A mother and her children on a bicycle in Amsterdam. One of the children is in what the photographer calls 'the suicide seat'.

Imagine you are a designer having to design a product for country or community you are pretty much unfamiliar with. Let's say you're an American designer that lands the assignment of designing a bike for everyday inner-city transport in the Netherlands. You need to learn as much as you can about your user group and their behavior. That requires extensive, expensive and complicated user research, right? Not necessarily. The photo report Amsterdam Bicycles illustrates what an incredible amount of information you can distill from standing on a street corner for 73 minutes. San Francisco based software engineer Brian Wilson stood on a corner of the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt for 73 minutes, took 83 pictures of people riding their bikes and annotated them with comments that expressed an ever increasing amazement of what these crazy Dutch people were doing to and on their bikes. A few brilliant examples:

• Multiple Riders on One Bike - With or without any extra seats or foot-pegs for the extra riders, you will see 1 or 2 or even 3 extra passengers side-saddle, balancing precariously, standing, sitting, whatever it takes so they can hitch a ride with a buddy or parent. This is so common I had to stop taking pictures of it because it would prevent me from capturing some of the other trends.
• The long dresses like the [this picture] seem like they would be avoided, but apparently not.
• This one [referring to the picture above, ed] shows a common "3 person bicycle rig" I saw a lot. You'll notice the kid in back is just sitting on the bicycle freight rack, feet dangling and looking bored. Also looking bored is the kid in the suicide position in front of the bicycle. Mom of course is wearing a stunning white dress and lipstick and has a nice purse over her shoulder, and *NONE* of them are wearing bicycle helmets.
• Spectacular Gigantic Unbreakable Security Chains - Almost all of the bicycles in Amsterdam are what I would call "beaters", which means they are beaten up, scraped, bent, out of tune, and have bad paint jobs. At the same time, all these beaters have these GIGANTIC security chains that look like they should be the chain on the anchor of an oil tanker ship.

Of course, a part from taking the pictures the analysis and annotation might have taken some time, but you'll manage doing that within one day. I think his report is a great example that even an unexperienced 'user researcher' can produce a wealth of design information in a limited amount of time, given the fact that he or she is in the right place at the right time.