Hello, friend!

Thanks for clicking in. We’re back with more chugs and plugs. And a seaside Crunchwrap.

Let’s Do Design Research Right!

Whether you’re new to research or tired of having the same arguments and not being heard, join us Thursday, April 30 at 9am PDT.

This workshop is useful for everyone, whatever your role or level of experience with design or research. You will learn how to help your team or your clients learn better and faster, and why they might resist. It’s a good time, possibly the best three (3) hours of your week.

Special for newsletter subscribers, use code BOOK to receive a free paperback of Just Enough Research 2024 with your workshop registration (and $1 off).

The Most Beautiful Taco Bell in the World

I biked down to the magical Pacifica Taco Bell Cantina for the first time this past weekend. Goals! Coincidentally KQED just did a story on the miracle of its existence. Good news! You have decades to visit before the ocean rises enough to threaten the building. You should go.

Still on the fence about the Dirty Baja Blast, though.

Revisiting the Cooperative Principle

Human conversation works as well as it does because we can (usually, often, sometimes) make sense of the difference between what someone says and what they mean, based on the context. There’s so much we can convey because of how much we can imply. (Bless your heart!)

The study of this phenomenon is called pragmatics.

Philosopher of language and pragmatics guy Paul Grice introduced the concept of the cooperative principle. In conversational exchanges “each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction.”(Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, 1989)

This often implicit common purpose (or its absence) is what determines whether a particular contribution to a conversation is more or less appropriate.

The cooperative principle is critical in client services. Any project can be thought of as an extended conversation with an explicit goal. For a variety of reasons, clients often make specific directives or requests that are at odds with that goal. That’s a normal part of the work. Our ability to recognize this, interpret those requests, and respond appropriately is what makes us useful and effective partners. Our expertise is facilitating the exchange in a way that gets us to the agreed-upon outcome, which often involves a degree of disagreement in the moment.

Being pedantic or sycophantic would be irresponsible, counterproductive, and a big waste of time.

The more apps start talking with people like people, the more important it is to think about this principle from all sides. Software is getting really good at sounding like it has all the context and shares a given user’s goal, even when this isn’t the case.

And if you’re having any sort of conversation that starts feeling frustrating or takes a turn, ask yourself, do all participants have the same purpose here? Upon reflection, you might find that deep down, you don’t. And you have to fix that before moving forward. Seems obvious, but like all obvious things, easy to miss in the moment.

For more on this topic, the first edition of Conversational Design remains available as a free download from the Mule Books site. The second edition is still in the works, but we can safely say providing confidently wrong information remains a bad thing to do.

How to Die (and other stories)

is now available as an ebook. We do have a few more of the hardback in stock and ready to send out, custom inscribed and signed. It’s absorbent!

Reply to say hi! And we hope you have a good weekend. ☀️