Adaptive Path Blog

Last month we announced Managing Design Projects, a ‘grassroots’ Adaptive Path conference, coming up on February 5th 2009. Since we announced the event, we’ve had people from around the world register. We’re thrilled to create this new community of people that help make design work happen behind the scenes.

We also announced that Scott Berkun will be keynoting at the event. He is not only author of Myths of Innovation, and Making Things Happen, but a kick-ass speaker with great stories from his experience managing projects at Microsoft.

Lynne Waldera, founder and CEO of InMomentum, Inc, a management consultancy, will also be speaking at the event. She’s an expert in organization strategy and one of the wisest people I’ve ever met. She will be talking with us about: Conflict Maneuvers:  Navigating disagreement, politics and emotions to “make things happen”. I’ve had a preview of what Lynne will be sharing with us, and I believe it will be valuable to anyone that’s works with creative teams on making big things happen.

Come join us to hear Scott & Lynne speak.

Space is limited to 60 people for this deeply discounted event, so register today! Price increases to $299 on January 15th.

Timing is everything. Take Flickr for example, a photo sharing service that successfully emerged in 2004 not just because of good design, technology, and leadership, but because of the coincidental mass adoption of camera phones and affordable high-quality digital cameras. A good idea becomes a great idea if its time has come.

So as we start off in a gloomy looking 2009, I’ll put on my hunch-hat and share my nine ideas of experiences who’s time has come:

		Enabling behavior change — Whether it’s to extend your paycheck or conserve your energy, there’s plenty of reasons for people to change how they behave this year. But behavior change is a complex thing. It’s an experience that needs to be carefully thought through from the human perspective, from the depths of the cognitive psychology of motivation to the breadths of incremental change across weeks and months. People won’t substantively change their behaviors simply because of clever marketing campaigns. To change consumer behaviors we must design motivational experiences that push, pull, and ease the pathway to adopting new habits.
		Feeling the wealth of health — The U.S. stock market dropped almost 40% in 2008, making the phrase, “you always have your health,” more true than ever. Yet investing and participating in your own health and wellness is complex, clinical, and confusing. People and healthcare providers need to engage in simple but sound experiences that foster good decision making, good outcomes, and good feelings. Better experiences that design for the medical, physical, logistical, and emotional experience can make healthcare humane and something we all personally want to invest in.
		Visualizing value — We’ll all be looking to get the most out of a dollar/euro/yaun. The trouble comes when we try to access the true value we’re getting our of a product or service. Experiences that help people find and get the most value out of a product/service will be the winners. The challenges are in revealing the value—especially the non-financial value—and reminding customers of it. Progressive Insurance might help people find value, but few organizations also help people appreciate it the way ZipCar does. When it comes to value, all customers are from Missouri: show-me, show-me, show-me.
		Throwing a party for the third party — Traditional customer-centric product development meant finding customer needs, selecting the most marketable needs to design for, and creating a product to address them. But new approaches can turn this model on its head by opening up organizational capabilities to passionate customers and third party players who can participate in and design solutions that your business wouldn’t or couldn’t consider. Threadless proved this approach interesting. The iPhone app store has proved it real. So what aspects of your experience will you open up to pragmatic third-parties and what experience will you design to support them?
		Uniquely mobile — Mobile is here and it’s been here. What’s changed is we’re no longer trying to shoehorn desktop metaphors and desktop interactions onto mobile divices. What’s changed is that opportunities are opening up for more people to design experiences for mobile devices. As a result, we’ll see many more mobile experiences emerge that are only possible and only compelling on a mobile platform.
		Solid clouds — Cloud computing may be a hot meme, but outside the tech bubble the real world could care less. People will move to the cloud when the experiences offer something tangibly different and better than the desktop. Working more fluidly with a team is one such successful experience, but there will be more. But to find these experiences, we have to pull our heads out of the clouds and find solid on-the-ground benefits to people’s everyday lives.
		Long wow experiences — Yep, I’ll throw in my personal favorite: The long wow is an approach to customer loyalty based on systematically impressing customers again and again rather than simply (and naively) issuing them a loyalty card with an identification number stamped on it. The relationships that customers will keep before, during, and after an economic downturn are the strong relationships with brands that deliver moments of noticeably exceptional service—moments when the service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer.
		The elegant upgrade — Consumers have already started hanging onto hardware, such as mobile phones, for a longer period of time. This trend could be seen as a positive for the consumer, the environment, and smart business. Software upgrades, add-ons, and other modifications mean new and better experiences for customers. For businesses, it means additional revenue after the original purchase in a positive economy of scale. What has to be created are more elegant customer experiences for upgrading and augmenting products. Such products will be recast as services.
		Chorded services — Multi-channel services typically delivery cacophony, not harmony, across the various channels of customer interaction. The opportunity is to define a songbook of chords that your organization can play as great customer experiences—as noted by Kate in her recent virtual seminar. If businesses start simple and learn to play the chords well, they can coordinate multiple touchpoints to delight customers and support behaviors that results in both savings and positive revenue. Today a business can deliver just about any service over any channel, but by using the lenses of experience you can define what services are valuable when and where.

