Adaptive Path Blog

At the end of her talk, Sara Ulius-Sabel asked all of us, “How do we sustainably get to WOW?” Her point being, we can get to developing products that deliver a delightful, transcendent experience occasionally, but often unpredictably. So how can we get there consistently?

Well, I tried to answer it by synthesizing the main themes I heard over the course of the event, and turning it into a couple of sentences. (Main themes are in ALL CAPS):

By achieving EMPATHY we realize an EXPERIENCE STRATEGY that gets us to DESIGN BEYOND PRODUCTS (and maintain focus when MAKING MISTAKES).

This requires SYSTEMS THINKING (which in return requires TEARING DOWN WALLS), that produces TRANSFORMATION for your MATRIXED(?) ADAPTIVE organization.

Commentary on the terms:

Empathy — Both Tim Brown and Todd Wilkens really stressed the importance of empathy in the design process, and how it’s the primary value of your research efforts.

Experience Strategy — Jesse kicked it off with a paean to experience strategy, and we heard it again from Adam Richardson, Caterina Fake, and Tim brown.

Design Beyond Products — Jesse talked about taking design beyond thinking about individual products and considering larger systems and services, which Lou echoed strongly, and was really brought home by Jennie Winhall’s discussion of her work with RED.

Making Mistakes — This was a primary theme from Scott Berkun, whose research on innovation showed that a primary contributor to innovative organizations is a willingness to make mistakes.

Systems thinking — Mentioned in Jesse’s discussion, Jennie Winhall also addressed this in her discussion of designing social services.

Tearing down walls — This was an explicit theme from Todd’s talk on research, where he stressed the importance of getting the entire organization involved in research activities, and the idea of multidisciplinary design teams was mentioned in many of the discussions.

Transformation — One of the more surprising themes that emerged was the discussion of transformation, and the importance of evolving organizations to better take advantage of research and design. Todd’s talk was titled “The Transformative Power of Research,” Jennie talked about transformation design (reinventing organizations to deliver new offerings), and, of course, IDEO has made waves with it’s transformation practice.

Matrixed — One open question was how design and experience groups should be organized within organizations. Should they be centralized, and “matrixed” into product teams, or decentralized, where designers work explicitly for product teams.

Adaptive — Caterina mentioned how her team had to be able transition from making an online social game to a photo sharing website, and Scott commented in his talk the importance of trying things, and if they don’t work, trying other things, and bobbing and weaving and adjusting as necessary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Conference commentary, Design leaders, Experience strategy, Product Design, Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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