Adaptive Path Blog

Oh, 2009, how sad we are to see your days draw down. Okay, not really. If we’re being honest, we’ve been wearing our 2010 party hats for weeks now. And we’re celebrating with super low early bird pricing for these 2010 workshops and conferences. The earlier you register, the more you save.

Use promo code BLOG for 10% off on top of the early bird price. Click the links below or go here to register.

We hope to see you in 2010!

	MX 2010: Managing Experience Across the Web and Beyond A conference for people who take a leadership role in guiding better experiences into the world March 7-8 $1,295 Early Bird ($1,595 Regular Price)
	UX Intensive Amsterdam Our popular four-day workshop series for experienced UX folks wanting to take their practice to the next level. April 27-30 $1,995 Early Bird all four days | $695 Early bird single days
	UX Week 2010 The premier UX conference, now in its seventh year August 24-27 $1,395 Early Bird

We missed last week, so we’re going double-or-nothing this time. Twice the goodness!

Matt Jones’ chrono-mind-blast blows our circadians: We Have All The Time in the World

Information visualizations the old skool way, featuring the genius work of Mark Lombardi.

Hey look! A new Flickr-searching desktop app that can place photos and captions directly into Keynote.

Here’s a new blog that’s a gallery of great RIA design.

Next time you need to create a sitemap, see if you can make it look like a theme park map.

And now, a unified approach to visual and interaction design.

Past MX speaker Björn Hartmann and friend-of-AP demonstrates how awesome it is to get keyboards and mice working in conjunction with large multitouch tables.

Yummy! A project where design meets street food.

Hotel room design insights from Colin Powell. Seriously, haven’t we all experienced this? (If you want to spring for an iPhone clock radio that’s pimped out, you can get this.)

Got nostalgia?

We think this is pretty cool. You insert an iPhone into a special book for a interactive reading experience. Consider the possibilities for textbooks or any kind of interactive brochures.

Videos from the Service Design Conference, including one from our very own JJG.

We were thrilled to work with an awesome team recently, and the phrase “design for the fist pump” has us fist-pumping, too!

This new site that interprets brand and company responsibility into a Social Nutrition Label.

Are you a music festival junkie? Then it’s time to spend less time being lost and more time enjoying music and the experience. Hell yeah.

Can’t get enough of Pixar-goodness? Learn about the production design of WALL-E.

Smart product ecosystems, from a Nokia vision of 2015. We don’t really need to wait that long, do we? Let’s start making them now!

Go forth and make things! Have a great weekend.

Have you ever set out to “reimagine an experience,” only to find yourself feeling trapped? Have you had one of those days when all your ideas felt too much like existing ones? Perhaps your design decisions were rational and grounded, but just didn’t feel inspired. Or maybe you felt stuck because you were constrained by assumptions without realizing it.

As a Left-Brained Person, I’ve certainly found myself there before. Fortunately, my brilliant colleagues, Kate Rutter and my former colleague Rachel Hinman, are always full of ways to help me, and others, snap out of it. And these ways often begin with kicking me out of the studio door and into the world — or at least into the wonderful world of make believe!

In this presentation from UX Week 2009, I invite participants into this world — a world that was so easy to enter as a child, but that we all have the power to enter into still.

Alexa Andrzejewski | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

You can also learn more about the activity in Kate’s post on The Wand in the World.

I finally got around to watching IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s TED Talk “urging designers to think big”. It’s a noble talk, but as I was watching it, I realized something bugged me. Many of the elements Tim proposes–moving from design to design thinking; balancing “desirability, viability, and feasibility”; to be “human-centered”; the approach of observing people, generating concepts, and prototyping experiences; to begin with divergent thinking before adopting convergent thinking–have become the accepted orthodoxy within circles that engage in “innovation”, “design”, and “strategy”.

And when something becomes orthodox, my contrarian nature kicks in, and I get suspicious. Because orthodoxy is comfortable, and when we’re comfortable, we get lazy, and when we get lazy, we miss what’s really going on.

I’d love to hear from folks what they think really *is* going on. Am I mistaken to be so wary of this orthodoxy? Or is its adoption a sign of an emerging complacency? How do we advance the dialogue, because all I’m hearing/seeing is the same thing over and over again.

Steve Gundrum | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

It’s becoming that season. You know, the season where food seems to take center stage. As the weather gets colder, comfort food, hot drinks and celebratory feasts appear on the horizon.