And here are a few more experiences that didn’t quite make the cut:

• Tween experiences — new businesses that fill in experience gaps between others (e.g.,TripIt)
• Customer servlets — simple service protocols that your business can excel at on specific channels
• Managing personal presence — relating ‘me’ to ‘we’ and ‘where’
• Gaps in personal expression — blogs may have peaked, but there are plenty of other ways to express ourselves
• Markets for talent — if the world is becoming flat, it’ll need more places where people can showcase and sell their talent to pragmatic buyers through a trusted third party

Though UX Week 2009 doesn’t happen for a while now (15-18 September 2009), we’re well into our planning. In 2008, some of our audience’s favorite speakers were folks from outside of user experience design — Jane McGonigal talking about games (video), Michael B. Johnson sharing Pixar’s process (no video — he revealed behind-the-scenes stuff!), Jay Torrence talking about how his theater troupe operates (video). So, we’ve decided to explore that further, and for 2009, we’re looking laterally to all manner of disciplines outside of design, though which all influence our work.

We were able to land three amazing speakers before this year’s end. I’ve already blogged about (and interviewed) Scott McCloud, the mad scientist of comics.

There’s also Erin McKean, lexicographer extraordinaire. We’ll pair her with an information architect and have them talk about the experience of words. If you’ve never seen Erin speak before, I suggest this TED talk.

And, we’ll have Genevieve Bell. Though currently titled as the Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home group, her Ph.D. is in cultural anthropology. She’ll bridge the gap between experience design and anthropology, and help us understand just how we should be thinking about this “ethnography” thing.

The structure for UX Week 2009 will be similar to 2008 — single-track Main Stage presentations in the morning, and an array of hands-on workshops in the afternoon.

UX Week 2008 was our best yet, but I’m confident we’ll top it in 2009. Register now for the insanely low price of $1895 ($2,995 regular price), and use the promotional code RNSB and get an additional 15% off (lowering the price to $1610.75).

It’s exciting to see smart, thinky people’s ideas hit the uber-big time. And if they are visual-thinky types, it just makes my heart go pitty-pat all the faster.

So we’re thrilled that Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin is culling kudos from across the digital realm. We first met Dan in September, when he spoke at Adaptive Path about his inspirational ways of integrating visual communications for solving business problems. His insights are intriguing, fun and insightful, and the event was a hit.

Now we get to congratulate Dan for his major wins in the publishing arena:

• Amazon:  #5 of the Top 10 Books 2008 : Business and Investing
• Business Week : Best innovation & design books of 2008
• Fast Company : Best Business Books of 2008
• Best of BNET : #4 of the Best Business Books of 2008
• Business Pundit: #4 of the 10 Best Business Books of 2008

Sad to have missed the September event? No worries! Dan will be speaking at MX 2009 : Managing Experience through Creative Leadership, March 1-3, 2009. It’s your chance to hear what all the buzz is about, and to claim your inner visual practitioner.

Congratulations to Dan, and please join us in March to see him up close and personal at this marvy Adaptive Path event.

You can register for MX 2009 here.

(psst! Between now and the end of the year, you save 15% off our already discounted registration fees with the promotion code RNSB (Register Now Save Big.) But don’t tell anyone else. It’s just between us…)

Cyclists and RIA designers alike will enjoy reading about how Adobe designed their Tour Tracker app that allows you to follow pro bike races real time from your computer.

Read about mobile app development in Africa and join the conversation by adding your own ideas to the comments.

Just what in the world does make a UX Expert?

Just in time for gift-giving season, the Amazon Remembers iPhone app helps us build shopping lists.

What do service designers do? Watch the video to find out!

Rebecca Bortman of Mule Design brings us some good cheer:

This is our last Signpost for 2008. From the Adaptive Path family to yours, we wish you the brightest holiday season and the very best in the new year.

