Adaptive Path Blog

Some of the most fascinating examples of journalism are where the author literally steps into the shoes of the people he or she is interested in and experiences their struggles first hand. To write Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin to experience life as an African-American in 1959. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to live on minimum wage to expose the difficulties faced by low income workers.

During a recent diabetes-related project, our project team informally conducted a similar experiment: What if we took on the personas of newly-diagnosed diabetics and sought to experience their challenges first hand? We recognized the caveats and limitations of this as a research method. The books above, for example, were colored by the authors’ agendas and have received criticism for being from a “tourist’s” perspective.

It’s this outside perspective that can bring value, however. As I pricked myself with needles and logged every carb at every meal, I quickly found that making these challenges my own got my mind’s wheels spinning a lot more often and a lot harder. They spun every time I rationed out cereal with measuring cups (subtracting fiber carbs in my head). They spun as I fretted over the ambiguous portions at restaurants. They spun as I snuck sandwiches onto the office mailing scale because I had no clue what 56g looks like.

While I could have learned about any of these issues by reading forums or blog threads, experiencing them for myself left me with a deep sense of empathy, a head full of ideas, and a nagging drive to find or build solutions. Immersive research has limitations — insights must be tempered by understanding that “we are not the target audience” and “design won’t save the world,” and there are many shoes you can’t step into (heart surgery anyone?) — but I found it to be an irreplaceable opportunity to change perspective. If you’ve had any experiences with immersive research, I’d love to hear about them!

P.S. I found these sites inspiring. Will someone please develop more resources like these?

HealthSimple Toolkits
Carb flashcards and magnets… I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes!

A month ago I wrote an essay on the need for mobile carriers to reinvent themselves – that their strategy of bullying customers into relationships through contracts lays the groundwork for nothing but a contentious relationship.

If today’s ruling by a Superior Court judge in California making early contract termination illegal is any indication of the future, an end to the age of carrier tyranny here in the United States may be coming to an end.

Let the golden age of mobile in the U.S. begin…

We’ve got some pretty exciting work going public next week. We can’t tell you what it is yet, but we want you to be among the first to see it. Come by our offices in San Francisco next Wednesday night, have a beverage (or two!) and help us celebrate! Details and RSVP at Upcoming.org.

I recently chatted with Jensen Harris, commonly known as the man behind the Microsoft Office ribbon interface. Jensen will be joining us in 2 weeks as a UX Week speaker. I find it interesting that both Jensen and Adaptive Path share a strong belief in using what we call “design principles” and he calls “design tenets”. Whatever name you prefer, these are well defined goals that drive the creation of your product. It is critical that the entire team working on a product share ownership of these principles, be it management or design or engineering.

Here’s a snippet from the complete interview:

DH: We sat on a panel together at MIX discussing techniques to “Get It Right” when developing software. You mentioned the use of what you call “Design Tenets.” What are these and why are they so important?

JH: Design tenets are a list of shared design beliefs that a team uses to help them make consistent design choices. Think of it as your team’s design philosophy. It’s the way we were able to end up with a design that has a coherent voice despite the fact that many people contributed to it.

For Office 2007, we had six design tenets. One of them was: “Give features a permanent home — prefer consistent-location UI over ‘smart’ UI.” Another was: “The user’s focus should be on the content, not on the UI; help the user work without interference.”

Before you start designing, you need to explicitly agree on the tenets your team believes in — those which are consistent with the kind of user experience you want to create.

Once you have your design tenets, you can use them to help make decisions when you have several design alternatives to choose from. If everyone consistently makes decisions based on the tenets, your user experience will hold together and feel like it was designed with a single voice.

There’s still space for UX Week, and if you register with the promo code BLOG you get 10% off.

Say goodbye to the computer mouse
The BBC reports a leading research company is predicting the days of the computer mouse are numbered.

Google vs. Wikipedia: It’s War!
Wired magazine reports that the big G has launched a service called Knol – short for ‘knowledge’ – which is basically a different flavored Wikipedia. Watch out Wiki, Google wants your crown!

Android and Symbian, sitting in a tree…
“…Google’s Android OS and Nokia’s Symbian will “combine to provide a single open source OS,” sometime in the very near future…” Seems like a marriage between Linux and Fortran.

It’s cool, and green(er)
The iPhone’s unsoldered battery makes the new phone easier and more economical to dissemble and recycle.

E-ink coming to magazines
“The owner of Esquire said Tuesday that it plans to publish the magazine’s October issue using so-called electronic ink to mark the publication’s 75th anniversary.”

Samsung Haiku
Have you submitted and “ode to a mobile” yet?

We’re following the highs and lows of 2008 International Development Design Summit. Good stuff is happening there.

Desire Paths?
Here’s a whole collection of the phenomenon that inspired the AP name. Maybe we should change our name to “Desire Paths!”

The Long Tail and the Dip
Seth asks if you’re at the head, the long tail, or (probably) that really unfortunate dip in between.

