Adaptive Path Blog

My startup, Foodspotting, was born at Adaptive Path. Now it’s growing up (over 40,000 foods have been spotted around the world), and as of today, I’ll be heading off to work on Foodspotting full time. (Follow my adventures: @ladylexy and @foodspotting)

But the things I learned from 3.5 years at AP will continue to be put to good use as I strive to create a “UX-Driven Startup” (and to figure out exactly what that means in practice).

Today, at the Web 2.0 Expo, I shared how I’ve applied what I’ve learned at AP to my own startup so far, and in parting, I wanted to share this toolkit with all of you. I’ve repackaged some of Adaptive Path’s “Greatest Hits” to show how these tools and methods can be applied to a startup business (or to the creation of any new product, really).

Knowing what kind of experience you want to create and creating a concrete representation of that experience can help you validate ideas, impress investors, build a team and avoid some of the biggest mistakes startups make. I hope that this kit of tools will help you find what JJG calls, “a star to sail your ship by.”

Focus on the ideal experience and let everything else support that.

For more tools and methods, check out my past blog posts.

“Location was the new Twitter” at South by Southwest this year, and you couldn’t have asked for a more interesting test bed for these apps that let you share where you’re going (Plancast) or where you’re at (Foursquare, Gowalla) at any given moment.

For me, it was an interesting experiment as it was the first time I actually had a REASON to use these apps for reasons other than badges or prestige (“Look at me! I’m at Momofuku!”):

At any given moment, I wanted to know where everyone I knew who was at SXSW was, and I wanted to make sure people could find me if they wanted to.

To do so, I used Foursquare, Gowalla, Plancast, and a Twitter List of everyone I knew was at SXSW (which I actually found most effective for keeping tabs on people). (And yes, I used my own app Foodspotting — which didn’t lead me to my friends, but did lead me to free cheezburgers, kobe beef on a hot rock and avocado cones). While I didn’t use half as many apps as MG from Techcrunch, who bemoans check-in fatigue here, it was still time-consuming and irritated my travel buddies.

But this newfound power to make serendipity happen more often was just so enticing! And it was also overwhelming: I felt obligated to optimize my plans every moment to be where the right people were (and where the best food was), instead of just bumbling into a place and seeing what happened. Yet despite all the checkin apps, I still ended up doing the latter anyway… and despite my constant checking and checking in, I actually can’t think of an encounter that the checkin apps enabled that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, so while I depended on them like a drug, I guess I could still question what they actually enabled.

In any case, the moment I got back to SF, half of the apps I’d put on my home screen during SXSW became instantly half as relevant. In my day to day life, I don’t generally care where all of my friends and connections are at every moment. If I see that you’re at Zachary’s Pizza, I’m probably not going to just go drop by and hope to run into you. And I wouldn’t expect you to try to find me just because I’m hanging out at Adaptive Path today.

All of this makes me wonder which apps will prove to be the most generally useful beyond the little bubble that is SXSW. At SXSW, the urge to know where everyone is happened all the time.

But what’s the trigger for launching these apps in day to day life?

It’s different for different apps and different people (maybe YOU have the urge to know where all your friends are all the time), but finding a good trigger & making sure people think of your app first when that “urge” happens will be critical to succeeding in the location space.

It’s that time of year! Adaptive Path is on the lookout for graduate students and exceptional undergrads to join us as summer associates this year:

Learn more about internships at Adaptive Path!

As an intern at Adaptive Path, you’ll be treated like a fellow practitioner. You’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with clients, develop a personal voice and put experience strategy, research and design methods into practice.

As someone who joined Adaptive Path early in my career and just celebrated my 3 year anniversary here, I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned about how you can make the most of the learning opportunity that is Adaptive Path — or whatever summer internship experience you might find yourself in, for that matter.

Watch, practice, put yourself out there and ask for feedback.

Like many young practitioners, when I joined Adaptive Path, my design skills were sharper than ever, but my “soft skills” — like facilitation, client communication and selling ideas — needed some refinement.

