So, I'm guessing that people are going to continue to filter in, which is awesome, but we're going to get started. My name is Dani Norden, and I'm going to be talking today about collaborative usability testing for lean and agile teams. So before we get started, a little bit about my background, if this will work. I am the senior UX designer at Harvard Business Review, and my mission is essentially to take a bunch of marketers and technologists and designers and editors and turn them into user-centered designers, which is a really, really fun and rewarding task, although sometimes it can be difficult. I also have been in the Drupal community for several years. I wrote the book Drupal for Designers for O'Reilly. I also do video trainings for them. And I'm the co-organizer of Design for Drupal Boston, which, by the way, I do actually have, I have two things for you if you want to come up after the session's over. One is I have postcards for Design for Drupal if you're interested in coming to the camp. The site is now live and accepting sessions. And I also have a fantastic discount code that the folks at O'Reilly have given me for 50% off eBooks and I think 40% or 50% off video trainings. So if you're interested in either of those things, come and see me after the session's over. And this is my daughter of the aforementioned stuffed pig. So let's talk about usability testing. I have talked a lot about this subject and user research in general over the past few years. And one of the things I always hear is some variation on, well, we just don't have the time for that. We don't have the, our clients don't have the budget to do that kind of research. And I can understand the need to prioritize resources, especially when you're working in tight timelines, but the reason we test is because we, you and I sitting here making products are not making products for us. We're making them for a set of people who have a very real set of needs and problems. And the reason we test is because, is because we want to make sure that those people out there in the world who are going to be using our products understand how to use the product and also understand how this product solves their problem in a way that is better than the way that they're currently solving that problem. It also does a great job at helping us as a development team prioritize what we're going to work on and what we're going to do. This is one of the fundamental reasons why we test. If we test and we realize that a feature that we were intending to build is not useful to any of our audience, then you know what? We've just saved ourselves a heck of a lot of development time. Same thing if we're testing a prototype of something that we're about to build and we find out that there are major usability problems. We've just saved ourselves a huge amount of development time just by talking to people and watching the music. The reason we want to do this is because assumptions can be extremely dangerous. Let's talk about Windows 8. The fun thing about Windows 8 is that they did usability testing while they were creating that software and guess what they heard? Where's my start menu? Where'd it go? I mean, what, what is this? Where's my start menu? And they did not listen to those people. They said, you know what? They just don't get it. We're creating a new paradigm. We're innovating. We're disrupting. And guess what happened? Several weeks after Windows 8 was launched, the Internet exploded with where the hell is the start menu. Third-party vendors started coming up with applications that would give you a start menu that you could download to get your start menu back. One of the best reviews of Windows 8 that I've seen actually compared the system and the interactivity within the system to a goblin coming out and farting on your head while you're trying to check your email. And guess what happened? Windows 8.1 came out a couple months later, and guess what came back? The start menu. Windows 10.1 has been announced, and guess what the first thing they're talking about is the start menu. When we ignore the legacy of knowledge and built-up learning that our users have experienced with our product and we refuse to listen to what they say, we fall in trouble. We become laughing stocks. And I don't think anyone in this room will disagree that Windows 8 became a bit of a laughing stock for a while. So now that we understand why it's important to test, let's talk about what actually goes into testing. Now there are many different methods that you can use to test. Some take a very short amount of time. Some take a much longer amount of time. But the anatomy of a research plan is pretty much the same. It starts with understanding your research goal. What is it that you actually want to learn? And what parts of the interface do you need to understand how people use? We also want to get a sense of who the people are that we want to talk to. What are the problems they're facing? What are the specific characteristics that they might have? Are there specific demographics? Are there specific levels of tech savviness? All of this creates how we actually screen and recruit people. Then we want to get into some of the logistical details. So examples of this might be if we're testing an e-commerce platform, how are we going to get dummy credit card information so that we're not asking people to put their actual credit cards in our system? If there are features that are only available to a certain subset of our users, how are we going to make sure that we have test accounts created so that everyone's getting the same basic environment and we're not essentially taking up valuable time during the testing process, walking people through getting involved in the system? So a couple of things that can help with this. The first is to involve all of your stakeholders as soon as humanly possible. And get them aligned first and foremost on the actual goals of the research. And one of the things that you'll find when you're doing goal setting with your stakeholders is my personal favorite, well, we just want to understand what the pain points are in the system. Does that sound like a research goal to you? Does that sound like a thing you want to learn? No, we need to get more specific than that. What specific pain points do we anticipate in the system? And how are we going to focus the things that we're studying to a narrow enough area of the interface that we, A, can focus our efforts in one particular way. And B, we know what questions to ask people and we can keep them there for the amount of time that is allotted for the test and respect these people's time. The other thing that's really important with this is to have a bunch of different methods at your disposal. A lot of people think of usability testing as you have to sit with me for an hour. There seems to be two dichotomies. One is you have to sit with me for an hour in a usability lab and I'm going to watch you do things and ask you questions. The other one is I'm going to run up to you in a Starbucks. And shove my phone in your hand and ask you to do some things. Neither of those is actually true. Neither of those is the only way that you test. We're going to actually discuss in a little bit some case studies of different ways that we've tested things at Harvard Business Reviews, at Harvard Business Review, but there are all sorts of ways that you can test based on what you want to learn. Card sorts and tree tests are great for testing information architecture and understanding how people group things. First click tests are fantastic for discovering whether people can find the thing you want them to find. And they're quick and dirty and they do not require a ton of investment in time. Unmoderated testing through services like validately, user testing.com, user zoom is really great for very small, discrete parts of your interface that can be tested in 10 to 15 minutes or less. It's not good for anything where someone's going to be putting in credit card information. It's not good for anything where the prototype is still so janky that someone could get hopelessly lost. And then of course there's moderated testing, which is the stuff that many of us think about when we think of usability testing. This could be happening in a lab, this could be happening over screen sharing software, which is how I usually do it. And those are typically reserved for much larger sections of the interface or for really understanding people's mental model of how they solve a particular problem. So we do that a lot more for generative research than we do for basically just figuring out what's wrong with things. So the next thing we want to understand is how we actually screen people. Now screening people and asking them if they qualify for a study. I'm still trying to figure out a nicer way of saying that. But essentially it's saying you are the type of person who is trying to solve the type of problem that this product solves. That's all we're doing. We're just making sure that you are the likely target audience for this particular product and that you have some relationship to the type of problem that this solves. Now there's two ways that I screen participants. One is through user testing.com, which we actually use extensively at work. And in that case, what we do is we actually have a couple of screening questions that essentially include or exclude certain people based on things like their job title or their level of income. They're more likely to be HBR readers. The way that I screen participants for moderated studies is actually through a survey that is delivered via email to registered users in our system via SurveyMonkey. And there's logic set up within the survey that will politely disqualify you if you don't meet the right criteria. And if you do meet the right criteria, then you get sent to a service called Reservio, which allows you to book an appointment with one of the researchers, which is a fancy way of saying me. This piece of it, the screening and the scheduling, is the toughest part of running usability studies. It is the most painful, it is the most annoying. So whatever you can automate, the better off you're going to be. But participants are still going to need reminders. So once they set up their appointment in Reservio, I then create a meeting in join.me, which then reminds them and sends them details for the call automatically. So I don't have to think about it. And this actually is really helpful for making sure that people aren't dropping out randomly, which does actually happen much more often with lab testing, but it happens with remote testing as well. So let's talk about a couple of different case studies. I'm going to present basically one of every type of research that we've done at Harvard Business Review. And this is pretty indicative of, I worked at the Bentley User Experience Center before I worked at HBR, and this is very representative of the types of studies that we ran there as well. So this first study, basically this was when I first arrived at HBR. And we had launched the news site about a month ago. And we wanted to get a sense of how people found