Understanding Customers: Research, Insights, and Storytelling with Steve Portigal — DT101 E48

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Steve Portigal is the Principal of Portigal Consulting and an experienced user researcher who helps companies harness the strategic power of insights. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He also wrote Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. We talk about interviewing people, customer research, and storytelling with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host.</span></p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Steve started out in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in the days before the World Wide Web and before the formal idea of user experience (UX) existed. He had a brief exposure to design as a profession through an article about industrial product design, and to the idea of bringing together people from many different disciplines to collaborate and create solutions to problems via another article about a project trying to determine how best to find a way to demarcate dangerous locations, like nuclear waste sites. These ideas planted seeds leading to his interest in design. Steve graduated with his Masters in HCI, had a summer internship in Silicon Valley, and eventually found a job in an industrial design consultancy to work on what was essentially proto-UX design with their software.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At the same time, this company was exploring ideas surrounding ethnographic research and the idea of uncovering product opportunities, and Steve managed to apprentice himself with the team, where he learned about organizing and finding connections within data. He also had the opportunity to develop his initial interviewing skills, which he continued to hone as he started his own consultancy focused on user research. Steve was one of the first people in the early 90’s to develop design processes for user experience and research.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We talk about Steve’s excitement for and interest in spending more time with stakeholders w