UX Speakeasy Enlists Big Data & Qualitative Research to Explore its Growth

Data Data Data

San Diego UX Speakeasy has a problem. We are popular. Yes, that is a problem. Sort of. We find ourselves in a growth spurt reminiscent of adolescence when things ache because they are being stretched beyond the current physical boundaries.

Such it is with us. Last night's Meetup about "Big Data & Qualitative Research" hosted by Mitchell International maxed out at close to 90 attendees and we had a wait list almost as long. Our seemingly unstoppable growth in popularity is a topic we have been discussing in Board meetings for a while. In a mere three years we have grown from a dozen crazy UXers who knew, just knew, that there were others like them in San Diego and wanted to do some community building to prove it, to hundreds of diverse and crazy UXers who just love to hang out, socialize and learn.  We have built a community. How do we manage our growth without taking ourselves far too seriously?

This all sounds suspiciously like a Startup Problem. However, no IPOs will ever be involved, no stock shall be issued. (We incorporated as a Non Profit at the beginning of this year in case you wanted to know. Primarily to make our lives easier at tax time).

Last night was perhaps one of the best of our meetups I have attended in the past three years. We decided to harness the enthusiasm and commitment of attendees in an analysis of The Problem. After all, we are all about inclusion, and we don't like having to say No to people. Yet, we want to keep the informal, interactive get-to-know-you mission that clearly works so well.

It just so happens we have some awesome members who have accumulated oodles of statistics about attendance at events. We also have some awesome members well versed in how to look beyond the numbers. Hence, the attendees were divided into groups and tasked with taking either a quantitative or qualitative look at The Question.

Somehow I missed hearing just exactly what The Question was. No one I randomly asked seemed to know exactly what it was either.  But it was not a representative sampling. Perhaps like me they spent critical moments during the Introduction drooling over the melted Brie with jam stuffed into it and fresh raspberries placed on top. I thought this absence excusable because I work in qualitative research almost daily; besides I wanted to check out the cheese. Qualitatively. With random sampling to ensure self-selection bias was not overly present.

No matter. Everyone set to work exploring the data about UX Speakeasy. For example, we have 405 members who have never (ever!) attended a Meetup. These are Lurkers and they have no clue what they are missing. But stats can be misleading. Because we don't know why they didn't attend do we? Is it because they wanted to but couldn't get in? Is it because they gave up in despair - if so, those people do have an inkling what they are missing.

We also could see from the brightly colored graphs that attending a Medium Sized event is more likely to result in someone becoming a Regular Attendee. Regular attendees are those who have attended 3 meetups. Being Wait Listed for a Medium Sized event decreases the chances of a person becoming an Active Member more than being Wait Listed for a Large Event, although any sort of Wait List decreases persistence. And then there are those Dabblers - those who have attended 1-3 meetups.

Why might that be? What can you conclude? Theories were flying. For example:

"More engaged people come to smaller events" 

or perhaps 

"Smaller events lead to more engaged people" ?

The quantitative groups were playing madly with the data and making insightful discoveries.

Oh *that* meetup [Name Withheld To Protect the Innocent] produced all sorts of Dabblers and a high overall attrition rate. But *that* meetup [Name Withheld For Equity Purposes] clearly blew the socks off the local community because attendees came back and back and back and back. 

The qualitative groups delved into things such as how they feel about coming to a meetup before, during and afterwards. What factors affect last minute changes of mind? Long day at the office? Tired....grumpy.... Commuting through traffic? Seriously depressed.... Awesome food and beverages? Happy Happy So Happy to have braved the traffic! When they reported back to the larger group they used words such as "guilt" "regret" "happy" "anxiety" "pumped!"

Experience Mapping

The really interesting thing was that in the greater group sharing it became quite apparent to everyone why both qualitative and quantitative data have something to offer. One group would spur a question that the other group was able to answer. Back and forth. So it went.

People were so engaged last night - everyone had the opportunity to contribute to the UX Speakeasy community. Lots of new people were there mingling with long time attendees. For 80+ people it felt like a much smaller crowd.

At the end of the evening they had to practically throw everyone out of the building. People wanted to keep talking and discussing the future of UX Speakeasy. People wanted to know what more they could do. A member of the Board explained that we are in the process of instituting several measures to accommodate more members while keeping the warm and fuzzy feeling we have all grown to deeply appreciate.