content, especially now that the architecture had completely changed. And what types of things they were looking for. So this was an unmoderated study. And the first thing we did was we got a bunch of stakeholders from different areas around the business together in a room and had them align on the actual things that we were trying to learn. And that can be a little bit challenging sometimes. Because commerce has a very different section of things that they want to learn than editorial does, for example. And someone in the room is going to say, well, we just want to understand the pain points of the system. And you have to get a little more specific about what specifically we want to test. Then what we did was we actually had each person in the room start writing their questions on sticky notes, without talking. And then we put them on the board and I was able to look through the list, and realize where there were questions that were coming up multiple times. I'm like, okay, so this is something we definitely want to know. And from that, we were able to basically create a test flow, a series of tasks that our users would go through as they went through the process. And there, from there, it was actually pretty easy to just put things into user testing.com and launch the study. Once we did that, we also made the strategic decision, because we are a responsive site, that we wanted to make sure that every study of this type, we test half mobile and half desktop. So we got 18 videos, approximately. We ran one pilot first on each platform to make sure that our tasks made sense and people could understand the flow. And then we ran another group. We got all of our results in about three hours. So this was using their panel. We sent it out. We got 18 videos in about three hours. Then I spent some time going through the videos, understanding, taking notes, making highlight reels, and making sense of all of the different things that we had learned and needed to work on, which I then created as a memo. And what's really fun about doing the memo is that this memo was nine pages total, which included the test plan. Now, I don't know if any of you have ever done usability testing before or have worked with an agency to do usability testing. But when I worked at the user experience center, a test report was 60 pages of PowerPoint. With screenshots and, you know, fun arrows and all of this other stuff that took like a week to write went through several rounds of revision. And I can guarantee you, not a damn person ever read it. This was presented as nine pages. It was sent around the building. Everyone completely went nuts for it and loved it. And it was then presented in a meeting with half the building, essentially. And what was nice about this was, first of all, it was a heck of a lot easier for me to do, but it actually made change. Me and my manager were actually able to take these results and these recommendations and put them into JIRA as tickets that could then be prioritized in the backlog. So it was really nice to be able to see the progression from giving the results to actually seeing changes happen on the website.  So one of the things that happens on hbr.org, if you're a registered user, is you get access to essentially save and share articles within your own personal library. So you have this whole section of the site that's devoted to you that where you can follow topics that you're interested in and get articles related to those topics and you can save topics or and you can save magazine articles and other articles into your library to sort of access later. And so what we wanted to understand was how do people actually organize the content that they need to refer back to later because all of us have this stuff, right? We have the blog post that we always turn to. We have the articles that we want to send to our colleagues because we have to prove a point to them. So we wanted to understand how our users did that. So this one was a moderated study and we started basically the same way. We aligned on goals. We involved sticky notes because that's very important in any meeting I'm in. And this one was actually created as another memo. So this test plan was a combination test plan and notes grid, which is basically a fancy way of saying where you take your notes. And then the screener was created and survey monkey. People were recruited through the marketing team, through email. And then they were sent directly to Reservio to schedule their appointment. And then we went over web conferencing software. In this case, WebEx, this was before I was doing joined up me. And essentially I started asking people a bunch of questions about. Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new for work. Where did you go? What did you do? How did you how did you collect that information? What tools do you use? So it was a combination of usability test and almost a user interview. It was telling it was getting people to actually tell me about the process they used completely independent of our site to collect this information. And as I was doing this, I started collecting these quotes, these interesting tidbits, these things that I was uncovering as, you know, problems with the way that our site was constructed that conflicted with the way that people thought about this process. I also used it as an opportunity to do a little creative child rearing because you gotta. But what I found was there were very distinct patterns in the way that people organized content and the way that people thought about the type of content that we provide. And so I started writing down these little patterns almost as a mini persona and then I turned them into more fleshed out personas. And we and we socialized these throughout the organization because we do have profiles of our visitors. But what we didn't have was action based personas that actually talked about how people use our product and our content. And then we were able to actually do a journey mapping workshop with all of the stakeholders to get them under to understand the different workflows and the different problems that people have faced using our website, using our content, trying to get done the things that they wanted to get done. And that workshop not only covered one really critical usability problem that was affecting subscribers, which are our most valuable audience. But it helped open the eyes of several members of the marketing team who did not realize that the specific things that they were trying to do to get the information they needed to get were actually stopping people from doing things like completing a purchase. My favorite moment in usability testing was when we were testing the digital download process and we knew that people couldn't figure out where their downloads were because they were sort of hidden within the interface. But I had identified my third week there.  And I don't know if you know this, but like there are at least four different places where someone could actually forget they're making a purchase. And so we did a round of studies which we actually streamed in one of the big conference rooms and had people sort of come down during the day. And the head of marketing came down for a couple of minutes just as one of the participants was being reminded that she was making a purchase by the moderator. And I looked over to the head of marketing and I just said, fourth person today, let me tell you that changed some minds. So this, again, is why we test because we have so many people that are involved and have a stake in all of our products and they are going to have very different opinions. And these are good people. They want to do what's best for the business and what's best for the customer. But often they have blind spots that they don't necessarily know about until they actually see people struggle with the products that we make. So this study was a little more expensive than a user testing dot com study. This study took a total of four to six weeks to plan and implement and analyze. It also did require creating, it also did require getting compensation. So we had to give $50 Amazon gift cards. But again, what we learned has completely changed how we're going to build these particular features. The final case study I'm going to share with you is an unmoderated study. This was a first-click test. And the story behind this was basically we have this red bar, this call to action that tells you to register or subscribe on the site. It basically represents our paywall. And it's very strategically important to the business. It's relatively unobtrusive, although a lot of people in our building are not fans of it. But what was happening was the way that this red bar was sticking from just sort of a code level was actually forcing the menu to get extremely jumpy and just jump around mobile phones. And so it was really problematic. And we have this great front-end developer who's coming in for the summer. And he said, well, you know what? If we actually fix this to the bottom instead of sticking it along with the menu and having all three of these things tied together, we can probably fix the majority of the jumpiness. Now, mind you, again, very strategically important to the business. So if we're going to make a change like this, we need to make sure that we're not going to inadvertently lose people. So what we did was we created two screenshots. One is the control screenshot, which is basically the red bar and exactly the position it is when you look at it on a mobile phone. And then we created a variation where the red bar was actually pinned to the bottom. And what we asked people was, please click on where you would go to buy a subscription to this magazine. Very simple, single question. Half of the people got the first screenshot, half of the people got the second screenshot. And what we discovered was, in this test, you can see 15, can you, eh, okay. Okay, so 15 people saw the red bar and saw the subscribe link in the control screenshot, which is where it is normally, but then 20 people, because there's 19 plus one other person, saw it at the bottom. And what was even better was that those 20 people came from less than the number of people who actually saw the control condition. So this was a factor of something like, I forget it, I think it was like 18 to 40% of people saw it in the right place. So guess what we got to do? We got to move the red bar. Now this test cost nothing more than the platform. The platform itself was relatively cheap. It's like a thousand bucks a year maybe. And we spread this on social media. So this went out on our Twitter and Facebook and we got a couple hundred people who came in and took this test. And it takes 60 seconds of people's time. You don't even necessarily have to give them compensation because most people are happy to just go in and do what you need them to do. So this, if you're doing things like testing labels, trying to understand if people can figure out where to go to get to a thing that they want, this is a really cheap and really effective way of getting the data you need to make decisions, especially when they have huge strategic impact to the