Adaptive Path Blog

A few months ago I wrote a post for HBR.org on how businesses that trust their customers deliver better experiences, because they use that trust to offer services that others simply will not match. In the article, I mention Amazon, Zappos, and USAA, and you could add to that Nordstrom, famous for their willingness to accept purchase returns without a receipt.

I’m continuing to explore the importance of trust, though not just in customers, but in ones own employees as well. For example, Southwest Airlines empowers front-line employees to make decisions driven by customer needs, and does not require them to be beholden to policies and procedures manuals. Nordstrom (again) had an employee handbook that consisted of 75 words:

Welcome to Nordstrom.
We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules:
Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations.
There will be no additional rules.
Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

Or the article that recently made the blogosphere rounds, on Netflix’s vacation policy (or, rather, lack thereof).

Netflix, Nordstrom, Southwest, Zappos, USAA — these are all companies renowned for great customer experience. And they provide remarkable latitude to both customers and employees, a latitude that suggests trust.

As I’m exploring this idea, I’d love your help. I’ve got two questions, and I’d love your answers in the comments:

1. How else are other companies demonstrating trust in employees and customers, and how does it lead to better experiences?

2. When have companies found themselves bitten by overly trusting policies?

I just read a note from Jared Spool’s talk at UX Australia: “In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team for creating a major design failure?” While I don’t know the context, it’s hard to imagine anyone answering in the affirmative. Why would you?

In the past few years, there’s been a lot of emphasis on failure in the world of design. Being unafraid to fail helps you take risks, or put design iterations out into the world to get feedback and learn. This should produce better results in the end. Some have called on designers to fail more, which usually gets lots of head nods.

Yes, designers should fail. They have to, because it’s part of the design process. Every idea, sketch, color choice, model, visualization, and prototype is a potential failure. If you’re not failing, and you’re not learning from your failures (or attempts at success), you’re not doing it right. But we know this, right?

Personally, I’d rather succeed more than get rewarded for failure, especially a “major design failure.” If my team produces a major failure, we’re definitely doing it wrong. We haven’t been true to the design process, which includes, among many things, failure in an attempt to succeed. And we should not be rewarded.

If a successful design is the ultimate goal, and failure is a part of the process in reaching that goal, and the resulting design is a failure, what should be rewarded? All the failure that takes place within the design process? A design process that results in failure? Or success?

How do you get to know a place through the eyes of the people who live there? How do you discover the nuances that only a resident would know?

Zakary Zide and I have been asking ourselves this question as we prep for a road trip to Oregon this week. So, we devised a fun little game to help us get to know our destination city, Portland, through the perspective of locals (rather than a guidebook).

We’re inviting Portlanders to participate in a behind-the-curtain-scavenger-hunt that will reveal the emotional geography of the city. Here’s how the game works:

(Please share with cool, fun, open people in Portland that you think would enjoy sharing their city with us in this way)

The Time:
Friday, September 3rd, 2010. MEET US at 3pm.

The Place:
Barista cafe (PEARL DISTRICT)
539 NW 13TH AVE, Portland, Oregon

You Get:
We’ll buy you a cup of coffee (not a fancy coffee, just a coffee).

The Materials:
We’ll give you a cute little flag on a toothpick and a small piece of clay.

The Task:
1. You have 20 minutes to place the cute toothpick flag in a spot within a mile of the cafe that holds special significance to you.
  It can either be a spot that you think other people overlook (that you take special pleasure in looking at), or a spot where something special has happened to you (the spot where you first kissed your husband, or the spot where you once found 20 bucks). See below for some examples.

2. After you place the flag, you text message us the location of the flag and a sentence or two about why the spot is significant to you.

3. We’ll be waiting for your text at Barista cafe. As soon as we get your text, the game is on and we’ll race to find your flags!  We’ll document what we find and make something creative in response to your special spot (and post via our blogs).

The possibilities, Portland, are endless.
Our experience will be completely determined by what you choose to share with us.
…………………………………….

Examples of tiny flag special spots where we’re from:

Location: Howard Street, underneath the overpass between Main Street and Beale Street, San Francisco
Why: I look forward to seeing this graffiti every day when I head home from work.  It reminds me not to take my worries too seriously.

