Adaptive Path Blog

Intersections are exciting, infuriating, wondrous, and dangerous places. Roads, vehicles, people, and destinies all come together and are forced to deal with one another. 60% of all traffic accidents occur at intersections and many cities were founded at crossroads. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Grant McCracken’s blog sitting at the intersection of anthropology and economics is quite a fascinating place. He always has something insightful to say about design, marketing, research, business, and culture. I especially love his “case study” style posts like these recent ones on “the new advertising” and the Zaltman research method. Note, though he may seem a bit academic/esoteric at times, it’s worth it. I recently met the man at the EPIC conference, an intersection between ethnography and industry, where he was directing traffic and stirring up trouble in the best way possible.

How do you teach people who already know a lot? That’s the dilemma I’ve been facing lately in my Designing for Interaction Workshops. The workshops seem to be well-received by people with some exposure to interaction design and a few years of experience. But practitioners with more than say, five year’s of experience have sometimes walked away unsatisfied. They feel they know a lot of what I’ve gone over, even if it’s revelatory for many others there. I’ve occasionally gotten a similar reaction to the book as well: That it is a great overview and introduction, but its usefulness for experienced designers is somewhat limited.

These are valid critiques. The book, from which most of the workshop material is drawn, is a primer — by design. I based it off the class I taught at Carnegie Mellon, which was an introductory course. Unless it is a really long book (the polar bear book and About Face 2.0 spring to mind) and/or multi-day workshops, overviews by their nature just expose only some of the subject matter and the major issues surrounding it. Depth and a high level of detail are a different beast entirely. In university, it’s the difference between a survey course and a seminar class on a single topic.

What I’m considering is the idea of a series of Adaptive Path Master Classes, similar to what is done in the fine arts. This would be in addition to the existing D4I workshops, which will be as they are now: Mostly focused on beginning and intermediate interaction designers in a larger workshop setting, with a combination of exercises and lectures. The Master Classes would be a different format — one that is smaller (~12 people), more intense, and solely for experienced practitioners. Each master class would focus on one major topic, and feature pre-session readings and prep work, possibly some “homework,” and engage deeply with a single problem or problem space. Potential topics would be things like:

Of course, this is just a list off the top of my head. One can see other Adaptive Path Master Classes on a wide variety of topics in design strategy, research, and information architecture.Please leave a comment whether or not something like this would appeal to you and what topics you might be interested in. If there is enough interest, we’ll look into doing some in 2007.

You probably don’t click over to our About Us page, but you may have noticed some new voices here on the blog. Since May, we’ve added a slew of people to our team, but we’ve been negligent in introducing them. Here they are, roughly in the order they joined us.

Robert Kinyon and Gina Crescenti both started as temps, quickly became integral, and, thankfully, stayed on. They are the behind-the-scenes duo here at Adaptive Path — their efforts have lead to establishing a work environment that supports amazing creativity.

Todd Wilkens came to us after wisely deciding to forego a Ph.D. in sociology. He brings a passion for understanding people as people, and how that can influence design decisions. Clearly there’s something wrong with him, as he worked with me at Epinions, and you’d think he’d know better by now.

When Jeff left, we needed a new tall person. Andrew Crow signed on after a lengthy stint at Princess Cruises. At Princess, Andy successfully lead a wholesale change to the site experience, working to help the entire organization understand the importance of a new design that responded to user’s needs.

Boris Chen leads our new business development efforts. We’re fortunate to have someone in this role with such deep experience in user-centered design practices. He also rocks the gold chain like no one else in the office.

Henning Fischer worked with us last year as a summer associate (cough-intern-cough), and, well, we must have done something right, because when he graduated from the Institute of Design last May, he opted to return. Henning’s contributes penetrating insights on the intersection of design and business, and has one of the strongest b.s. detectors in the office. You might see him cycling in the Headlands.

Sarah Nelson was an int– err, summer associate this past summer, and decided, to heck with it, I’m not going back to school. She brings extensive experience in interactive media, and an intense interest in how creative organizations work. She draws on-the-fly mindmaps like nobody else.

Rachel Hinman is so new we don’t have a page for her yet. She left Yahoo! Mobile to join our team. In the olden days of Web 1.0, she worked with both Jesse and myself. She then went back to school, and discovered her passion in conducting user research and developing insights from what she observed. Her favorite gemstone is garnet.