We are happy to announce that Scott Berkun will keynote our Managing Design Projects conference in February. This is very exciting for us and having heard Scott present in the past I am confident he will really get things off on the right foot. We have also posted the schedule of the day’s activities to give everyone a taste of what is to come.

As my colleague Julia mentioned a few weeks ago, after looking for events that focused on project management we found the field largely dominated by tools developers (Hello Microsoft!) and the Project Management Institute both of which didn’t feel like they addressed the particular needs of project managers who work in the design field. So we created our own!

The goals of the event are to identify some best practices, common work-arounds, key tools and begin a conversation with our peers that we have admired seeing our colleagues enjoy with both the IXDA and IA Summit. Since PMs don’t necessarily go to the same places to get information about how they do their work and how they can do it better, I am asking you to forward this to a PM that you know.

As this is the first time we are holding this type of an event, we have priced it below our other events at a thrifty $249. As of January 15th the price will increase to $295. If you have 2008 education budget left you can take advantage of the current event sale that will give you an additional %15 off until 2009! What a deal!

Register today!

Forrester has just released in 2008 Customer Experience Index. (Registration required to download). The Index was compiled by Bruce Temkin, who will keynote Day 1 of MX 2009. The results confirm what we all suspect — retailers and hotels rank the highest (their business is predicated on customer experience), and health insurance providers, TV service providers, and internet service providers are the lowest (three industries where customer choice is constrained).

At MX 2009, Bruce will talk about how experience-based differentiation is even more crucial in a down economy, and provide insights on how companies can do more to embrace it.

It’s also worth noting a couple of additions to the MX 2009 program:
• Dan Roam, visual thinking advocate and author of Amazon 2008 Top Business Book The Back of the Napkin
• David Butler, VP of Design for Coca-Cola, featured in this BusinessWeek article on reinvigorating the classic 100-plus-year-old brand

Between now and the end of the year, you can save 15% off our already discounted registration fees for our events with the promotion code RNSB (Register Now Save Big). We know times are tight and training budgets are in jeopardy, but we also believe key investments in making you and your business smarter will be just what’s needed right now. We pledge that MX will deliver on that promise!

Curation is one of the important and emergent topics Kate Rutter will be speaking about in her virtual seminar tomorrow: “Sailing the C’s of Change: What do curation, cobbling, collage and chording mean for your products and services?”

Kate’s keenly sensed these four emergent trends on the horizon and her seminar will provide insight on how they apply to your business.

Kate’s seventy-five minute virtual seminar starts tomorrow, December 17th, at 10am PST.

Sign up - you won’t be disappointed!

Recently, I’ve been involved in some inspiring conversations about the merits and applications of different content curation models (community curation, an editorial hand, or algorithmic). Those conversations came just in time, it seems, for a raging debate about curation involving Google.

First, read the originating TechCrunch article where Marissa Mayer discusses the future potential impact of community curation on Google search results. She suggests that Google may blend algorithmic results with those suggested by large numbers of human actions.

Then, read Andrew Orlowski’s article in The Register. My favorite quote:

“That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.”

Well, humans write algorithms. Google’s is written by humans, made wonderful by collective human behaviors. Like linking.

Then, read Tim O’Reilly’s response:

“The idea that Google’s algorithms are somehow magically neutral to human values misses their point entirely. What distinguished Google from its peers in 1998 was precisely that it exploited an additional layer of implicit human values as expressed by link behavior, rather than relying on purely mechanistic analysis of the text contained on pages.”

The human hand, revealed.

And finally, check out the pile-on: Censorship! Big Brother! Pragmatism not Idealism! The End of the Free World!

I love a good controversy. Gets my blood pumping so I can stay warm here in the office.

Andrew C. Revkin of of the New York Times asks “Does Obama Need a Department of Innovation?”

Our own Alexa Andrzejewski won the Cupcake Camp Best Decorated award with her spaghetti and meatball cupcakes. Way to go Alexa!

In 1944 Dr. Edwin Land had the idea for instant photography after his daughter asked him why she had to wait to see the photo he had just taken. This December is the last month Polaroid will be producing its instant film.

“No one has ever before or since seen such a collection of great ideas in one demonstration,” said SRI President and CEO Curt Carlson. The year was 1968. Read about the mother of all demos.

ReadWriteWeb reports that Forrester Research has a new report finding that corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. “Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them.” Here’s hoping the AP Blog fairs better than that.

For the folks in San Francisco, BART has released an API. The real-time displays are the lowest barrier to entry. You download a pre-configured web page that displays the next train in your area. It’s ideal for the local coffee shop.