business. So these are the three primary methods that we use at HBR to understand our users and figure out how to use data to drive our design decisions. And they've been really effective so far and we're constantly evolving our process to include more of this type of activity into our workflow and we're able to do it without actually disrupting the activities of the tech team. Which is a really nice balance. So to wrap up, make sure that you start with the research goal and you understand what it is you actually wanna know. Involve your stakeholders as early as possible and find ways to make them be there. Make them watch the videos. Especially if you're just at the point where you're trying to get investment in this kind of activity within your organization, having them actually sit there and watch people struggle is remarkably effective. Especially developers. One of the things I'm experimenting with is actually making stakeholders, note takers. So forcing them to watch every single session and take notes. Cause I'm fun. And then again, use a variety of methods. Don't depend on one single method. There is no one way to do user testing. And the more methods you can build into your research toolbox, the easier it's going to be to say, you know what, I think that's a great idea. Let's run an AB test on that because it's going to take us like a couple of days and we'll know what we need to know. And then automate as much as you possibly can. If you can work with, if you have a marketing team or a social media team that is working on promoting things about your brand, involve them early. Get them to help you build a participant database. Get them to help you promote these tests on social media. It really makes a huge difference and takes a large load off your shoulders when you're trying to get people. And that is basically what I have to tell you today. Did I go short or long? I can't tell. I'm short? Oh darn it. I can tell more stories. So let's talk about usability testing. What kind of stuff are you guys doing? No, you're not doing anything? Okay. Oh yeah. Oh so yeah, so yeah, that is one thing that people like to know about. They like to know how much it costs. So the costs really vary depending on the service. One of the things that I like is a tool called Optimal Workshop and that has three different tools available. One is Chalkmark which does just first click tests. The other is, what is it, Treejack which does tree tests which are essentially usability tests for your information architecture. And then there's another one called Optimal Sort which does card sorting. And what's nice about those is that the entire platform is something like 3,000 a year. And those are really, really effective if you do a lot of information architecture work. With the notable platform which is the one that we use for the first click tests at HBR. That is a platform that is, I wanna say it's like 100 bucks a year or something like that. It's not that expensive. It's not that expensive and in addition to the first click tests which you can run as A, B tests. So you can do two different versions. You also can do prototypes. You can do label tests which are really good for testing icons.  And so we've been doing a lot of that to test icons. Oh yeah, it's called Notable. It's called Notable and it's actually run by Zerb the same guys who do foundation. So it's really, really, it's really cool. And so that one again, that one's the cheapest of the tools that we use. UserTesting.com can be expensive but it's really worth it for the platform. And then with the moderated studies a lot of it is just coordinating with various departments around the building. So most of the expense is actually in participant compensation which is usually a $50 Amazon gift card. Occasionally it's free product. Yes, no problem, thank you. Oh yeah, so the four to six weeks is really an on and off sort of thing because recruiting people takes time and that's really what it comes down to. In terms of the team members, typically the stakeholder workshop is about an hour and that's really just getting a bunch of people in a room to agree on what we're gonna test. Then putting together the test plan is like a couple of hours and then you usually have a little bit of time for editing it. The biggest thing, the biggest time cost is in moderated studies having people observe. And a lot of times we set it up so that we're just streaming the study in a conference room and people just sort of float in and out. And at one point we have this thing called tech office hours on Wednesday. And so I basically camped out there and made people watch the study. Which was very fun watching the developers just like, oh yeah, that's a bug. Oh, no, we gotta fix that.  Go fix that now. That should be fine now. Oh, Steve Krug, yeah. Yeah, there's actually, rocket surgery made easy is interesting. The Krug method, so this is another method of testing that we're going to hopefully get to fairly soon. In this method of testing, you actually work with prototypes. So you don't work with the live site, you work with prototypes and it's really good for the early stages of testing. And this is actually one of the most fun and most productive types of testing. Because basically what you do is you plan the test, you get the prototype together and you run the tests one day and every time you see a major usability issue, like something that's just stopping people in their tracks, you make changes to the prototype and you push it for the next test.  And by the time you're done with that, you should have actually refined quite a bit of stuff. You've talked to about 12 people and you've gotten the prototype into a point where you actually know what most of the usability problems are and you can get it into production pretty soon. Yes. So accessibility testing is sort of an interesting duck.  I think one of the things that I'm trying to deal with now is there are several ways in which our website is openly defying the WCAG guidelines. And so I'm working very hard with the design team to gently remind them that the web is not a magazine and not a printed page and people look at it differently. And so part of it has been discussions, well, do we know how many people are using screen readers? And like, no, no, no, honey, this is every human over 35 that we're offending right now. Like this is a thing we have to deal with because people have eyes and those eyes see things differently on a screen than perhaps you do when you're reading a magazine on paper. But it's been a really good lesson in getting people to sort of understand what it's like to exist and to work on the web. And part of our accessibility work right now is mostly in just getting things in line with the guidelines unless having people with screen readers or other assistive devices actually use our products. I don't believe that they do. There are definitely things that you can do that will get your site up to code. So web aim is one of the things that I use to just sort of make sure that contrast ratios are working and get things, figure out where we score on the different guidelines. But yeah, accessibility testing is something we're going to be probably getting into a while from now. Yeah, well, so one of the things that's really nice about working at a company that does business publishing is we have a lot of people who do a lot of research on our users. So we actually, there was work that was done before I arrived that essentially created user segments. And this is where, so this is actually out of the Lean UX book from Jeff God Health. He has a great tool called Proto Personas which are basically initial character sketches of the sort of broad types of people that your product serves and the types of things that they're trying to do. So the more that you can get behavior-based as opposed to demographic-based, the better off you are with recruiting. So for example, we're launching a study in the next couple of weeks for the Visual Library which is essentially a collection of all of HBR's infographics or like a curated collection of infographics that you can download as a subscriber. And the types of things that we use to screening criteria is, you know, I often include graphics in my presentations. I consider myself a visual thinker. I like to collect infographics, like these types of behaviors as opposed to I'm between 25 and 65. Because what it, when it comes down to is demographics like that aren't very useful anymore. Exactly. They're just not very useful anymore in actually understanding how people behave on the web. Yes. Hi. Understanding their user base and rearranging architecture. And I noticed that you have more kind of action-based items. How do you suggest like working with people with different kinds of content and moving things around? I know you suggested a couple of things. Oh yeah. Trying to bring that to stakeholders and getting them to understand the difference. So the biggest thing to do is, I mean the best thing to do if you're really talking about, I think what you're talking about is there's a ton of different content and we need to know where to put it. And my guess is because I have worked in universities before, that there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions as to where said content goes. Yes. And so there are two things that are really important, really important and really useful tools. One is card sorting. And in card sorting you essentially create cards that have the labels of the different pages or the different pieces of content. And then also have a description of what the content is. And you have people essentially go through and put the cards into buckets. And they can be either closed buckets that you create or they can create their own buckets. And essentially what you find is after about 50 people do this, and I mean you can literally send this out as an email and promise them something in return. After about 50 people you start seeing very clear patterns in how people are grouping things. And you start getting a picture of what your information architecture should do. And once you have that, you can then take that architecture, put it into an Excel spreadsheet and then upload it into a service called Treejack. User Zoom also has a service like this. It's called tree testing. And essentially what you do is you create a couple of common tasks that your users have to perform. So an example for university is you'd like to learn more about how to get into the school or the requirements of getting in. You wanna know where the campus is. You wanna know where this office is. Show me where you'd go to get there. And essentially what they do is they use a stripped down version of your navigation to perform that task. And you get to see not only whether they actually find it in the location where you have it, but also how long it takes them to get there and how many times they had to try again and go back and keep looking to get there. So they call it speed and directness essentially. And so you can find basically, well yeah, everyone finds it but they have to click around five different places to find it. Those two are