A UX Boutique?
by DanI’ve been mulling over Jess McMullen’s categorization scheme of the 2007 Business and Design Landscape. In it, Adaptive Path is listed under Consulting Firms/Design-Led/UX Boutiques, along with Cooper, nForm, Uzanto, and, oddly, NN Group. We weren’t put with other Boutique Agencies, which is…interesting, since we often compete with them for jobs and hires.
Leaving aside the fact that Adaptive Path does non-consulting work (events, publications, the occasional product), consulting and design-led are probably the right categories to put us in. We’re also moderately small, so boutique as a qualifier isn’t bad. But UX Boutique sounds like a catch-all category for companies that do a little of this and that and don’t fit into any of the other categories (visual design, branding, etc.) neatly. Which, frankly, is true I suppose (more or less).
It’s apparently just as hard to give clear titles to companies as it is to people.
February 5th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Well, I put AP under “UX Boutique” because I think of you as user experience people – that’s the foundation of the firm, and I think of your deliverables being mental models, process flow, site architecture, wireframes, and reports (not brand identity, or visual design, or code). Hope that makes things a little clearer…