To develop these skills, I sought out opportunities to watch — by sitting in on sales meetings, client calls and workshops as often as possible — practice — by taking facilitation workshops and leading internal meetings — and to put myself out there — by leading workshops, giving presentations and so on — then asking for feedback from trusted colleagues immediately afterwards. Asking for feedback can be intimidating, but I’ve found that asking, “What’s one thing I did well, and one thing I could do better next time?” can be quite revealing.

As an intern, you’ll have opportunities to watch, practice and put yourself out there with clients. We’ll present you to clients as equal professionals, not junior practitioners, and push you to grow not only as a designer, but as a facilitator, consultant and professional.

Bring your obsessions, and we’ll put them to use.

At Adaptive Path you’ll be surrounded by people who are all a little obsessed with something, from sticky notes to game mechanics to electronic gadgets to how design can motivate people. Bring your obsessions to Adaptive Path, and you’ll have unique opportunities to put them to use!

A writing workshop at AP encouraged us to hone in on our “personal platform” by thinking through and writing down some ideas we want to be known for, some things that get us excited and some unique experiences we bring to the table. While my personal platform is always in flux, I’ve found that getting in touch with my interests and making them known can open up many exciting opportunities.

We do our best to put everyone, including interns, on projects that align with their passions — and the more you share your ideas, the more people will be on the lookout for the right kinds of opportunities for you. (Check out how last year’s summer associate, Dane, was able to channel his interest in physical object-inspired interactions into his work on the Smart.fm iPhone app.)

Adaptive Path also gives you the opportunity to express your interests through writing — you can make your voice heard through the AP blog or pitch stories to other publications that AP can help you identify. A clear point of view can also help to land you speaking opportunities, at AP events like UX Week or other events.

Be visible and ask for help.

When tasked with conducting my first rigorous competitive analysis, I was overwhelmed by the possible ways to go about it and wondered what my colleagues would do.

So I set up camp in a project space that people often pass through and pasted up flows from well-known websites on the walls. Not only did I ask anyone walking by to comment on the website flows via sticky notes (what’s working? what’s not working?), I also pulled in colleagues for 5-10 minute chats about the overall process. What’s the best way to structure information? What are meaningful comparison points and what doesn’t really matter? How might I lay out the report?

The result of this asynchronous collaboration with everyone in the office was the “Patterns for Sign Up and Ramp Up” report, which has since been distributed all over the web, and an essay on how to connect a competitive analysis.

As an intern at AP, you never know exactly what kind of opportunity you’ll be thrown into, but whatever it is, you can turn it into a learning opportunity by tapping into the collective consciousness early and often!

Are you ready to make the most of a summer at Adaptive Path? We’re looking for interns, or “summer associates” as we prefer to call them, for Summer 2010, and we’d love to hear from you. To learn about our internship program and how to apply, visit our Jobs page.

Have you ever set out to “reimagine an experience,” only to find yourself feeling trapped? Have you had one of those days when all your ideas felt too much like existing ones? Perhaps your design decisions were rational and grounded, but just didn’t feel inspired. Or maybe you felt stuck because you were constrained by assumptions without realizing it.

As a Left-Brained Person, I’ve certainly found myself there before. Fortunately, my brilliant colleagues, Kate Rutter and my former colleague Rachel Hinman, are always full of ways to help me, and others, snap out of it. And these ways often begin with kicking me out of the studio door and into the world — or at least into the wonderful world of make believe!

In this presentation from UX Week 2009, I invite participants into this world — a world that was so easy to enter as a child, but that we all have the power to enter into still.

Alexa Andrzejewski | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

You can also learn more about the activity in Kate’s post on The Wand in the World.

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

We’ve been quiet lately, as we’ve been hard at work developing the Smart.fm iPhone app. Dan will be sharing more about his experiences soon!

In the meantime, our friends at Smart.fm have proposed two panels for South by Southwest: Crash Course: Is E-ducation Making the Classroom Obsolete? and Going Mobile: Web to App Do’s and Don’ts.

If you’ve enjoyed this series of blog posts, please consider voting for these panels — especially the latter, which will essentially be taking this project blog and bringing it to life for the South by Southwest audience! We’d love to have the opportunity to share what we’ve learned from taking this app from web to mobile with the South by Southwest audience.