Location: Natoma Street next to the Transbay Terminal, San Francisco
Why: Sometimes when you look up into the sky, you can catch clusters of birds riding a circular current for long periods of time, hovering in that one spot like a weird, undulating amoeba.
(Image source: http://www.networke9.com/archives/author/marc-johnson)

Location: Florida Street, the chairs inside Circolo restaurant, San Francisco
Why: The spot where Zak and I first met!

The Myth of the Fold. If we put this link further down the page, will you still find it?
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

“People said that a tape player, which could not record, would never catch on.” Oh yeah? http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-06.html#block3

This indestructible soccer ball goes to show you that inspiration can strike for just about anything. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/18/BUT61EF67O.DTL

This concept video on what Rock Band could be in the future is sure to make some heads explode around here. http://laughingsquid.com/what-rock-band-might-look-like-in-the-future

The New York Times tells us how changes at Nordstrom’s had a huge impact on the user experience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/business/24shop.html?hpw

Billboards had more style in the 40′s
http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2010/01/1940s-london-in-stunning-hi-res-co

Dark Patterns – a collection of anti-usability patterns and why they’re evil
http://darkpatterns.org/

Gantto has us thinking about different ways to communicate project plans.
http://gantto.com/

BERG London introduces BBCs Dimensions
http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/08/17/introducing-bbc-dimensions/

People in Pictures: 8 Techniques for Humanizing Diagrams
http://www.eightshapes.com/blog/2010/08/23/people-in-pictures-8-techniques-for-humanizing-diagrams/

GooSh.org, the Google Shell (command-line interface to Google):
http://goosh.org/

During a recent research and strategy project at Adaptive Path, our team uncovered a fascinating pattern around media multitasking—most participants between 20 and 30 years of age watched TV or movies while engaging with laptops, iPads, and smart phones. Our team was able to categorize this behavior into levels of multitasking ranging from backgrounding, which was more common, to full on media multitasking.

I am guilty of this behavior too with multiple applications running, responding to email and reading SMS—all while watching TV. But the fundamental question our team debated was why we needed to attend to all of these tasks at once? Our best response was that we feel more efficient or productive, as we maximize our time across multiple activities.

This raises an important issue: should we design for multitasking behavior, or are we feeding a habit that is a gateway to distraction and overall work inefficiency? Are we becoming a society of unfocused, half-attentive people who are constantly mid-way through six different conversations by catering to media multitasking? It’s bad enough during meetings or even at restaurants when someone pulls out their phone, causing a chain reaction of phone checking.

Digital multitasking features arguably enhance productivity. I believe that multitasking adds a level of complexity our brains enjoy. We like the challenge, or illusion of challenge, that multitasking creates. When completing a variety of simple tasks the brain can react to the foremost stimuli rather than the lull of autopilot. Simply put, it’s just more stimulating than the same dull routine.

I think multitasking is a behavior that designers should take into consideration when planning for their product or service. If we can orient features and functions to assist in accomplishing more than one task at a time, rather than to distract or hinder, we’ll emerge a more seamless and productive experience. It’s rare that we stop and ask, “This interface is intuitive, but does it help the user focus to accomplish the task? Will the user become distracted and not bother to complete it?”

Ideally, the user will be filled with a sense of accomplishment as a result of our ability to consider other tasks going on simultaneously.

Here’s a rundown of the interesting, peculiar and inspiring nuggets that crossed our paths last week:

Chula Carlson, our fabulous Controller, wrote her first (and dare we say, AWESOME) AP newsletter article, Accounting for Experience.

We were intrigued by how the NY Times creates infographics.

We also found some cool gamelike apps that help kids get off their butts and move around.

As designers we’ve all seen lip service paid to ‘sustainability’. We asked ourselves: can designers define sustainability for themselves?

Those of who are music aficionados passed around Shuffler’s (very alpha) concept of bringing music and music blogs together (content and context streaming with your audio).

We checked out these top travel apps in Travel and Leisure and discussed Why UX is so important on travel websites and how to get it right. Speaking of travel, we also laughed at Christoph Niemann’s hilarious illustrations of nightmare flight experiences.

We couldn’t believe what we were looking at when we discovered the Krispy Kreme cheeseburger (yes, you read that right), served at the Wisconsin State Fair.

Nor could we believe that Barbie Video Girl could even pretend to compete with the Canon 7D, but she did (though she didn’t win).

We found the “Can We Date?” flowchart and now know where to point our single friends for trusted dating advice.

Our Star Wars, comic, and sticky note vices were thoroughly nourished by a cartoon of All of Chewbacca’s Dialogue from Star Wars drawn on a 12″x12″ megasticky note.

