rooms and More. The research was carried out with travel agents in 5 different countries, and helped provide insights into the usability and user experience of this new product.

This is what Travelport said about working with Webnographer:

Prior to launching a brand new product in the market to our existing customers, we really wanted to hear from them.  As always, you make some assumptions in your initial designs, but we needed a way to test things out that would allow us to make changes before we rolled it out to everyone, and had to react to their feedback.

Faced with the choice  between a simple questionnaire [that does not really deliver quality results] and lab work [which gives you quality, but also has the drawback of costs and really limiting the number of people you can get feedback from], we found that the Webnographer remote testing solution was the perfect fit!

We worked with Webnographer to run our customers through a series of tasks, and the ability to see their real-time feedback, and then play back their session was invaluable.

James and Sabrina not only helped us define and design the testing, so that it brought us actionable results, but also delivered a well thought-out, extensive report on the tail end – allowing us to really focus in on the key changes we need to make.  We liked it so much, we signed up for more.

Sincerely,

Brian Batts
Head of Product, Consumer & New Ventures
Travelport