The other panel on Web Companies Disrupting Innovation also sounds interesting: It features entrepreneurs from education startups who are out to revolutionize the way we learn. It’s a chance to spread the word about new paradigms in online education.

I hope you’ll join us in supporting the wonderful people at Smart.fm by giving their panels a thumbs up!

You can also check out the panels Adaptive Pathers and friends are proposing at South by Southwest.

There was never a dull moment at this past weekend’s iPhoneDevCamp — not when we had to pitch an idea, recruit a team, and develop a functional iPhone app in less than 48 hours! But when I stepped off the stage after presenting the first native demo of Foodspotting to a crowd of 500-some participants, I couldn’t have been happier with how far our team had come! And thanks to the three intrepid developers who volunteered to take the idea I brought to iPhoneDevCamp and make it tangible and presentable, Foodspotting won Best Social App in the Hackathon.

So how do you build an iPhone app in 48 hours? There were over 75 entries in the Hackathon, so I’m sure there are many smart ways to go about it. (I’d love to hear about other teams’ processes if you’re reading!) But here are some things that helped our team do “good design faster” this weekend:

We started with an experience vision.
Admittedly, we did not conceive of and design the app this weekend — I’ve been putting my UX strategy and design skills towards Foodspotting for several months now. Although I’d never developed anything, having a well-rehearsed elevator pitch and a smoke-and-mirrors vision prototype made it easy to get others on-board, ramped up and developing.

We did very little.
As Jason Fried puts it, “Build half a product, not a half-ass product.” We knew we needed to narrow the vision for Foodspotting down to the simplest thing that could be of value. At its essence, Foodspotting is about taking and finding food photos. So that’s what our team focused on.

We worked side-by-side.
As a design consultant, I rarely get the chance to sit side-by-side with the people who are implementing the designs. So looking over the developers’ shoulders and being able to hand off data and artwork as needed was one of the best parts about iPhoneDevCamp. I gained insight into how developers think and a new appreciation of the complexities of doing “simple” things in Objective-C.

We asked for help.
One of the best things about iPhoneDevCamp was the culture of openness and sharing (reinforced by the blue raffle tickets that organizers handed out to everyone demonstrating these values). Whenever the developers hit a snag, we asked for help using the open mic, and “Helpers showed up faster than you can say ’911′” (as my teammate Peter put it).

We set up the problem before presenting our solution.
In the last half hour before our 3-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon, one of these helpful people, Eric, offered a tip: Prepare a slide deck, because, “Everyone forgets to establish the problem before showing off their solution.” I quickly dug into my design strategy toolkit and pulled out a problem statement, an elevator pitch, some positioning charts, and some vision sketches. I was so thankful for this tip! In just three minutes, even with a half-finished demo (even with our narrow scope, there was a lot we couldn’t do), people got it.

So that’s how we were able to do “good design faster” at iPhoneDevCamp 3. But for whatever reasons you might find yourself under the gun, I hope some of these approaches can help you make the most of it!

And if you want to see the iPhone app, you’ll have to follow @foodspotting on Twitter or keep watching http://www.foodspotting.com to see where it goes!

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

While Dan is busy coding away at the iPhone App, I wanted take this time to share about our first project with smart.fm, a project to reimagine the smart.fm web experience!

What’s in a name? What we call something can have a profound impact on the way we think about it. And changing the way we think about something can have powerful implications on what we design and how we evaluate it. For smart.fm, the ah-ha moment came when we realized that it’s about Goals, not Lists.

Smart.fm is a learning community founded on a powerful technology that equips users to memorize anything — from the Capitals of the World to Japanese Vocabulary to the names of various Heart Murmurs. Today, you learn using Lists. A List is a set of content about a topic that is typically managed by a single person or a content partner. While Lists are a straightforward organizing principle, they don’t form natural hubs of activity. It’s hard to rally around a list.

Smart.fm partnered with Adaptive Path to transform the site into a “motivating, social world of learning.” Collaborating closely with smart.fm, our team (Me, Brian Cronin and Kate Rutter) sought out new ways to bring people together and engage them in collaboration and competition around learning. Through a series of exercises where we envisioned what the experience of using smart.fm could be like, the answer that emerged was Goals.

