Adaptive Path Blog

This entertaining video (via information aesthetics) celebrates the evolving nature of text on the internet. I’d like to see a similar exploration of how text is evolving across the landscape of networked devices. If the internet’s awesomeness is largely due to it’s unprecedented ability to associate and manipulate text, why don’t designers have a more extensive shared vocabulary for varieties of text? I’ve developed my own informal lexicon based on what behavior is enabled by different genres of text.

Microtext: Short formats like SMS suitable for sending messages when using a device with a constrained input, while short on time, or when you want to send a snippet of text like an address.

Minitextin: Formats that enable conversation-like exchanges; work best with an optimized, familiar input, like a QWERTY keyboard. May be synchronous as with active instant message chatting, semi-sychronous as with instant messaging while multi-tasking or asynchronous as in campfire.

Multitext: Texting to groups like twitter or dodgeball; good for spreading information across a network of people, provokes low-touch awareness and passive uptake of information. Context is often inferred.

Intratext: Sending text across multiple platforms like from AIM to cellphone. Or cellphone to blog.

I’d love to know how others have teased apart the many varieties of text based on experiential value.

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Check out this video technology sketch of a smart wine rack. thingM says these sketches are part of a product development process that “focus on users’ experiences first and technological details later”. They also mention that a final product might not end up looking anything like the sketch because the point of making it is to develop the conceptual model of the experience.

Looks like a really effective way of both communicating and thinking through a product concept — especially for a product where understanding interactions within a physical context is important.

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Check out Chiara’s latest essay where she discusses what exactly gets information architects and user experience professionals so excited about tags.

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One of the great giants of 20th century economics, Milton Friedman passed away this week. Check out Capitalism and Freedom.

An interesting article from the Convergence Culture Consortiumon what on what Turner Comedy is up to with it’s upcoming Super Deluxe platform.

This Friday at Yerba Buena, Adobe sponsors cut + paste, a live head-to-head design competition. Rumor has it that an interaction design competition is also in the works: GraffleMaster Championship!

Hong Kong-based Daniel Szuc and Gerry Gaffney just released The Usability Kit, which includes magnetic web widgets. (Mix with refrigerator poetry magnets as a collaborative design a la exquisite corpse.)

Hope this isn’t what Ted Stevens was talking about when he described the internet as a series of tubes.

Ikbis claims to have the largest yellow button on the web.

Finally, Joshua Porter’s article on Netflix’s Fast Iteration development approach prompts Karl Long of Experience Curve to ask “…. are there any ‘fast iteration’ [design] agencies out there? The equivalent of IDEO for the web?”

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Dictionary.com’s recent redesign is a great example of how critical it is to consider the effect of advertising on your site’s overall experience. Their clean design and careful attention to information hierarchy is decimated by the slapped on advertisements. Of course you can pay to make the ads go away — or you can just ignore them.

And that’s what people do. Jared Spool, among others, has been talking and writing about the Death March for Advertising and how research shows that web site visitors quickly develop techniques to avoid looking at ads. It’s not enough to make online ads contextually relevant — Google has done a decent job with that and people have still learned to ignore them.

According to articles published by the Newspaper Association of America and Nielson Media Research, advertising dollars are moving from print to online at an increasing pace. The effect of this is raising the bar on the quality of the online ad experience — we all expect more. Adaptive Path advertises on The Deck, a network that targets design and creative professionals. The Deck serves ads only for products and services recommended by members in their network. This strategy effectively connects site visitors with businesses they are far more likely to find valuable.

Beyond improved contextual relevance and recommendations from trusted sources, the value of a site’s ad inventory can be increased by considering the role of advertising during the design process. Michael Beirut posted recently about Helmut Krone, “one of the greatest designers ever to live [and] an advertising art director” and noted the gap today between design and advertising. This gap is in fact a gigantic opportunity for companies willing to consider innovating with the role advertising plays in the overall experience of their site.

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Desire Lines
Web of Conceit
Pith from the Path
Adaptive Outlet
Adaptive Snacks
Dan’s Adventure on Haight Street
Off the beaten….
APB
WWAPD
Four Letter Foundry
Where in the world is JJG?
Designing Tomorrow the Day Before

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During the dot.com bubble, I worked with a large technology corporation on a product with a meticulously pre-meditated strategy. The strategy made sense on paper and was a nice antidote to all of the, um, exuberant product strategies popular at that time. The product didn’t take off mainly because it was trying to accomplish too much (think iMovie + iPhoto). Additionally, the product’s strategy was static from conception through launch, which was about a year and a half. This experience got me thinking … when is it appropriate to develop a detailed product strategy in advance, and when is it better to let the specific details emerge during the design process?

Enter the Economist’s Best Business Book from 2004: The Modern Firm: organizational design for business and growth by John Roberts (Oxford Press 2004). Roberts explores the question of predetermined vs. emergent strategy in a case study on the 19th century battle between the Hudson Bay Company and the Nor’Wester Company. The HBC succeeded for many years with a very exacting top-down strategy until, during a time of economic turbulence, the NWC was able to out compete them (briefly) based on a broad strategic direction and by relying on employees to make good decisions. Roberts asserts that in times of rapid change, business performance is heightened when strategy follows organization rather than the other way around.

This concept explains why broad strategic objectives and principles are more valuable for many technology-focused companies making products now. Overly specific strategies and detailed implementation plans *can* become an impediment to success. This doesn’t mean that strategy or planning isn’t important; quite the contrary. As Roberts explains it, the more important role of a product leader is to “set a broad strategic intent that informs and shapes dispersed strategic decision making [throughout the company or team]”. While this concept seems somewhat obvious, in the real world, gauging how much strategic detail to set from the start, and how much is allowed to emerge is often an interesting and challenging jugdement call.

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Today I’m at the IIT conference which is all about how businesses can marry design and business concepts to create value and gain competitive advantage. The stories people are telling about how they’ve driven innovation through their organizations are fascinating. A notable theme emerging is about how making something new requires a unique business process each time.

A few presentations focused explicitly on processes invented to drive innovation through what otherwise might be a company adverse to change. These simple yet flexible processes allowed teams to focus on what they were doing rather than how they were doing it. Each time the story starts with a well defined business problem and ends with highly collaborative teams from different disciplines working together. The components of these processes aren’t unique but the way that they’re brought together addresses the problem at hand. In the end, the differences end up being similar in that they put the focus on the people rather than the process.

Design managements stories from Strategy ‘06:

Jim Wicks, Design Director at Motorola talked about the new model of product development used for the RAZR and the PEBL.

• Nail the basics, by addressing business fundamentals including a solid design principles and branding strategy.
• Develop rhythm by synchronize the business strategies, software releases, consumer research and strategic component roadmaps.
• Partner and collaborate intensively both internally and externally. Don’t be afraid to tap into inventive talent outside your team.

Todd Tillemans from Unilever and Chris Conley from Gravity Tank talked about how they solved a business problem using a straight forward set of design and management principles.

• Address a business problem. The Unilever team articulated a very clear problem representing a potential $19m in lost sales: a specific retail sector was consistently under stocked.
• Broaden your perspective. A cross-functional team was created and given permission to challenge everything, including problems other people were responsible for solving.
• See things with fresh eyes. The team looked at entire supply chain from end to end and saw first hand how why the problem was occurring in the stores.
• Work on it together. Gravity Tank facilitated a 2 day working session with Unilever and the store managers responsible for restocking their products.
• Prototype and pilot. Based on all the data collected the team developed prototypes, piloted them in the field, and iterated until they found a successful solution.

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