Two weeks ago, I was called for jury duty. I went to the courthouse, opening my laptop in the jurors’ waiting room to take advantage of the courthouse’s wifi while waiting to be summoned. Since I’m a Plazes user, I checked to make sure the courthouse’s wireless was registered in the service. As it turns out, it had been, just a month before, by Thor Mueller, Adaptive Path’s upstairs neighbor. Which meant that I now know Thor had jury duty a month ago.

What a strange world we live in.

I also realized how often in the last few months my whereabouts have not only been on Plazes, but also my blog, and, geotagged on Flickr. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that it won’t be long (if it isn’t already in the works) for someone to create a tracker to find people’s whereabouts in time and space at any given moment. You can imagine going to Google, typing in a name, and getting a timeline- and map-view of their life. Granted, you’d need a lot of online data to make this possible, and I generate a lot of online data. But it probably won’t be long before everyone is generating a lot of this data, mostly because of their mobile devices. And there are some scary privacy implications for this indeed.

Our pals at Flow Interactive have set up a new site in honor of World Usability Day: Making Life Easy, a collection of good and bad real-life usability examples.

Other friends of AP bought back their company this week.

Mobile operators have to “focus on becoming ‘enablers’ rather than ‘creators’ of the mobile experience” writes Marek Pawlowsk on MEX. Hear hear.

This just in: Reuters has a full-time beat reporter in Second Life.

For the cheapskates who won’t buy the book, Bill Moggridge is releasing a chapter a week in pdf format on his book’s site Designing Interactions.

Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote [12MB MP3] from the IDEA conference is not to be missed.

Power to the…taggers? Defective by Design takes on DRM on Amazon via folksonomies.

Adam Greenfield remarks on the impossibility of mapping.

Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Kathi Vian, and Ming-Li Chai and some folks at Herman Miller have released a report Designing Business for an Open World (pdf).

Just in time for US Elections, Cnet lists the worst political websites.

All 1,943 Cornell Faculty were asked to respond to the following question: Of the many charts (graph, map, diagram, table and ‘other’) you have seen in your life, which has been the most important, remarkable, meaningful or valuable? Interesting results.

The iPod turned five yesterday and much ink has been spilled in the last week about the product’s success, its ubiquity and impact on Apple. The state of the digital music market at the time of the iPod’s introduction has been relatively ignored though. It’s hard to imagine its embryonic state in 2001 from the perspective of 2006 and five years of hindsight. At the time, everything in the space, from devices to software to services, was up for grabs as various industries grappled with the problem of creating a new model for the music business. Several products already existed, but no one had quite nailed it before Apple came along.

One of the most remarkable things about the iPod’s introduction was the clearly articulated argument that Steve Jobs made when it was introduced. It’s preserved on YouTube and truly worth a look. Jobs’ argument is carefully constructed and compelling on many levels. However, aside from his famed “reality distortion field,” the argument adheres to basic business principles and provides an extremely useful template for the introduction of new products and services into emerging or underdeveloped markets.

Describe the Target Market:

On deciding where to innovate next, Apple chose music. Why?

“We love music, and it’s always good to do something that you love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone’s life. Music has been around forever; it will always be around. It is not a speculative market. Because it is a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.”

Although I’m sure he (and his team) examined it in great detail, Jobs stays away from hard numbers such as demographics, market size, dollars spent and average music library size. During the pitch, he keeps the focus on where music fits in people’s lives, not where it fits into Apple’s bottom line.

Know What You Are Not Going to Do:

It’s a given that the digital music player market wasn’t exactly saturated in 2001, but Jobs’ back of the napkin analysis of the opportunity space was clever in its adherence to simplicity. He compared traditional CD players, Flash-based units, Mp3 CD units and hard drive jukeboxes on a simple price per song basis. Again, a basic analysis but one that illuminates the choices available to Apple. More importantly, Jobs was clear about what Apple wasn’t going to do. “We studied all of these and that’s where we want to be.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 1:

Jobs described where the iPod fits into Apple’s product portfolio in one simple sentence:
“iMac, iBook, iPod.” Having established it as part of Apple’s consumer-focused offering, he offered why Apple could go there:

“No one has found the recipe for digital music. Not only do we think we can find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 2:

Jobs described the offering in concrete terms: an Mp3 player that holds your entire music library with CD quality sound that doesn’t limit you to one format. Rather then dwelling on technical specifications, Jobs again came back to a value proposition that describes what Apple is going to do for the consumer:

“How many times have you gone on the road with a CD player and said, “Oh god, I didn’t bring the CD I wanted to listen to. To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music.”