Instead of organizing content around topics, which people may study for many different reasons, content will soon be organized around Goals that people can form communities around. But before I get into the exciting implications of this shift, I wanted to share some of the experience-minded tools that led us to it:

1) We described the experience we wanted to aim for.

Using our Elevator Pitch “mad-lib” template, we brainstormed ways to fill in the blanks: “For people who… the new smart.fm is… It’s different because…” Ideas that emerged included “Smart.fm is like a pickup basketball game — it’s easy to jump right in and participate.” We refined these ideas into guiding principles that described the ideal smart.fm experience: “a friendly social world of learning” that “invites play” and “reveals and celebrates progress.”

2) We dissected the experience and brainstormed new metaphors for its parts.

From the experience mapping and metaphor brainstorming exercises that I wrote about previously, we selected some of the most compelling metaphors.

3) We imagined some possible experiences inspired by these metaphors.

We then explored how they could be applied to the major activities of the smart.fm experience — discovering, learning, celebrating, collecting, making and collaborating — and communicated the resulting ideas through “Concept Posters.” These posters enabled us to describe what an experience should feel like without getting into interface details. Aspects of the poster showing how “Smart.fm is like a scavenger hunt for knowledge” particularly stood out to the team — especially the idea of challenging users to create content through collaborative scavenger hunts.

4) We pictured the future.

We then used sketches of “The Homepage of the Future” to explore the best concepts further. Since a well-designed homepage tells the story of what you’re all about, sketching potential homepages can be a great way to boil a concept down to its essence using a value proposition, some featured content, and a presentation of core features or “how it works.”

5) It all came together in “Goal-Based Missions” — or simply, Goals

These explorations culminated in the idea of “Missions,” which we articulated through sketchy diagrams illustrating an exciting, game-like smart.fm where social activity is embedded into everything.

As the new activity hubs, Missions brought both learning material and social activity together in an elegant and cohesive way:

• Missions are about shared goals. While people may learn English for many reasons, people who want to “Spend a Week in the US,” “Impress their friends” or “Pass the TOEFL” will have much more in common with each other than everyone learning “English Vocabulary I.”
• Missions are social by nature. The shared goal is what brings people together. Instead of “signing up” or “enrolling,” you can “Join” or “Participate” in a Mission, competing or collaborating with other team members who share the same goal.
• Missions can be about creating content, not just learning it. The scavenger hunts idea from the concept posters manifested itself in the “Fact-Finding” aspect of Missions: If you want to learn enough Japanese for a week in Japan, but don’t know enough to build a list of stuff to learn — you can challenge others to create content for you.

While my high school sister loved the idea of “24-like” Missions, proposing there be “Objectives” and “Directors” and spy tools, the idea of collaborative Missions lives on under the more neutral name, “Goals.” Since the final wireframes were delivered, Smart.fm has already enabled collaborative list-building, and soon you’ll be able to do much more, including:

• Collaborate with others who share a goal (say, “Become culturally literate”) to create and collect learning material that will help you achieve it.
• Challenge other users to contribute content about a certain topic (such as “Hip Hop Artists” or “Internet Memes” — you can actually add content to these lists today!).
• Ask questions about things you want to learn (“How do you say ‘Experience Design’ in Japanese?”) and get answers from others.
• Earn badges for completing your goals and responding to challenges.
• See how you’re doing compared to others who are pursuing the same goal, others in your hometown, and perhaps even others who share your first name!

These are just a few of the exciting possibilities that reframing Lists as Goals has afforded, and we look forward to seeing both the name change and mindset change taking shape on smart.fm!

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

What if memorizing facts on your mobile device were as easy as listening to your iPod shuffle? It doesn’t demand dedicated attention, you don’t have to worry about what’s up next, and you can tune in and out at any time.

After a day of wearing our mobile hats, we knew this was the kind of experience we wanted to create. Unlike the existing, web-based learning apps, in which you study in 5 to 10 item sessions that have a clear start and end, we want learning on the iPhone to feel continuous. Like radio waves or your iPod shuffle, your learning stream is always playing. You can tune in and answer a question or two while waiting in line, then tune in later and answer a few more. The next-up items are continually downloaded, and there are natural break points between every screen.

