Back in April I took a business trip to the fascinating Indian city of Bengaluru, which is both very like and very unlike big cities in the US. One of the many things I found interesting was the empty decorative fountains littered around the central city — carcasses of a British city aesthetic that did not survive its transplantation. In a place where water is a limited resource and the temperature hovers all summer in the high 80s (°F), evaporation makes public fountains very high-maintenance and expensive. Their empty shells seemed like warnings about the folly of globalizing design without research and cultural awareness.

Trash can at the Lalbagh Gardens in Bengaluru

I also noticed the very common practice of public (or semi-public) wall urination. I was especially struck by the juxtaposition of the overall dryness and this constant but small-scale “watering” of the streets after seeing John Thackara’s keynote address at Interaction ’09. He spoke some about global water conservation, and had one slide showing a spindly plant that had been watered with tap water next to a much larger and more vibrant plant that had been watered with urine. (Here is a video of his talk, Designing for Business as Usual, and the slide I mention is at 41 minutes.)

Then just last week I saw this article on the Wall Street Journal about the Paris police writing tickets and upping their effort to curb wall urination, and I remembered something Robert Fabricant said in his Interaction ’09 keynote, Behavior Is Our Medium*.  He encouraged designers to avoid trying to change learned behavior, but to focus instead on changing the non-human parts of the system.

Laws against public urination (as far as I can tell it’s against the law almost everywhere) are intended to change an entrenched, global behavior. But police enforcement, infraction processing and court time, and installing and maintaining plentiful public bathrooms are all expensive efforts, not to mention the extra water used for every urinal flush. Surely there is room for a more elegant solution that doesn’t try to change the human part of the system? Inspired by this question, I sat down and quickly mind-mapped around the idea of a public wall-urination capture and re-purpose system.

click to see full-size

I enjoyed the exercise immensely, and I got pretty excited by some of the possibilities. I think there is a real opportunity for a low-cost, low-effort solution that would harness that wasted water and simultaneously reduce the mess and stigma of wall urination, without requiring people to substantially change their current behavior. I would really love to drop a prototype or two into a corner of downtown LA and see what happens. Unfortunately, it would still be illegal.

This is obviously not a minor consideration. A facet of this project, if it ever were to become a project, would need to address society’s perception of public urination. But product demos and PR campaigns can’t help if the product is, by definition, both public and completely illegal. And hoping laws change before public perception changes seems pretty unlikely.

So what do you think: am I crazy? Is there NO WAY people would ever accept sanctioned semi-public urination? What about outside the US? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

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*Bonus: Sketchnotes on Flickr of the first half of Fabricant’s keynote that I did when practicing sketchnoting at home.

I’ve been feeling lately that being the parent of a pre-speech toddler is training me to be a better user advocate.

Being a parent, aside from being simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding thing I have ever done, is a great experience for me as a user experience professional. I get to see up close how my son learns new things, how empowered he feels when he can accomplish something on his own, and how frustrated he is when he can’t. I have seen him learn behaviors that I had thought were innate and saw him dance to music before anyone showed him how. And right now, I think parenting is improving my behavior observation and analysis skills.

Getting to the Root of the Tantrum

The other evening I was frantically trying to process his hooting, pointing, waving, and screeching to determine what to do to make him happy. I quickly figured out that what he wanted was to go outside, but what he needed was to go to bed. It occurred to me that what I did was not unlike listening to users, watching their behavior, and learning to understand not only what they think they want, but what they really need.

I follow my son around in his natural habitat and constantly monitor his actions. I analyze his behavior, taking into consideration a lot of contextual influencers like his surroundings, the time of day, and his usual daily routine. It’s my job to figure out his needs and goals and to be his advocate. Sometimes, of course, this just means giving him a cracker, but fairly often it means communicating what he can’t to people who aren’t as familiar with him.

Goal-Directed Design

I just finished reading About Face 3 for our UX Book Club meeting, and the main premise is that designers should be focused on goals, not tasks. In the section on conducting and analyzing user research he says,

“You usually can’t ask a person what his goals are directly. Either he won’t be able to articulate them, or he won’t be accurate or even perfectly honest… [D]esigners and researchers need to carefully reconstruct goals from observed behaviors, answers to other questions, nonverbal cues, and clues from the environment…” (88-89)

In my UX work, as in my parenting, I strive to translate behavior (even often direct requests) into true goals and then design a solution that meets those goals. In other words, I listen to “Make this button red,” and “Let me go outside,” and understand “Simplify the data entry process,” and “Help me get some sleep.”

Of course, a lot of what I do as a parent is very different from valid user research. I observe only one person, not a sample of a group. I take a very active role in my son’s actions. I purposefully influence his behavior. And I try to directly mitigate his needs. But I like to think that the sensitivity I’m practicing as a parent, being able to observe closely, to learn to understand his unique language, to tease out both the trigger of a behavior and it’s root cause, will also improve my work as a user advocate.

Disclaimer: Contextual user research has not been a focus of my career – there are many UX practitioners who know much more about it than I do. I may have misrepresented user research here somehow – if I have, feel free to let me know.