Wordle
Impress your friends with pretty text-frequency analysis.

Stop sign innovations

Welcome to our new CEO, Michael Meyer
There’s a new sheriff in town… and he’s got killer sideburns.

Those of us interested in experience strategy and design are attracted to the retail industry like a moth to a flame. The successful retail experience requires a coordination of remarkable complexity. Online, you’ve got e-commerce, and it’s needs to address usability, desirability, and findability, and to overcome concerns about trust, security, and privacy. Offline, you’ve got the design of the in-store experience, including the interior architecture and wayfinding, interaction with staff, activities that the store supports, oh, right, and the products that are the reason you’re there. And, increasingly, there’s the hand-offs between the online and offline channels, currently limited to things “in-store pickup” of items purchased online.

This is a big hairy problem, one that requires analytical and visceral thinking and making, where you have to appeal to the head, heart, and stomach of the customer. This is what makes the Starbucks Saga so interesting to follow. It began early last year with a memo sent from then-chairman Howard Schultz to then-CEO Jim Donald about the commoditization of the Starbucks experience.

Then, Schultz stepped back in to run Starbucks. I blogged that the Starbucks Experience is not about the coffee, though many disagreed with me.

In a press release issued after Starbucks annual meeting with shareholders, Schultz makes clear that customer experience is the paramount concern: “By embracing our heritage, returning to our core — all things coffee — and our relentless commitment to innovation, we will reignite the emotional connection we have with our customers and transform the Starbucks Experience.”

I find that press release fascinating. When the CEO of a multi-billion dollar organization goes on and on about experience, well, it bodes well for us who feel that designing for experience is crucial to success.

Most recently, of course, has been news of Starbucks’ imminent store closures. The best commentary which can be found here:

I would love to get my hands on the redesign of the Starbucks Experience. It makes you wonder if they’ve done any design research, shop-alongs with Starbucks customers, or simple observation of what goes on in the store. And whether there’s a lab somewhere, with people sketching concepts for different store layouts and store offerings. And if they’re thinking seriously about how to tie the online and offline experience with some stronger than a “store locator” on Starbucks.com. Retail is ripe ripe ripe for radical transformation, and Starbucks would make a fascinating case study.

In college, I spent a period of time working in the University of Arizona Art Museum as a gallery guide. I learned many valuable lessons there:

1. Do not do anything, anywhere in a museum that you would not do on camera, because you are.
2. There are art works that grow on you over time. Staring at a painting for hours on end makes a difference.
3. Traditional art museums are like churches to art.

It’s the museum-as-church phenomenon that impacts me the most. The rituals and protocols in a museum are well-defined. Do not touch the art. Don’t even really get close to the art. Speak quietly so you don’t echo. Don’t take pictures with a flash. Don’t use a pen anywhere in the galleries. There’s a lot of don’t goin’ on.

As a studio artist, I’m involved with the hands-on practice of art making…the sheer physical, emotional, intellectual and visceral effort it takes to create a piece. I get inspired by the excitement of experimenting, playing, seeing the work evolve, developing a visual language. My goals in art-making are first and foremost about the experience of art-making, and much less about the results.

In contrast, the sterile, hermetic, hands-off environments in traditional art museums seem bereft of any life or engagement. The artworks sit there, suspended in time, protected from poking and prodding, isolated from the environments in which they were made, and in many cases, the environments for which they were made. The white wall of a museum bears little resemblance to the original environment in which this work lived. How do these artworks impact people? Why is there so little context in a museum? How can people fully understand the impact, meaning and importance of works that they have not created themselves? What are the stories that bring these works to life? I grappled with these questions during my gallery guide stint in college, and I grapple with them now.

Reading the above, it sounds like I’m anti-museum, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I highly regard museums as the keepers of cultural touch-stones: art, history, music and other works that define and connect people with their cultural heritage. The work that museums do to preserve great works and the education and perspective they provide are true gifts to society. I’m a great admirer of the staff, volunteers and patrons that keep these institutions vibrant and thriving. The new ways that are being explored to engage people from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences to deeply connect with art is inspiring.

So it was a great pleasure to have a long conversation with Peter Samis and Tana Johnson about exactly these questions. Peter and Tana work in the Interactive Educational Technologies team at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and their challenge is to bridge the gaps between visitors and art. They have a wonderful perspective on how technology plays into this challenge. As a result, SFMOMA and the IET team have received awards and wide recognition from sources as diverse as the American Association of Museums, the Webbys, Communication Arts, and I.D. Magazine.

You can read the entire interview here.

Members of the IET team are speaking at UX Week, on day three: Play and Immersion. They’ll be speaking about the designing contexts for connecting with art. If you’re interested in seeing the team up close and in person, you can register for UX Week using the code BLOG for 10% off.

Although UX Week is coming up, it doesn’t mean things are all quiet for our other events. We have a slew of new speaker videos from this spring’s MX Conference up for you this week. These aren’t just excerpts, these are their full presentations.