really the best way to test your information architecture and to make decisions based on data and not on endless meetings. So for that you'd probably be better off doing usability testing or interviews but it doesn't change the problem of like our architecture is a mess. That's too bad for me. Yeah, analytics can be hugely useful, hugely useful. I think you and then you. Yeah, oh nice. Oh, unmoderated? Yeah, so the basic thing, I mean the basic rule of thumb if you're doing an unmoderated study, it has to be a situation where no one can mess up a database. Like that's really what it comes down to. Like having people create fake accounts on your production site is not necessarily going to make your marketing department happy. Is all I'm saying. But I think the biggest thing is, and then the other thing is things like credit card information unless you give people a dummy credit card to use. So if you want someone to find something you'd like to buy and buy it then you want to make sure that you're giving someone fake information so that they don't have to put in their own personally identifying information because the big thing with unmoderated testing is there will always be video. With unmoderated testing you might have a certain piece of the test where you're turning the video off so that that information isn't on the recording but with unmoderated testing they're gonna get video all the way through. And the last thing you want is someone basically saying oh I'm not phishing out my credit card and giving you that information. I had, oh actually hold on. Actually if you guys could line up behind the microphone I think that might be useful. Hi I work for a digital agency out of Colorado and right now we have probably five or six people in the office that are really passionate and interested in usability testing but it's kind of happening in this organic way. You know it's coming out of our post production plans or we're getting recommendations from our SEO or account managers where they're seeing problems in the booking funnel or just in the UI in general. So we really want to take that next step towards monetizing and restructuring this so that we can begin offering usability testing as a professional service offering. And I'd love to hear any recommendations that you have for that to kind of take that next step and your recommended tools for that as well. Sure I think that I've really loved usertesting.com although Validately is another service that is becoming increasingly attractive to me. Both of them are pretty reasonably priced if you compare it to going with the usability lab for example. I think the biggest things that you need to get started usability testing are the decision that you're just gonna do it. Like that's kind of it. I used to get clients all the time who were like well you know that's a little bit expensive do we really need all this research and I would just tell them no we do. We need all this research because you want me to do it right. Obviously sometimes that's a little harder to get away with. But to do most like if you're gonna set up for moderated studies like really the only thing you need is good screen sharing software, a service like SurveyMonkey and Reservio, a good mailing list that you're starting to put together and then essentially an old laptop. I mean that's it, that's all you need. And then it's really just getting into the process of getting into the process of actually creating the usability tests and running them which once you've done it a few times you really get the hang of it. The handbook of usability testing is a really good resource for that. It gives you sort of the, and then rocket surgery made easy is another one which goes over the right and crug method. And those two, between those two you'll be able to figure that out. But it doesn't have to be onerous and it should happen at each stage of the development cycle. It should not just be a post-production thing. It should also be during the time that you're building.  I work for small shop developers and we take on clients. One of, two of the things I've noticed that smaller clients are kind of resistant to and probably the price factor, getting a designer up front because they think because their friend did the wireframes and knows something about this, that's gonna work. So they're very resistant to that and to usability testing at the end because they think, well my friend who did the wireframe knows all the steps and I know what I created this trail through the site that people will get. And then they end up with all these changes at the end because as they go through it they realize, oh, it's not very usable but during the process they've been like, stay with my wireframe, do it this way. These cost me a lot of money. But I'd like you to speak about the importance of getting a designer up front together with the developers when you start a project and is there any easy way to present this to the client who's unknowledgeable why they need this? Oh gosh. Sorry. That's, I mean that's an easy one. So I think that part of it is just education and part of it is taking a stand. I think that one of the things that, one of the things that can be useful is to have a service. If you have a service like Validately, for example, I know I'm name dropping a whole bunch of tools but whatever, Validately is really nice because it's 40 bucks a month. And if you create your own test panel like with MailChimp and you can, and you can get a sense of like, and you can get some questions in there on how to sort of segment users so you can create a screener. So it takes a little time to build that up but if you do that, you're basically at most you're spending $10 a test and you can find the budget for that. And so you can actually build that as part of your sales process. We include this amount of testing. So we will test with five people, we will find the usability problems and then we'll talk to you about it. If you can find things like that, like Validately and then Deserve Platform is the other one that's really not that expensive but it can get you a lot of quick feedback from targeted individuals about what might cause people to fall down within this interface. And if you start there, you can usually build up the understanding of why this is important. So one of the things that happened, one of the turning points for me when I started at HBR six months ago was being able to actually create highlight reels and show people a guy taking a minute and a half to log in on his mobile phone because the site was so damn slow and being able to sit there and show people what was actually happening when people were trying to use our site. That video can be incredibly powerful. Incredibly, like unbelievably powerful. The minute I showed those videos, people were on board. And I had people, I just had, I may tear up a little. One of the marketers said to me in a meeting, well, yes, but that's our internal term. I don't think a user understands that. It's amazing, once you just start the process, how quickly people understand the value of it. As for the designer, I think one of the challenges that I'm sure every designer in this room has faced is the increasing commoditization and almost like can you work your design magic? I still get emails, can you bring our test creative?  This is a wireframe, it's not creative. But there are people who just speak that language and they think that design is an unnecessary expense and I think that some of these design for a buck services have really caused problems with that. But I think that as you stand up for who you are and the value you bring to the table, that really transfers to how clients treat you. Well, it varies by the goal and by the type of test. So if you're doing moderated testing and even unmoderated testing, with unmoderated testing, what we shoot for is five participants per platform. Yeah, same thing with moderated. Five to 10 participants is usually fine for moderated testing. The big thing you have to watch out for though is segmentation. So if you have people in various different audiences, so I used to see this with financial services firms all the time, they would have consumer clients and they would have small business clients. And so when we're talking about five or six participants, we're talking about per segment. And those are, let me tell you, not fun tests to run. By day three, you're just punchy.  Logged himself out again, okay. Yep, we gotta fix that, all right. And then also compensation, for example, will vary by the type of person you're recruiting. A consumer, you can usually get away with a $50, a $50 or a $25 gift card. There was a shoe company that would actually give you a $100 gift card to their company, like to their website, and they're like, go buy yourself a pair of shoes. That was the entire test. And I was like, how can I be in that test? But then if you're recruiting a highly specialized audience, we did one study that was all medical professionals. And we had to up the compensation three times just to get people for the study. Because if you think about it, a doctor is gonna, he's gonna come out to Waltham for an hour. Yeah, no, you gotta give me 300 and some odd dollars for that. But usually, what we found for the work that we do is 50 bucks is usually fine. So it's not that expensive if you think of it, I'm recruiting 10 people. No problem, all right. So actually, we had a really fun conversation, which is what I was hoping for. If there's any other questions, come up and see me. And again, I do have postcards for Design for Drupal and I have discount codes for O'Reilly. So if you want any of those, come up and see me.


In 2008, I heard from a friend that this Broadway producer was trying to set up a Chinese production of the American musical fame, especially in China's own fame school, the Central Academy of Drama, where many international stars graduated from such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi. So I immediately thought this is going to be a great angle to see how a quintessentially American concept like fame, like self-made person, like spotlight, would translate in a Chinese environment. I want to per star. Super star? Yeah. In terms of the dreams, how much of these dreams for fame for success are really owned by the kids themselves versus being pressured to them by their parents? That's a very interesting question because when I try to explain China to my American friends, especially for the urban youth generation, sometimes I cannot tell really any major differences between them versus their American peers. But if there's one thing that really stands out, it's the pressure they feel from their parents, the filial piety, and the pressure they feel like they have to make their parents proud. So every family right now has only in urban areas, only have one kid. As one of the characters said in the documentary Chen Lei said, all hopes on us, even though these kids are really spoiled, are caught, but then the parents are looking for a return, which is like we're investing in you, make us proud. Because a family is just one of us, all our hopes are on us.