These initiatives include adding additional activities each month  (UX Karaoke? someone did suggest that really). We have another conference in the works (save the date November 8) and more. For all of which Volunteers will be needed!

Seriously, at least as seriously as we ever get, the networking and job announcements and socializing and Random Acts of Education will continue. As we grow.

"Predictions are Hard, Especially About the Future"

I was listening to a talk recently when this was said by a someone with unquestionable technical expertise. Given that I know what he meant to say as opposed to what he actually said I will protect my source. The point is of course, that you can guess, you can calculate, you can run all the statistical models in the world, and you might be wrong anyway. After all, the future is a result of lots of moments of now, and my now and your now and other people's now and the now that comes after the next now and the mere fact that I give you a clue about a possible direction might change your behavior and hence that direction.

The stuff science fiction is made of. Did you know that it is not at all science fiction that DARPA is funding a design project to see if we can develop a propulsion system to get us to Alpha Centauri in 100 years instead of the current 65,000 years? (Perhaps the goal is 1000 years - I may have misplaced a 0). Think about the development of a backbone array of receivers stretched across the galaxy. A different set of interplanetary protocols are needed. TCP/IP wasn't designed to store data (why should it have been?) so when there are delays....whoops, lost a packet. In trying to beam Dr. McCoy from Planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, we seem to have misplaced a few of his body parts. Just as Bones predicted would happen. I gather, then, that the idea is to develop interplanetary protocols with a store and forward capability that will withstand episodic disruptions and delays.

Not so far in the realm of the future, in fact, in the here and now, is an internet enabled surfboard. And it has been around for a decade. At least in prototype that is, because I can't find anyone, including Intel who created it, selling it (see one news article here) . I confess to having mixed feelings about a wifi ready surfboard anyway. Surfboards are a dime a dozen here in Southern California. On any given day, unless the ocean is flat as a pancake, you are likely to find the dedicated out on the waves. More often than not, they are just sitting there, hoping for that perfect swell. Assuming proper conditions, a good time to find them is between 7:00am and 8:00am on any given weekday. At 8:00am they pile out of the water, strip off the rubbery outfit and put on their suits over their sandy selves. Off to work. Last week, I was driving down the freeway at about this time, when a bright green surfboard came bouncing along - it must have come loose from someone's car as they boogied to the office at 80mph.

Speaking of high speed, I wonder what data rates you can get on a surfboard? Is the surfer more likely to miss the perfect wave if they are busily updating their status on Facebook? Personally, I prefer to leave all that behind when I don the rubbery outfit. Maybe others do too. Maybe that's why I don't find the internet surfboard for sale even in my local high end surf shop. (Excepting perhaps Los Angeles and vicinity, I can't think of any place in the continental US where a wifi surfboard would be more likely to make an appearance).

Then there is IPV6. You  techie nerds out there heard of it? It held it's world launch in 2012, yet to date, penetration is at about 1%. I agree with Vint Cerf (see that link two sentences back): we should stop making excuses and implement it.

It is super cool that as of last fall, non Latin domain names were approved. Cyrillic anyone? Speaking of the future, at the time I located that article, it was dated tomorrow (i.e. one day ahead of the day I am functioning in). Of course this has to do with time zones in Europe vs. San Diego, but it seems very in the spirit of things that there is a post made in the future about a futuristic tech topic in a post about the future of technology.For just a blip in time I can see the future.

Have a wonderful now.

Internet Voting: Security, Networking, Politics and Some Heat

With social upheavals happening in countries across the middle east and northern Africa, the media and politicians have been talking a lot about democracy and the rights of individuals to freely express themselves politically. Although we are not in a similar situation here in the US - we are not risking civil war or overturning the government - we do have an issue that provokes heated debate and widely divergent perspectives among computer scientists: Internet Voting. The US Constitution guarantees the right to vote for its citizens. Most of us take this right for granted I suspect, whether we act on it or not. It amazes me when I hear how many people do not vote regularly, given that we can do so safely and without worrying about repercussions, but that is another issue.