But even in a world where learning is journey and not a destination, people still need a sense of progression and achievement.

So as we set out to develop a visual language system for the smart.fm iPhone app, our main question became: How can we communicate progress in an continual learning environment? The flash of insight came when Dan H. likened it to the game experience of Oregon Trail.

While achieving the larger goal of reaching Oregon Trail takes a long time (just like mastering your first 200 Japanese words), Oregon Trail holds your interest by introducing milestones along the way. While you might track your progress towards Oregon in the corner of your eye, you’re generally focused on how far it is til the next milestone.

More complex than Oregon Trail, Smart.fm tracks your learning progress at many levels. In addition to showing your progress towards these milestones, the visual language needed to communicate:

• Item progress (how well you know a fact, from 0 to 100%)
• Goal progress (items you’ve mastered vs. the total number of items needed to achieve a goal)
• The two-part nature of items (like flashcards, they’re composed of a cue and response)
• Your study record (how many items you’ve gotten right or wrong today)
• Milestones (where you’re at now and how far til the next milestone)

Rather than using typical progress meters to communicate these concepts, I set out to develop a coherent visual system that could hold it all together. Thanks to Dane’s Your World concept and Happy Hour conversations with the smart.fm guys, where we chattered about virtual pets and knowledge gardens, I found the answer in a favorite metaphor of mine: The leaf.

I have always loved leaf-themed visualizations. Leaves emerge, mature then fade away if you don’t tend to them — qualities shared by all kinds of personal information, from To Do items, to friendships… to facts you want to memorize!

Through personal explorations and open design sessions — where anyone from Adaptive Path was welcome to sit and sketch with us for an hour including our brilliant “non-practitioners” — we were able to map these qualities to the visual language needs of the smart.fm iPhone app. Here are some visual wireframes showing how it’s coming together:

Item progress is represented by a leaf’s “ripeness” — the more you study an item, the greener it becomes. Once you’ve mastered an item by reaching 100%, the leaf becomes a flower. Throughout the system, green leaves represent items you’ve studied and flowers represent items you’ve mastered.

Goal progress is a visual aggregate of item progress represented by color bars showing items mastered and items studied as a fraction of the total number of items associated with a goal. (By the way, Goals are the new Lists! In the website redesign we worked on with smart.fm, we’re introducing Goals as a new way or organizing learning material around shared motivations rather than topics. More on that soon!)

The two-part nature of items is communicated through the asymmetry of the stylized leaf-shape. The leaf and flower shapes are designed to work both as content-containers and icons. (By the way, this item creation screen also hints at some exciting social features we’re exploring!)

Your study record in the “Now Learning” world is tracked using an Owl and a Beanstalk: For every question you answer, the owl “moves up the beanstalk” leaving behind a green leaf (if you got the question right), a flower (if getting the question right meant you mastered that item), or a bare twig (if you got the item wrong).

Milestones appear every 10 items and give you something to aim for throughout the continual learning experience. Represented by golden eggs, these milestones break open to reveal a progress report, and, if you’ve hit a significant milestone — such as mastering 100, 250, or 500 items — the golden egg might contain an prize! These prizes could be collectible “colorforms” that appear in your little world and provide an ambient visualization of your overall progress in smart.fm.

We are all incredibly excited about this visual system and are already buzzing with ideas about how to take it further in the future (What if the seasons changed every so many items? What if you could arrange your colorforms by dragging them around? Can we still have scratch off answers?).

We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas, and we can’t wait til you can participate in this friendly, social world of learning via iPhone!

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

In his last post, Dan shared an overview of the smart.fm iPhone app project, but I wanted to expand on what he shared by offering some guidelines for anyone taking a product from web to mobile.

Don’t think “mobile version of a website,” think “mobile component of a larger experience” The smart.fm iPhone app should not be a pared down version of the smart.fm website — a path that thinking of it as a “mobile version” might lead us down. Instead, we want the iPhone app to complement the website — not replicate or miniaturize it — and to support the larger experience of learning anytime and anywhere.