If you respond to a situation, you're more determinative. In fact, if you go to the doctor and say, Doc, I've got this rash on my arm. Can you suggest something for it? And he says, try this solution. Come back in two weeks and tell me how you're doing. You go back after two weeks and the doc says, well, it looks like the treatment is reacting to your skin. Is that good or bad? That's bad. But what if the doc says it looks like the treatment is responding to your skin? Is that good or bad? Now, so you might think it's semantics, but it's really not. It has a much more powerful meaning when we understand responding as opposed to reacting to certain situations. On this side of the room, give me some other examples of things over which you have total control, a couple of others. Decisions, all right? The decisions that we choose to make, any others? OK, the way you think, your thoughts. What's the self-esteem factor over here, high or low? It's nice to be in control, isn't it? To be in control of your life to the point where the things that you're doing are yielding the results that you want in the first place. But it takes a certain type of individual to make that happen. And this person is the kind of person that really understands, law one, the ability to gain control of themselves, to be able to step up, to be able to do everything that they're supposed to do and they want to do to create the kind of results that they want to create in their lives. And so notice also that everything that you have in your life in terms of results, whether it's personal, professional, financial, whatever it might be, you have all those things based on the decisions that you've made up to this point. So if you want different, you're going to have to do different, or you're going to have to do more of what you've already done. So there's no high fives and group hugs here today. It's very much about, this is what it takes. This is what we've seen works, and this is what we're going to have to do. You volunteer someone that's willing to gain or possibly earn 400 grand today. Show of hands. Oh, it's interesting, isn't it? When the need is big enough. All right, this gentleman here in the blue, what's your name? Lloyd. Stand up, Lloyd. Where are you from? Sorry, OK. That's all right. We like sorry. Lloyd, if I said to you, do you know the M1? If I said to you, Lloyd, if you'll be at Newport Paginal Services on the northbound side reception desk at 8 o'clock tonight, 8 PM, there'll be a check waiting there for you for 400,000 pounds, right? All you've got to do, Lloyd, is be there on time. Would you be there on time? Yeah, look at his face. Yeah, I'd make sure I'd be there on time, right? OK, Lloyd, what time would you leave? Right now, baby. Don't need to think about that one. I'm going, making time to go out straight away. Let's say, Lloyd, he's accosted someone in London.  He gets within three miles of welcome break services. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, traffic thickens up and he comes to a standstill. Cars on both sides, right, Lloyd? Are you with me? OK, so at this point, he's looking around, he's thinking to himself, it's a quarter past seven. Cars on both sides. You turn on the radio and it tells you that a truck's tipped over, spilled two by fours of wood all over the place, it's going to take three hours to clear it up. Are you going to be there on time, yes or no? How? A man after my own heart. He's going to get out and run. He's going to walk, he's going to run, he's going to crawl. He's going to leap tall buildings with a single bound if that's what it takes. See, when the need is big enough, we learn to control all kinds of stuff that we believe we can't control. And the issue is the need to do it. Thanks, Lloyd. So understanding the need to gain control is the foundational law in building any wealth. And you'll notice that this law really has very little to do with money and a whole lot to do with leadership. A whole lot to do with self-leadership and your ability to move when it's required. Law two, embrace the future. What does that mean? Well, more than just being some kind of phrase, embrace the future really means understanding, number one, what your skills are, what are your skill sets, because each of you here today have certain things that you may or may not know would yield the kind of results that you want. Some of you have tapped them, and some of you are still looking for what they are. But each of you, in your own way, have got unique skills and abilities that can be commercialized. And your job is to find out what those things are. Whenever people come up to me and say to me, how am I going to create value? How am I going to be able to make it as an entrepreneur? Three things to consider. What do you do well? That's the first one. Ask yourself that question. What do I do well? The second thing is, what do I do better than most? There's got to be some sort of differentiation between you and the masses. What do I do well, and what do I do better than other people? And then the last one is, and how can I create value for people doing these things? How can I create value for people doing these things? The name Howard Hill, how many of you have heard of Howard Hill? Show of hands. Howard Hill? No? Looks like I got to you just in time then, right? Howard Hill was an archer. True story. Some say he was the greatest of all time. As a young story, I remember you used to watch record breakers, and probably some of you might know that show. But record breakers, Roy Castle used to host that show. And on one occasion he had Howard Hill with his bow and arrow. He was an archer.  Show of hands. Any good any of you? Any good? Well, I know I could take any one of you and make you a great archer, provided we did a couple of things. Howard Hill went into 287 tournaments and placed first 287 times. He was able to take his baron arrow and kill a white shark under 15 feet of water. He was able to bring down a Bengal tiger. They said the fastest and hardest of game animals to stop with a bow and arrow. He was able to fire at someone's head with an apple on it and split it in two. And in fact, he was the guy in the film Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. See, that wasn't camera work. That was a real guy. And his name was Howard Hill. Now, I've never shot the bow and arrow professionally. But I know I could take any one of you here today and provide your eyesight was good and your health was normal, have you can shoot in more consistently than that of Howard Hill the best day of his life. Provided, of course, we first blindfolded Howard Hill and turned him around a couple of times so we didn't know what direction he was facing.  That's juvenile, isn't it? How can a person hit a target they can't see? That's a good question. Well, how are you going to fulfill an outcome that you don't have? So the key with embracing the future is to understand that things out front won't occur until we start making the steps, the necessary steps, right now to ensure those things happen.


The next thing we'll talk about is ejecting the tips.  So we have our liquid and we take the liquid out. And so now we've already used this tip, right, and we don't want to use it again. Unless you're using the same media or the same solution, you never really want to reuse a micro-pipe pet tip. So there's a way to get rid of the micro-pipe pet tip. So we've been using this top one to get the liquid out. For ejecting the tip, we use this one right here. This in the back, there's a one right there. And this one's a little bit harder.  So that's how you eject a micro-pipe pet tip.