And, last but not least, we were occupied with preparations for one the one and only….UX Week, which kicks off tomorrow!

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post “The Lure of the Single Click”, about interfaces that support successful engagement through a single click of a button.

Having just completed a ginormous future-of-media project, I found myself thinking of this again. Among our project activities was 24 in-depth interviews in people’s homes to understand their media behaviors. And one of our realizations is that, when it comes to media, most people are very very lazy. Awe-inspiringly lazy. I was stunned at, in a world of DVRs and streaming media, how many people still just plop down on their couch, point a remote at their teevee, and browse whatever is on.

And I realized that, if you could just give people a magic button, and they pressed it once, and stuff they liked just started appearing before them, they’d be ecstatic.

And then I realized, “Wait, that’s basically what Pandora does!”

When Pandora is discussed, a lot of attention is focused on its Music Genome Project, and how it analyzes songs you like to deliver a “radio station” tailored to your tastes. Increasingly, you’re hearing about how Pandora is available on pretty much any device you’d want it, now even in your car.

But I’ve never heard anyone talk about what I think is the core of their success, which is that after you hit “play”, you don’t have to touch it again, for hours on end. The songs it chooses just need to be good enough, and you’ll be happy letting it play. I believe this extremely minimal level of user engagement is huge for their success, and gives them a leg up on services like Rdio, which require me to expend a fair amount of effort to assemble a queue.

Such minimalism is so extreme that it’s awesome power is unrealized.

TV and radio have been successful, in large part, because when you turn them on, they just work. Content keeps pouring forth. It’s a lesson worth learning.

Just a couple years ago, Pandora was laying people off, fomenting concern over survival. Just a few weeks ago, they announced tremendous growth.

It’s no secret that a key to their growth has been in non-PC devices, notably smartphones — somewhere between 40 and 50% of their audience listens on mobile devices up from 0% about 3 years ago. Even 3% comes from internet-connected TVs (reference). And iPad is proving to be a valuable platform as well.

While the majority of users still access Pandora through their PCs, that percentage is decreasing, and trends suggest it will probably drop below 50% by the end of the year. This falls in line with some research we’ve done, which suggests that the era of PCs as media devices has begun to wane.

PCs are all-purpose machines, and served as media devices because people love media, and there was nothing better around. With the emergence of smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs, I think we’ll see media retreat from the PC towards these tools that are better suited for its enjoyment.

Extrapolating further, I think there’s a chance to re-embrace the PC as a productivity tool. What does a PC look like when it’s not an any-purpose device, but suited to creativity and productivity tasks? How might it change?

We are delighted to welcome Elena Pacenti to Service Design Thinks in SF! Elena is the director of a brand new masters program in service design at the Domus Academy in Milan.

Once again, Service Design Thinks (and Drinks) will be returning to Adaptive Path on Tuesday, August 17th from 6–9 pm (we’re still looking for other hosting locations, if you know of one). Join us for drinks, and a talk with Elena about her past work and upcoming masters program in service design. Please RSVP, we look forward to seeing you there.

Check out Service Design Thinks and Drinks worldwide.

This week started off quite nicely for San Francisco as ground was broken on the new eco-friendly Transbay Terminal.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a very cool tool that maps 161,000 American neighborhoods and adds the transportation costs to the housing costs in a given place so you can see how affordable (or not) the far-flung exurbs really are.

NPR has written a fascinating article on our evolving brain. NPR quotes Dr. David Linden, “In evolution, you never build something new if you can adapt something you’ve already got”.

Could we see future Apple products built in a metallic glass material that’s stronger than titanium? The chance seems fairly high considering Apple just bought Liquid Metal.

Ever wonder how today’s tech start-ups would have advertised their products/services 50-60 years ago? Wonder no longer.

Lisa Gansky has written a book which argues that the businesses of tomorrow will be doing less selling and more sharing.

Like business and advertising buzzwords/jargon? Neither do we. However, we do enjoy sites that make fun of them. What the Fuck is My Social Media Strategy? and Unsuck it both make us chuckle.

Paper.li is a great app for those who really like the concept of FlipBoard but don’t have an iPad.

Everynone creates a beautiful video for Radiolab’s Words episode.

After a ‘thorough battery of tests’, McSweeney’s has concluded that the best e-reader on the market is… the newspaper.

Sputnic have created, by far, the coolest racing game ever.