Put experience first, not features. Taking the list of website features and prioritizing them might seem like an obvious starting point for designing a mobile app based on an existing site. But because a complementary iPhone app may or may not include features from the website, before we looked at features at all, we took time to think about the mobile experience independently. Why might you use this app in a mobile context? What are some scenarios where you’d use it?

Get into the mobile mindset. When you’re sitting in a meeting room, it can be hard to think beyond obvious mobile uses. So much so that taking the team on a walk through the neighborhood, mobile-sized sketchbooks in hand, has become a regular part of mobile workshops I’ve facilitated and participated in in the past.

On another project, I took the team on virtual walks, where we first listed the breadth of contexts in which you’d use the mobile device (in bed, in front of the TV, while shopping, on a plane, etc.) and then imagined how we’d use the mobile device in each of those contexts.

For the smart.fm workshop, we free-listed not only mobile contexts, but also the characteristics of mobile experiences. We clustered these characteristics and then used these as starting points for imagining use cases for the iPhone app.

Get into users’ minds. From this emerged dozens of ideas for new, uniquely mobile uses for the iPhone app. We voted on the top use cases and clustered them based on the mental “mode” a user would be in when engaging in that activity: Are they in a “Study” mode? A “Reacting” mode? A “Look Up Something” mode?

Once we’d defined the major mental spaces, only then did we bring out our pre-printed sticky notes featuring every action you can do on the website. Talking through each feature one-by-one, we discussed whether and when you’d want to do that thing in a mobile context, and if so, which mental space would you be in.

Think system, not standalone. To continue to remind us all that the iPhone app will be part of a system, not a standalone app, we intentionally called the bucket for features that wouldn’t be included in the iPhone app “Stuff the website is better at” rather than “Other” or “Discards” or something like that. While we do want people to be able to engage with the app without having to use the website, realizing that the website is simply better for some tasks made us all feel better about leaving some features for the site to handle.

While it can still be hard to let some possibilities go, knowing what the mobile is best at and doing that well can result in a much more compelling mobile experience than a “mobile version of Smart.fm” could ever be.

By getting everyone into the mobile mindset, we were able to develop a solid set of priorities that we’ve been continuing to flesh out through user flows and wireframes. We look forward to sharing our progress soon!

For now, here’s a summary of activities teams can engage in when engaging in a mobile prioritization work session:

1. Write mobile contexts and characteristics on stickies and cluster them on the wall.
2. Based on these contexts and characteristics, imagine how you would use the app in a mobile context. Add use cases to the wall near the characteristics from which they emerged.
3. Dot vote on which use cases are the most compelling.
4. Cluster the most compelling use cases based on which mental mode the user would be in when engaging in that activity.
5. Referencing a list of all of the existing website features, determine which activities fit into these mental spaces and which are better left for the website.

Do you remember the last time you had a crush? My last crush was on the guy who’s now my husband. From the moment I met Seth, I couldn’t get enough of him. I talked about him all the time. I was convinced he was perfect. When you’re designing a community-driven website, you WANT people to like it that much! Users with a crush are power-evangelists and power-contributors. You want them to want you! Seth, on the other hand, didn’t actually want ME at first… which meant several agonizing months of figuring out what it takes to “spark a crush” — as well as what NOT to do.

If you want to attract and retain users, then the principles that apply to relationships apply to you! In both relationships and web design, getting people to fall in love with you is never easy. The good news is, you don’t have to leave it to chance: There are concrete steps YOU can take to make your product or service more attractive to new users.

In this 75-minute virtual seminar — Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users — you will learn how to create compelling new user experiences. You’ll take away both:

• Practical relationship advice, illustrated by concrete patterns from the Web 2.0 landscape, and
• A set of strategic tools that individuals and teams can use to diagnose and address attraction issues.

By examining these patterns and tools and applying them to the imaginary startup, “Snapfood,” you’ll leave with a memorable toolkit of patterns and approaches you can put to use immediately.

I look forward to being your relationship consultant!

Wednesday, May 20
10:00 – 11:15 AM Pacific Time.

Register with the promo code BLOG and get 10% off the $129 price.