How's it going everyone Caleb here with late in sports cards next tonight? We've got Jason L with five national silver packs. Good luck Jason Star Wars is coming up here pretty shortly probably About 20 minutes away That's a purple Yannis there to 25 nice one it starts Taylor to 199 Jalen Durin The 199 there Riley Green and a CJ Stroud to 99 Vladigrero, Jr. Tyree killed the 199 Dolphins Tyreek and Last one for you here. Thanks again Jason L closing it out with a curry and nice rookie Jalen Green blue 11 of 50 Awesome ending and there you go. Thanks again Jason L. We'll have them all well protected up and right out to you Thanks again for the order man


All right, as I told you, last week we have the guest speaker today from Israel and Palestine and they are a grassroots organization or civil society kind of activist to promote and create a bridge between different cultures and different religions and his father is devoted to land, a farm that can be used as a site for different workshops and also as a site for both local and international students to come and visit and connect and become and understand the nature of the background of the conflict in the region as you know it's a very, very difficult region there's history of conflict for many, many years this is a chapter we are going to cover this week so Mr. Nasir will give us a brief description of the background of the conflict Israeli-Palestine conflict or on a larger scale the Arab-Israeli conflict, the issue of land, the issue of religion, the nature of the violence and what can be done and what they are doing I mean peace is central to a human endeavor and that's what we also promote as a community in Gasteves the best way to resolve people's difference, religious, historical, ethnic difference is by coming together, otherwise it will lead us to the process of eliminating one another that's not peace peace is trying to find a middle way a common point where we can give and take and live in diversity accommodate one another as I said the more diverse we are the more beautiful we look like a flower if a flower is one color nobody will go to shop to buy it the fact that we are obsessed with a flower as a gift, as a symbol of love is because the diverse nature of that flower so I live very much, I'm interested in what they do on grass with lava also difficult it is and we will leave from Mr. Nasir so now we will take that thank you very much thank you thank you so much for having us today in this class of course we won't be able to solve the conflict in this class but of course I'll try to give you an idea about what is happening there and I will speak about the development I mean I won't go into details and I hope you will cover that in the class but at the end take one example about the family example of struggling to keep the land and the last part of the talk will be what can be done in a difficult situation so just to my name is Dawood and Dawood is David and was born in Bethlehem and Palestinian and Norwegian Christian Palestinian Christian and I grew up there studied in Austria studied theology in the Bible school in Austria studied at Bethlehem University business and continued with tourism management and I was dealing with the tourism issues in the country because many tourists are coming to visit the area but the most important thing is not just to visit the places the holy historical places of course the holy land is holy for the three religions for Judaism, for Christianity and for Islam at the end many people they come and go without you know, interfere with people without talking to the people there without talking to Israelis and Palestinians without meeting Jews, Christians and Muslims and at the end they go back home without knowing what's happening there so I will just give you a brief introduction about the area there and as we see here this is the map of Palestine of course Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire for more than 400 years until 1916 and then from 1917 until 1947 the country was under the British mandate of course the conflict started years back but was like going faster early in the last century when Jewish started to immigrate to Palestine and as you see here before 1948 the majority of the population were in the country where Palestinians and then in 1947 when the British left and the UN took over they started to say well why not to solve this conflict and have two states on that area where the Palestinians could get their state and the Jews, the Israelis could get their state so this was the plan to do that to divide the historic Palestine, the country into two states with Jerusalem as you see here Jerusalem to be like an open city international city controlled by the UN because this is let's say the city the center of the three religions but of course this plan did not work and with 1948 the establishment of the state of Israel and of course on the other side the Palestinians called it the catastrophe because this situation left more than 750,000 Palestinians without a home they had to leave their country and they are living in refugee camps in the West Bank and in Gaza and also in the Arab countries from 1947-48 until 1967 this was the West Bank was under the Jordanian rule and the Gaza under the Egyptian rule and then with the Six Day War in 1967 the Israelis control now the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem and since then we are living Palestinians are living under occupation now of course the Israelis started to build settlements in the West Bank and day by day the land was being cut and cut so nowadays we are not in charge of everything we are in charge just in some places in the West Bank as Palestinians now in 1991 the peace process started and of course you can learn more about it later but just to give you a brief introduction so with the peace process the West Bank was divided into three zones three areas and which is the majority of the area which is this color is under Israeli control that means the Palestinians in this area control just people they are not controlling land they are not controlling resources and they are not controlling borders so it's very difficult to talk about independence in a small area of land and at the same time without in charge of land, resources and borders now this is the context in our area and of course when you talk about land issues and you talk about like there is no future if a population has no land now I will come to the story of my family my grandfather in 1916 during the Ottoman period he bought a land southwest of Bethlehem located on a hill and of course now it is surrounded by five Israeli Jewish settlements and my grandfather was a farmer he used to make wine so he bought this piece of land and they planted more than 25,000 grape trees and they started producing wine and of course this is the most important thing my grandfather did at that time and of course you see people adapted always the new culture so Palestine was always occupied the Romans were there the Byzantines were there the Muslims were there you know always people in that country the native people in that country they started to adopt the new culture and this is exactly the dresses during the Ottoman period and when the British came the people started to wear ties but this is not our subject today when my grandfather bought the land he registered it and it was unusual at that time because papers were not important according to the tradition there and this is the biblical tradition people could buy mountains with hand shakes so why do you need papers and signatures and so on but my grandfather did it the right way so he registered the land so we got documents from the Ottomans and then my father and uncle continued re-registering the land during the British mandate during the Jordanians and after the Israelis in 1967 and we have also documents that proved we paid taxes at that time property taxes and the second unusual thing my grandfather did which according to all traditions people were not living on their farms so you don't see people living on their farms they live in communities like a village or a city and they walk with their land and come back in the evening but my grandfather did it the other way because he wanted his children to grow up with the land and this is exactly what happened after my grandparents died my father and uncle continued their work they continued farming the land living in caves until they passed away in 1991 this is the piece of land I'm talking about and now it's surrounded by settlements in 1991 the Israeli authorities declared the farm as state land in order to confiscate the land and build a settlement on it and their argument was the land has no owner so since we have documents from 1916 we started, you know, we went on a legal battle with the Israelis in order to prevent our land from being confiscated and of course it is a military court so we started the process in 1991 and it is going on and on until today so we are in front of the military court for 12 years and in the Supreme Court for 11 years now so all together almost 23 years of legal battle military and supreme with a financial burden of more than $170,000 and, you know, you are in an unjust situation because you have the documents you have your presence but at the end we are not giving up we believe that one day justice will prevail although the system is unjust for us so we are continuing the legal battle but at the same time, you know, there are groups in the Israeli settlements who are radical groups that come with the ideology God promises the land so those kinds of people, they came to the farm they cut our trees it's like since 1991 we are facing those difficulties they damaged our water tank they threatened us with guns and they tried just on their own to build roads they started to come with big diggers and bulldozers to build the road and to establish a settlement and of course we went all the way legally and the last time it was in 2002 when they started constructing the road we managed to stop it legally in 2001 through going to the Israeli courts and the settlers were very frustrated because we stopped them from building the road on our own land and they damaged 250 olive trees from our property and of course like an olive tree is a symbol of hope and peace so we were very sad because in our country when you plant a tree it's not easy to grow you have to take care of it it's a dry climate but later on three weeks later we managed to plant new trees and sponsored by a Jewish organization from the UK called European Jews for Just Peace in Palestine they heard about our situation and they sponsored 250 olive trees and they came and planted them so we realized with this kind of example that there are people who believe and act for justice and this was for us the very positive encounter now the journey of violence continued like on the 30th of March we found a piece of paper on the eastern side of the farm which says the area where we planted here 10 years ago around 1500 great apple and apricot trees they said well those trees were planted on state land that means it's not your private property so immediately after we found this document we appealed because this is our strategy to go legally all the way and we appealed and our appeal was accepted by the military court because we have the papers we have the documents and we were waiting to have a court case but instead of waiting for a court decision the army came with bulldozers and they damaged all the trees and they buried the trees into the ground so this was like a punishment for the trees so we lost about 1500 trees and the problem is the story is like a very sad story because we were watching the trees to grow up to grow and grow like our own kid children but with sadness and frustration we started rebuilding the terraces and we are preparing the land to be planted again and now we have committed people who would like to come and plant trees among them is American Jewish group coming in the middle of February to plant to replant the trees that was destroyed so on the legal issues we started illegal better because this action was done illegal according to the court according to the law so we have two court cases going on now and the question is why did they