When I think of food, I think of things like: yummy, fragrant, spicy, hearty. Or, fruits & veggies, meat & potatoes, Mom’s amazing spaghetti.

Then I heard Steve Gundrum, CEO of Mattson speak at UX Week 2009 on “The Secret Ingredient” for Designing New Foods and Beverages. He told the insider tale about how the food industry thinks about food. It was fascinating, enlightening, and, I admit, a little creepy, as I captured in my sketchnotes of the talk.
Steve was passionate and engaged when he revealed the pyramid of maximizing profits. He did a great job of communicating how differently the food industry thinks, plans and designs food products. Do you think about attitude as a key ingredient in food? I didn’t either, but now I can’t get it out of my head.

To cap off the talk, Steve did what very few speakers know how to do: give the audience an experience with the simple tools of jellybeans, nose, mouth and time.

Are you designing experiences that have an insider view? Are you curious about what makes the food and beverage industry go? If so, take a peek through the keyhole into the world of food profitability with Steve Gundrum.

Matt Webb | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

This past UX Week brought some great speakers, including Matt Webb from BERG. We’re happy to share is fantastic talk about developing products and learning from mistakes. Matt shares the lessons that his company grappled with during the design and production of their first major product.

Matt talks about how smart products bring their own design challenges. Internet-connected devices and plastic filled with electronics behave in unexpected ways: what does it means for a physical thing to side-load its behavior, or for a toy to have its own presence in your social network? What we’ve learned about user experience on the Web is a great place to start: social software, adaptation, designing for action creating action — these are principles familiar on the Web, and still valuable when design is not on the screen but in your hands.

Matt’s story is important for anyone who is developing new products and experiences – physical or digital. Being selective about your innovation and looking for the one thing that your customers can get excited about is a guiding product development principle that we can all remember.

The web is about to become a more beautiful place if our friends at Typekit have anything to say about it.

Billed as “the easiest way to use real fonts on your website”, Typekit enables web designers to use real fonts in their web designs. As simple as inserting a line of code, designers now have the ability to present their designs in a way that’s on-brand and is more aesthetically pleasing than Arial, Helvetica, San Serif.

In the past, designers had to use Flash or static images for specialized typography. They can now lean on new web standards to get the look they want. By utilizing the modern web browser’s ability to link to font files, Typekit’s service provides access to a full library of hosted fonts. This subscription service helps designers license the font they want – legally – and type designers can protect their creations without annoying DRM.

Typekit has lined up some great type foundries already, including Fonthead, Betatype, Underware, with more coming in the future. Take a peek at the library available already.

We’re particularly happy because this new company is made up of a few of our own. Bryan Mason is our former COO and a board member and Jeff Veen is one of our founders. Add Greg Veen and Ryan Carver (both of whom were helped build Measure Map) and you’ve got a great group of designers and businessmen who understand the web and the people who use it.

So, what does this mean for you? We can now keep our web designs consistent with the brands we work with. We can move beyond the standard serif and sans-serif, lowest common denominator mindset that has plagued us for years. With services like this, we can make sure our designs look and feel the way we want them to.

Typekit shows how web standards, webs designers and great type foundries can come together to move the bar forward.

Let the beautiful web begin.

Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.

Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like the balanced answer he drew:

However, I had to go back and dig deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between his diagram and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:

President Obama’s new Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, gave a talk on technology and innovation. The first thing he said that needs to be considered? Customer experience design. Listen to his address here (it’s good!)

The Litl is a sexy little webbook. Read what Pentagram said about its design. (And also read Pentagram’s involvement in the NY Riverways project.)

Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact.’

The Information Architecture of Behavior Change Websites.

Our friends at Flickr have released an App Garden.

This one has made the rounds: Cell Size and Scale. It’s a powers of 10 thing!

Hrm. This seems to be a taxonomy error.

Dieter Rams’ 10 design principles. Follow them and you, too, can make spare white objects.

DVR is TV’s new BFF. (In other words, the TV industry fighting DVR was as senseless as fighting VCRs, or music industry fighting cassette tape, or piano rolls, or… etc etc.)

Sometimes, we put down our whiteboard markers and engage with our true passion – boy bands.

Below is a little thing we made in response to another video on YouTube. It was planned in about 5 minutes and we really didn’t know the lyrics. But, it was a lot of fun. Check it out and let us know if we’ve missed our calling.