Press
Taming the Elephant in the Room: Brand Perception and Bias
I’ve been a bit of a pizza snob ever since my first job making pizza at the age of 15. I’ve always had a pretty low opinion of Domino’s Pizza®, so I was very impressed when I saw Domino’s recent efforts to reinvent both their pizza and their brand identity by tackling their problems head on. Read More »
Research Is Communication
When people ask us what we do for a living, it can be difficult to explain if they aren’t familiar with the user-centered design process. As user researchers, we’ve come to realize the average consumer doesn’t expect companies to involve their users in developing their products and services. Read More »
Research Logistics: A Crash Course for Designers and Stakeholders
With more companies today putting a stronger emphasis on gaining a deeper understanding of their customer, it’s not unusual for us to be called in for a project to find that our clients don’t have a lot of experience with research and don’t know what to expect. Read More »
What designers and researchers can learn from hostage negotiators
It’s 2 a.m., and a call comes across the radio that a young man with a gun has barricaded himself and his mother in his home. No shots have been fired, and little communication has been established between the man and police officers outside. Read More »
Contextual Interviews and Ethnography: Two Different Types of Home Visits
It’s important to make a distinction between these two different research methodologies and the kind of data you get from each. Both involve visiting a participant in their homes or other environments but they are distinctly different. Read More »
How to Listen to the User and Hear the Experience
When someone is speaking, do you think about what the other person is saying, or do you think about what you are going to say next?
At ActiveComm Labs, we are big believers in communication and what it can do to improve research. Our background in both user experience research and communication has allowed us to harness the experiences of our users and provide the most accurate feedback to our clients. Our background in communication includes many years of research and training with hostage negotiators across the country. Through this training we learned the skills and techniques that negotiators use to resolve crisis situations and how to apply them in a research setting. We consider Active Listening to be one of the key components of an overarching method that we call Active Observation®. Active Observation® is a synthesis of Active Listening skills, influencing techniques and advanced observation of non-verbal communication such as facial expressions and body language to generate a deep and dynamic understanding of an individual. Read More »
The Future of Mobile Applications
Mobile applications are the new kid on the block. The inception of the iPhone has given birth to a whole new market for applications that are relatively cheap and easy to create. With the number of mobile applications on Apple’s app store projected to exceed 100,000 by the end of the year [http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/flurry-iphone-apps/], mobile apps are the exciting new frontier that invites both large companies and independent developers to innovate like the early days of the internet. Many app developers have treated the mobile space much like the web, providing information on demand, but they are just scratching the surface of what is possible with a personal device. Having applications that run on a single mobile device that sits in our pocket, allows engagement possibilities that can help us tackle lifestyle shifts like never before. Read More »
The Science of Negotiation – Patterns to Predict Success or Failure
No one ever plans for their marriage to fail. However, with time – 30 years – and many research subjects, the noted psychologist, John Gottman, Ph.D, developed a coding system that enabled him to do just that – he was able to predict with 90 percent accuracy the outcome of marriages – successful or not. By analyzing patterns of communication between married couples, he and his team developed a framework so nuanced that they could accurately make this prediction with only 15 minutes of dialogue. Though it sounds like science fiction, Gottman has replicated his results repeatedly and even made predictions with an astonishing 80% accuracy with just a three to four minute sample. Read More »
Applied Training is the Secret to Active Listening
The art of hostage negotiation does not focus on one particular moment: the most successful negotiations are built from solid understanding of the hostage taker, and the development of mutual trust between negotiator and taker. Many negotiators have found that the most effective way to accomplish this is to listen actively to the hostage taker as he tells his story, absorbing and processing not only content, but also emotion and subtext. This deeper understanding can give negotiators better leverage to convince the hostage taker into giving up and walking out.