destroy the trees all the trees were planted on the private property one tree of course the damages happened just a week before the harvest and we were expecting a very good harvest one tree was not destroyed which is the fig tree and that's why we call it now the steadfast witness the tree that witnessed what happened and we hope as to reconcile with the land to reconcile of what happened I mean because for us it's like we did everything but we could not prevent the destruction of our trees and that's why it's important now to replant to rebuild and to replant so I hope that this fig tree will also witness the new cultivation and the new plantation of this area now of course with violence we did not give up we are still there and we did not give up we did not lose any kind of the land now we have a problem there which is the war that is being built to separate people from each other first we have two problems with the war the war is with war we cannot achieve peace the wars we achieve more hatred you know when you separate people from each other there is no peace with that and the second problem with the war in our area is that the war is being built not at the borders between the West Bank and Israel it is going through the Palestinian Territories and it's separating people from their land and this is the case with our family farm it's located here and this is the border the green line, the border between Israel and the West Bank and this is the route of the war so the people will be living in an enclave totally disconnected from the city which is about six miles away and this situation will force many people to give up a leave because they will be totally disconnected they cannot go to the war easily the only access will be a road here and this will make it difficult for people to exist and to continue farming the land now of course when people live in a conflict situation usually they respond with three ways they respond the first way they respond with violence when people live in violence they say well I am pushed to the corner what should I do so their normal reaction is to respond with violence but the question is what can people achieve with violence except more violence with violence we create more bitterness, more hatred we build more walls physically and psychologically between nations and between people and so for us we said violence is never a solution we put it on the side the second normal reaction is to sit down and cry and accept the situation as it is to say well I can't do it I can't handle it let me wait for something to happen for a miracle to happen it might happen but it might take longer and it might never happen so this is also not a response for us because you know to resign is like being a victim and it's very bad to fall in the victim mode and then the third option is to give up and leave and who is leaving the best educated people and you know like maybe you can copy this to your situation of course like I mean everyone in life faces struggles or crisis or difficulties sometimes we react violently towards our problems we try to prove ourselves I can do it but it's not a solution sometimes you accept the situation as it is and say you know I cannot handle it and be a victim and it is dangerous to fall in the victim mode because at the end sometimes we are blaming others for our own mistakes and suddenly all you can decide to run away from your own problems in our case we said none of those options is good so we are not acting violently we are not resigning and we are not giving up and leaving so we started to think about a different way of resistance and we said four important things because we said if you want to start something new we have to think we have to work on ourselves we cannot try to change other people if we are not changing ourselves I cannot make peace if I'm not peaceful and I cannot make friends if I'm not friendly and I cannot expect others to be friendly with me and I'm not friendly so I have to work on myself and that's why it was important for us to say four things that was the start of a new beginning and that's why we said from the beginning we refuse to be victim we need to be out of the victim mode although the situation is bad and I can tell you hundreds of stories how difficult life is but we definitely refuse to be victim and then the second issue we said we refuse to hate and of course it's easy said difficult to live how can you don't hate the people who are hating you so it's a difficult thing but for us it's important to say we want to distinguish between hating the other and not accepting the bad actions so people should respect each other as humans but when people do mistakes I have to tell my neighbor or sorry you are doing something wrong I have to stand up on my rights and the third thing we said we will act in a different way not because we are good people but because this is part of our beliefs we are believing in this way of non-violent resistance and fourthly we said we are people who believe in justice and of course the path of justice is long and too difficult but at the end justice will prevail so after we said that we created another way a new way a positive a constructive way of resistance by overcoming evil not with more evil but with good hatred with love and darkness with light under the slogan the title we refuse to be enemies I am not an enemy I am refusing to be put in that circle and we started with this way of resistance which is a positive, creative and constructive way a project on the farm called the tent of nations and we say the tent of nations people building bridges because we need people to build bridges of understanding of reconciliation and peace and with the tent of nations it is a therapy for us because in a situation like that it is very easy for people to get frustrated and to act in a violent way but for us what we are doing there is like we are trying to invest our frustration in a constructive way because our frustration is a negative energy when we are frustrated we are angry and when we are angry we act negatively but we try to channel this negative energy this frustration to be invested constructively and secondly it's difficult but doable secondly we are committed to nonviolent resistance that's why we are going all the way in the courts although the system is unjust for us and thirdly we said let's open the farm for people to come and see and so we are opening this place for people, locals, internationals, Israeli people to come and see, to connect the situation with faces and when you start to make a face to what you call an ending you start to raise questions and this is important for us building a bridge of understanding like solving let me say conflict you cannot solve it just on people they have to start to change their image about the other and you cannot do that without creating an understanding without bringing a face to the story and thirdly we said and the fourth issue we said we want to connect people with land because all over we have environmental problems in our area there environment is not a theme at school that's why it's important to connect people with land plant trees, protect the environment and keep a healthy society for the new generation now on the spot here and of course with all restrictions that the road is blocked we have more restrictions there on the ground there we are not allowed to have running water no electricity and no building permit because those we are restricted there and the question is how can we develop the farm without electricity, water and building permits so we started to think about creative ideas so for electricity what do you think, what did we do for electricity? solar panels exactly we have solar panels now since 2009 and with that we are totally independent in terms of energy we have 25 batteries we have charged the batteries for the evening and now we can even there run electrical machines and by doing that we managed to save more than 45,000 US dollars for fuel expenses we used to run a diesel generator so by doing that it's not about electricity it's about telling other people showing other people that things are possible even in a difficult situation so don't sit down don't cry and don't blame the other stand up and act in a different way and of course by doing that we motivated ourselves and we are like encouraged other people to do so and at the same time we are protecting the environment so positive actions are not helpful just on the ground are helpful to keep ourselves motivated with others and also for the benefit of the environment now with water how we solve the issue of water we started collecting grain water into systems grain water doesn't drain that much but we try to collect as much as we can and then we pump the water up on the roof and use it for cleaning even for drinking because we filter it for drinking and this is like systems like we collect rain water into the systems so we cement it like a water reservoir and we use the water during the summertime with buildings we are not allowed to build on the ground we started building under the ground we started renovating existing caves it's a way of nonviolent resistance in a positive way and now we extended some caves we have this this is a chapel cave we use it as a prayer room and one time we had in this room a prayer for peace where Jews were Christians and Muslims came together and prayed for peace in this chapel and for us it is a way like you know I see here like breaking the gun it's an unviolent way of resistance and of course we started of course renovating caves and extending it to small houses for the volunteers workshop for our tools and machineries this is our meeting room there which was a cave natural cave for horses now it's a nice meeting room and the painting is done by children during one of our summer camp and the title was peace justice and conservation the creation the children painted the shadow so it is a way to encourage people of course we continue to think about creative ideas so now we are filtering the grey water to be used for irrigation and we are using compost toilets also because to save water and the idea is like to produce biogas out of the compost so any new idea any crazy creative idea you are welcome also to share it with us and those compost toilets were built by an Israeli when he came to visit the farm it changes his idea it changes his thinking and he decided to join a peace peace group inside Israel and he came back and he said how can I help you and this is important to say when people start to see the other as human being things are changing we are on the right track for peace that's why when we call if we want to achieve peace we have to create an understanding first we cannot have peace through handshake we have to create an understanding to understand what's going on and then work on the process of reconciliation coming to the end goal which is peace now of course we have infrastructure there we have tents our guests and volunteers we are started to do different kinds of activities to bring people together and every year we do a tree planting project we invite Palestinians, Israelis to come and plant a tree for peace because for us when we plant a tree we believe in the future we believe that this tree is going to bear fruits and especially an olive tree we plant a tree one year old and the hope is in 20 years to become like this it's a slow growing tree because of lack of water but the first olives might come after 10 years so we have to take care of the tree the first 10 years in order to start the first few olives but the best fruits of olives might come after 20 years or 30 years but for us when we plant a tree we protect the ground we protect the land and we make the land of course like a symbol of hope at peace but also we learn that if we are talking about peace we should start from the bottom we should start from the ground because you cannot build a house on sand you need the foundation and you start from the bottom and the tree grows slowly slowly the second project we are doing is children summer camp activities we invite children and we work with them traumatize children in difficult situation but we have a theme every camp so the last summer camp theme was with heart and hand we