For the past several years various groups and organizations have been debating, proposing legislation for, and running pilot projects using the Internet to vote. Why? A big motivator is to increase access. American citizens living overseas (civilian, military, government employees) often want to vote but if they have to rely on the postal services of several countries for ballot requests and return, or if they have to travel great distances to get to an approved polling place it can be a significant burden. State and county agencies in this country wonder if they can improve reliability and efficiency while reducing costs by implementing online voting. Given the current fiscal situation in this country that is a huge motivator. The problems of access, reliability and budgetary pressures just scream for consideration of a computing based solution. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but if it is going to happen it is going to be computer scientists who make it so (A Captain Picard reference in case you didn't pick up on it).

There are pros and cons and this is where opinions run hot. Let's take just one example: the need to guarantee the security and privacy of such sensitive data if it is sent over the Internet.

Why is a "guarantee" of correctness on the Internet so difficult? As many of you know, the Internet was originally designed by the US Department of Defense for use by a select number of trusted sites for the purpose of guaranteeing communications in the event of a national emergency such as a nuclear attack. Therefore, redundancy of data was the primary concern, not security of data. If Washington DC was attacked, multiple copies of sensitive data would be accessible in repositories across the country. This legacy lives on today, as the Internet has grown into a global network of diverse systems connected with everything from telephone lines to satellites, connecting state of the art computers and mobile devices to 25 year old legacy mainframes. As a result, it seems that we can communicate with almost anyone anywhere at anytime and because of built-in redundancy systems, data almost always gets through - unless someone intentionally interferes. And therein lies the problem. There will always be people who try to steal, or at least read and exploit, data that is not "theirs". Although not unique to electronic voting systems, the vulnerabilities of the Internet bring added attention to this old problem. We do *not* want anyone intercepting electronic ballots, or compromising a voting web site. How good is "good enough" when it comes to accountability and reliability?

How are these issues currently being tackled? I'm going to get technical for two paragraphs in order to provide a flavor of what computer scientists are currently doing in the realm of computer security for sensitive data.

The focus of much data security work is at the application and system levels. Onion routing is an interesting technique that supports anonymity across complex networks. As data is passed from an original source to a final destination it passes through many intermediate nodes (which may reach into the hundreds). Data that is “onion routed” has layers of encryption that are successively “peeled off” at each node, assuming the node in question has the correct cryptographic technique and knowledge to do so. Thus many successive security checks take place and a suspicious event at any node along the path will raise a warning flag. The action then taken is application dependent, and can include halting the process, rerouting the data or other customized response. Two other well known network level security technologies include strategic placement of firewalls and the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Various methods of authentication, encryption, verification, digital signature and hash functions find their way into this work. How well do state of the art data security efforts protect data and provide an audit trail?

Although the answer to that question invites a range of answers, computer security experts will generally agree that software alone will never be sufficient to detect or prevent tampering. Hardware level security checks are also needed. It is common practice in security intensive systems to include a Tamper Proof Module (TPM). This non-rewriteable chip contains check code to search for tampering. First the boot loader is checked, which then checks the Operating System, which then checks the application(s) for an integrity breach

There are high level issues to be addressed as well. Equally important requirements. An Internet voting system for US voters needs flexibility (to accommodate different state requirements), convenience for the user, training and education of both staff workers and voters. Particularly important is timeliness – the most flexible, friendly, convenient electronic voting system is pointless if the ballot arrives too late to be counted or has to be discarded due to suspicions of fraud.

There are always tricky issues when science and public policy intersect. Computing is particularly complicated because the field is so new, and technology changes so quickly. By the time consensus is reached on a contentious issue, the point may be moot. The technical issues alone for Internet voting are complex, but often come down to one issue: risk assessment. What degree of risk is tolerable in order to achieve a societal right guaranteed by the Constitution? In some cases entrenched opinion comes from holding a philosophical stance about whether or not the Internet can ever be an acceptable medium for any voting, overseas or otherwise.  Proponents argue that it is only a matter of time until Internet voting becomes reality, and also that the subject is a matter of morals, so we must address the problem directly. Critics counter that it is not possible with current technology to implement Internet voting at an acceptable level of security and privacy, so the risks of trying it outweigh the potential benefits.

If we can be successful, the payoffs are tangible: morally, ethically, fiscally. If we don't succeed the risks are serious: from disenfranchisement of citizens to interference with our democratic process in the worst case scenario.

What do we do? Move forward (how?), or sit it out and accept the current situation as good enough for now. What do you think?