Ryan Armbruster, Chief Experience Officer for OnCURE Medical Corp.: How Emotion Transforms Experience

By the way, Ryan is hiring service designers.

Björn Hartmann, Stanford University & Microsoft Research: New Interactions: Enlightened Trial and Error

Stephen Anderson, VP of Design, Viewzi: Leading the Rebellion: Turning Ideas into Reality

At the end of the conference, Brandon challenged everyone to take one idea that they had heard and to try it out in practice. Inspired partially by Brian Cronin’s talk about Earth Day, the Designer’s Accord and going green, Thomas Obrey and our friends at PixelMEDIA in Portsmouth, NH are taking steps, both internally and with clients, to make a difference.

You can already register for next year’s MX Conference, March 1-3, 2009. It will be held in San Francisco. Use the code BLOG and get 10% off.

We’re excited to announce Charmr as a finalist in the IDEA awards! Charmr is a design concept we created that shows the vision for a combined glucose pump and monitor for Type 1 Diabetics. This started in response to a challenge. Amy Tenderich, a well-known diabetes advocate, wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs on her blog. In her post she asked Jobs to apply his design expertise to “the little devices that keep us alive, the people with chronic conditions.” As part of our R&D work, we took on the challenge and created a revolutionary diabetes management system concept that has triggered an overwhelming response from the diabetes, medical device, design and now the design award communities!

Recently a thread went around the Adaptive Path email lists about consultant-speak and how to battle the incessant plague of bad jargon and meaningless phrases. This was yet another reminder that clear, human communications has become the exception, not the norm, of everyday business life.

This makes me both angry and sad. In an attempt to be clear and concise, we instead fall into the trap of formal, jargony words, and empty, distant language. People that talk this way don’t sound human, they sound canned. Canned conversation lacks all the things that make communication fun: engaging language, fluid changes in topic, personal experience, and human messiness.

It’s a seductive trap, and I know I’ve fallen into it more than once. In my quest to battle the bulge and reclaim brevity, I’ve found 4 tools that help trim the fluff.

Take it to the Max(ims)

Grice’s Maxims, that is. Grice’s Maxims are the work of philosopher Paul Grice. His work focused on the relationship between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning. He studied how we say what we mean, and how much people get what we mean by what we say. He proposed 4 maxims that are the foundations of clear communications. Although these were created to govern both written and spoken communications, they come in incredibly handy when writing for business.

It doesn’t matter to whom you are writing, about what you are writing, nor to what end. Grice’s maxims will keep you on track.

• Maxim of Quality : Truth
  * Do not say what you believe to be false.
  * Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Maxim of Quantity : Information
  * Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
  * Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• Maxim of Relation : Relevance
  * Be relevant.
• Maxim of Manner : Clarity
  * Avoid obscurity of expression.
  * Avoid ambiguity.
  * Be brief.
  * Be orderly.

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.

A great way to gut-check your writing is to visualize it. Seeing quantity can improve quality…do the words you’re using roll up into the point you’re trying to make?

Wordle is the fastest, most fun way I’ve found to literally see the message and identify themes and trends in your piece. Using simple word counts, Wordle clouds make it easy to know what words you’re using most so that you can adapt your writing to bring home the concepts that matter most.

For example, here’s what this post looks like in Wordle:

Become a Meaning Matador by fighting the bull

I recently finished reading A Bullfighter’s Guide : Why business people speak like idiots and it was like a breath of fresh air. The authors outline four traps that are at the root of crappy, slangish writing:

• the Obscurity trap
• the Anonymity trap
• the Hard-sell
• the Tedium trap

Because they consider the bullfighting work to be part of a movement, not simply a book, they have multiple ways to help folks learn and keep good habits.

1. 1. The book, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (A Bullfighter’s Guide). You can get it from Amazon.
2. Bullfighter software, a Microsoft Word plug-in that catches you in the act of writing meaningless blather. Caveat: It only works on the Windows platform, not the Mac or Linux or anything else. (Go ahead…make the jokes. Feel better? Great.)
3. My favorite is The Mystery Matador service on their website, where you can drop in a chunk of writing (no less than 500 characters) and get an instant assessment of the readability and the bullshit quotient. For example, running the Mystery Matador on this post yields this summary:

Explore the Flesch-pots of Readability

Is there a way to measure good writing? Overall, writing is subjective, but readability…well, Mr. Flesch worked pretty hard to make it measurable. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability test vetts for ease of reading for contemporary academic English. How does it work? Like this.

Hmmmm. Not helpful? Thanks to the nice folks over at Bullfighter, you can get a quick take of the test on your writing sample. If you use the Mystery Matador, they toss in the Flesch test for free.

These four tools have made me take a good hard look at my writing, tone it up, tighten the points and focus on writing to communicate…not to impress.

Do you have other tips and tricks? Share them in the comments section!