Show How Features Support Purpose (or, If You Must Explain How, Do It Like This):

Jobs then takes the Wizard of Oz tack and gives us a peek behind the curtain by detailing the three breakthroughs that will allow us something heretofore impossible: The ability to fit our whole music library in our pockets.

1. The iPod is ultra portable: Jobs describes the new hard drive and skip prevention technology that makes it possible to “take iPod (and all your music) bicycling, mountain climbing, jogging, you name it, and you are not going to skip a beat.”

2. The iPod is fast: A simple apples to apples (no pun intended) comparison between Firewire and USB demonstrates that the iPod is going to upload 1,000 songs in 10 minutes rather than 5 hours.

3. The iPod is smart: The battery of the iPod is supported by FireWire rather than a separate charger, meaning that there are fewer parts to keep track of. It charges and loads songs, all at the same time.

Jobs cites all three of these technologies to back up his claim that “people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.”

Demonstrate Strategy Tangibly:

After all the build up, Jobs pulls out the iPod. It’s the size of a deck of cards, and he makes the explicit comparison. What he holds in his hand is the tangible result of what he’s talking about, and it shows.

The iPod pitch is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. It sticks to the basics of Moore’s elevator pitch and doesn’t add much fluff. What is remarkable has been Apple’s adherence to this technique and development philosophy over time. The future was staring us right in the face.

Dan finished up his two-week interview on The WELL’s Inkwell series on a pretty broad range of interaction design topics.

Conivio Networks kicks off their interview series with Nokia Researcher Jan Chipchase, whose Future Perfect blog is always worth a look.

Speaking of Nokia, here’s their guide to “graphic design for the mobile world, for example, colors, contrast, animation, and icon design, and gives tips on how to make the most of the small screen of a mobile device.”

What World of Warcraft Can Teach Web 2.0

“Technology doesn’t matter. Design doesn’t matter.” So claims Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Webb bangs the drum for the internet.

Adaptive Path practices this frequently, although informally: agile designing.

“Lack of internet connectivity: today a nuisance, tomorrow a serious problem and possibly even damage risk.” Thus Warning Signs for Tomorrow

Stanford grad students are putting together an impressive collection of podcasts about design, business, and technology.

Happy 5th Birthday, iPod!

Speaking of which, Wired News takes a crack at explaining the birth of the iPod inside Apple.

YouTube is taking hip-hop back to the ‘hood.

The recent Future of Web Apps Summit posted podcasts of their talks.

I had been waiting until I had a larger collection of images and movies, but since Core 77 outed it yesterday, no sense in waiting.

Inspired first by Bill DeRouchey’s History of the Button, then by Andy Clarke’s talk at Web Directions South, in which he implored designers to look to the real world for inspiration, I have a new side project: No Ideas But In Things.

NIBIT is a collection of buttons, dials, control panels, animations, latches, etc. that could be used as a source of inspiration for interaction and interface design. It’s not overly robust now, but hopefully soon it will be.

I had almost forgotten how beautiful libraries can be. It seems like the modern day library is either Barnes & Noble or Borders. It would be nice to experience the solace maze of the stacks again.

These images are beautiful and are from a book of photographs by Candida Höfer entitled, Libraries.

More here.

Another of the UX Week podcasts is now available — Thinking Creatively by Kathan Brown and Janice Fraser.

Kathan Brown, author of the book “Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life,” discusses how her art publishing group Crown Point Press is helping bring artists together and redefine the communication of their ideas. In a conversation with Janice Fraser, at the Adaptive Path User Experience Week, Brown tells her story of art and working with artists.

Fraser, who is CEO and founding partner of Adaptive Path, discusses with Brown that in today’s busy world there is little time for examining what leadership is – from a user experience point of view – in the art world. An answer to some of those concerns is the work by Brown, who recounts her experiences with artists, how they approach art as a magical, almost miraculous process.

You can listen to the podcast and download the presentation here.