change that we need the people to believe we need the children to think in a positive way we need them to discover their talents focus on the positive not just deal with their problems and believe in themselves I am able to make a difference so remember the summer camps are in July the last two weeks of July so if you have a summer holiday and you don't know what to do and you want to do something constructive join us working with children we are not asking the volunteers to be talent and to be professionals we are asking the volunteers about their talents some people they come with music some people they come with art talents and we try to build a project together for two and a half weeks and this is the way how to encourage those children so we have always theme like a team of volunteers international volunteers we are doing also different kinds of activities like work camps we have the apple harvest the almond harvest, the grape harvest the fig harvest and the olive harvest so international volunteers would come and join us to harvest the fruits there and of course it's a way to get to know the country to meet people and to understand the situation and go back home and believe there is hope for a better future the products it's difficult to sell on the farm to sell on local markets because of the restrictions that's why we try to process the products that the farm is producing like olives, olive oil we do out of the grapes and we try to sell those products on the farm like the ideas like all the products are organic products now we have international volunteers coming for short and long term to help with construction with agriculture we have exchange programs we try to bring cultures and young people from different nations together to understand each other and build bridges we have a women project in the village my wife she started this project for women in the village we do not have chances for education for many reasons and the idea is to bring them out of their homes and bring them in touch with other women they started with English and cultural computer classes and the idea is to empower them we have guest groups coming to visit the farm for a talk for a stay we came to visit us last year and of course imagine those 7,000 people they went back home with a message of hope because in a situation like that it's very easy to get frustrated but we want to show people even in a difficult situation we have to work together for a better future we are trying our best in small steps to think positively but also to be realistic to live in our dreams slowly slowly we can make a difference but our long term goal is one day to build the school focusing on alternative energy organic farming and recycling and to start this kind of education with children and we hope one day to achieve this goal in small steps we are making the farm a symbol of peace and a sign of hope in a hopeless situation we are welcoming you to join us to think with us to dream with us and if you have some time also to come and join on the ground there very important thing to say here like the combination of the work we are doing is faith, love and hope we have no faith we have no love we cannot achieve what we already achieved and that's why we need to focus like a farmer using his donkey to plow he's not allowed to look backwards you should focus and look forward we have a website you can learn more about the work we are doing and we started a couple of years ago with friends of 10 nations and my friend Bill his friends are here and I don't know if they have the chance but you can talk with them if you would like to get involved you can find more information about Fautona F-O-T-O-N-N-A dot org and I always say in small steps slowly slowly the journey and the struggle for justice will continue this is my son I have three children 15 and 12 and my son Bishara is 10 years old and his name is Bishara which means the good news sometimes it's very difficult to think about good news but always when you hear even about conflicts about Israel Palestine, the conflict of religions or whatever believe there are people who are trying to make a difference thank you thank you very much Nasser an excellent presentation very sad story very moving and disturbing actually I wish this lecture was organized or campus wide campus wide community where this would have been a big lecture I know the conflict I myself grown up in a conflict situation I teach world regional geography the whole world is preoccupied with the conflict this is one of the major one which also affect United States you know the issue of security the issue of terrorism the issue of Islamic fundamentalism the Gulf War and by large the result of radicalization of Islam has a lot to do with the mistreatment of Palestine the whole thing because it appeals to us it appealed to me here I'm not even Palestinian imagine how this story is going to appeal to the Arab children it's easy there's nothing more powerful than that and our government the US government has a big hand in that and I would just open it for some questions for the students to ask actually I show a documentary the road to Palestine narrated by a British journalist where the the old farm were thought to leave this farm to give away for the Russian Jewish so you will see that similar story he has all the documents he has all the deeds he paid all the taxes and he said this is not your place and actually you are lucky you are going through this battle ground and at the end we don't know but the route you took is the most important and very holy and very human way next time there is no question about that especially when you are sandwiched between the two radicals the Hamas who think this project nonsense because what they see every day they will not really convince them to really take this and also the radical Jewish it is a difficult project alright questions comments opinions, reflections do you find more people that are internationally involved than the people in your community or is that balanced? as I said before we have all over a year we have international volunteers coming to help some people they come during the planting season between January and March some other people they come and participate in the summer camp with children women education program and in general we have now six volunteers two of them are from Germany and they are staying for a year they come for a year so we have always people there who help us a lot questions, opinions you mentioned something about grey water can you explain what that is grey water of course they are on the farm because we don't have like utilities we don't have electricity we are not connected with sewage system we are not allowed and the idea is to make it difficult for us to exist not to is the plan so what to do about the sewage water and about the grey water so we have like underground tank for that but we try to process that and filter the water to be used at least for irrigation and so this is what we are trying to do to have a full cycle of water because we cannot get water there and we are limited in using we are depending on grey water and if we have no water there we have to buy and it's very expensive so that's why we try instead of watering all our trees from this system water we try to filter the grey water and use for irrigation you talked about like growing the different crops on the farm do you have to plant all of the crops at the same time or is it more of a rotating crop well mostly we are planting trees because it's a dry dry area and sometimes we have like we grow like wheat and so on but it depends on rain if we don't have enough rain won't grow that much so our focus mainly on trees so the planting season any kind of tree is actually between January and March in the rainy season now some of the trees are producing earlier than the other for example we have the apricot and the apple harvest in June now almond harvest in July the grape harvest in August and in September we have the fig harvest and end of October we have the olive harvest so almost like starting in June we are busy with harvesting fruits then you next being in the area that you are I was just wondering how connected or disconnected you feel from the conflict between Hamas and Israel are there people that try to dry you into that conflict more than you already are or are you trying to keep yourself out of the virus well you know like the thing is the problems we are also in Gaza the thing is of course like we are in the western but living in a different situation like this everything is affected so the thing is of course we believe there is no solution with violence because violence is creating more violence and that's why we with this way of resistance with this way of actions we try to tell people you know anyone you know look in an unviolent way in a constructive way you are able to make a difference because until now you know like we as Palestinians we always say the Israelis started and the Palestinians reacted and the Israelis you know the Palestinians started and we reacted so it's like who came first the chicken or the egg and at the end what is the outcome? Nothing you know that's why it's important to prove success there it's important to show people that we are moving forward it's a long way to go but we are succeeding in an unviolent way of resistance and we invite people to come and see some people they might believe in our way of action some other people they might say but at the end they realize there is no other way to solve this conflict with you know just through understanding and through bringing people together there is no way to solve the conflict with violence The question has how much have you worked on attracting publicity from international media or some important international especially from the area because this is an extraordinary story we should be told on a global scale yes what have you done any recognition, any attention yes we are of course trying to inform people on different levels and especially this is something that our friends of ten nations in the US did for example after the destruction of our trees many people reacted many people sent letters we have also people coming from Europe and doing documentary films about the situation for us it's important to bring it on that level because we need to encourage people by doing that to show the other side of the story but at the end to show how difficult in a very complicated situation there are people who still think differently and this is what we are doing in terms of that last question I was just wondering since March that legal stuff happened what's the status on the plantation or the area in terms of legal legally the supreme court the high court in Israel demanded the military to respond why they destroyed the trees and of course the military started to postpone so they were given time until the 15th of September to give the reason because their claim at the beginning they said all we did it because it is a state land and those people they planted their trees not on their private land but on state land now we brought our documents to the courts this is our land the land survey those trees were landed on private property so that's why the supreme court demanded the military to respond this is a private property why did you destroy that you know let us say in order not to give any explanation they start to postpone so it is until the 15th of September then they said they need another month until the 15th of October and then they said another 15 days until the beginning of November we should we should hear by today or tomorrow if something happens but I believe they will demand another month or two months because the journey it happened with us since 1991 alright thank you very much now I said hello and I hope some of you learn a lot and while not only learning but also be part of this peace movement and influence in the meantime I want you to write one page reflection you start restating the problem write a narration and also the moral of the story and how it impacts you know the peace movement so Wednesday I need one page reflection on this lecture thank you so much it would be interesting for me to see yes please to send me also your reflections thank you thank you so much