Adaptive Path Blog

This Wednesday night I’ll be joining a great IxDA-SF panel at Adobe Systems to try to get to the bottom of it. While we probably won’t come up with an exact dollar figure (so sorry!), I expect we’ll get into the benefits of being able to connect design to business value and some of the skills and approaches for making it happen.

I’ll be joined on the panel by Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts; Rajan Dev, president of Hot Studio; and our special guest moderator Jess McMullin of nForm and the bplusd.org blog.

Find out more about the event on upcoming, and I look forward to seeing you there!

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At the IA Summit this year, I dove into one approach to design we cover in Subject to Change called The Long Wow. It’s a simple idea: If you want to have loyal customers, you can’t just assign them customer ID cards and hope they behave as you’d like. Instead, you need to thoughtfully design experiences to impress them repeatedly over the long haul.

Here’s the slidecast including audio, covering what the long wow is all about and how you can achieve it.

| View | Upload your own

Special thanks to Jeff Parks and the folks at Boxes & Arrows for sharing the audio!

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We work hard to make UX Intensive not just a great learning experience, but full of practical techniques that you can take home and immediate apply to help make a difference in your work.

Our friends at PixelMEDIA did just that after attending our UX Intensive in Vancouver last November. Several of their staff came for the event an took home what they learned in a big way. They lead their own internal UX Intensive workshops, sharing the approaches they learned to approximately 30 of their staff members. Here’s a couple of photos of their sessions from Thomas Obrey, COO of PixelMEDIA.

We’re inspired by Thomas and the others at PixelMEDIA, and we’re really looking forward to sharing our best ideas at the upcoming UX Intensive in Minneapolis. Come join us, and use the promotional code BLOG to get an extra 10% off.

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I recently sat down to talk with Scott Hirsch, principal of the Management Innovation Group and MX conference speaker, to talk about using UX and design sensibilities to solve the problems of business strategy. Scott shares his experiences on where UX outperforms and compliments typical business functions like financial analysis, and how UX can be used to tackle problems differently—from how much is Google worth to how telecoms respond to the iPhone.

Download the MP3 of our conversation, and come join Scott at the MX conference next week to learn more about “what’s wrong with strategy!”

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It’s less than one month until our MX Conference, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’ll will be our third and best conference on the Managing Experiences, and we’re focusing strongly this time on the skills and practices that successful creative leaders use to get great experiences out into the world.

Here’s just a few of the incredible speakers at MX that we’ve interviewed in the lead-up to the conference:

Chip Conley, CEO of successful boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre Hotels, talks about recession planning, service design, systematizing experience design, “experience report cards”, team dynamics, and succession planning. Listen to the interview (MP3) »

Julie Peters, Brand Manager at Virgin, shares her experiences in managing and building new experiences within Virgin’s U.S. brands, Virgin’s model for incubating new brands and experiences, and how Virgin defines and practices innovation. Listen to the interview (MP3) »

Nathan Shedroff, Program Chair of the new MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts, reveals his plans for a new program to blend design and business and the needs that future graduates will fill. Read the interview »

And Stephen P. Anderson, formerly Principal User Experience Architect for Sabre and currently Vice President of Design at Viewzi, explains his passion and lessons on pushing visionary ideas through an organization. Read the interview »

MX will be April 20-22 in San Francisco. It’s now just $1,495 (plus $395 for a pre-conference workshop). After March 31st, it’ll go up to $1,595 plus $495. And if you register by March 31st, you also get a free iPod Shuffle! Use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off when you register.

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A couple of weeks ago I participated on a panel on Conscious Capitalism at the Commonwealth Club of California. We covered quite a bit of ground in an hour, from how experience design could offset conspicuous consumption to issues like making meaning in the lives of customers, consumer activism, and lifestyle brands.

We had a packed audience for the panel, which I shared with Rajan Dev of Hot Studio, Nathan Shedroff of the Design MBA program at CCA, and Eric Ryan, co-founder of the Method line of green cleaning products. I’d love to tell you more about the discussion, but can do one better, since Fora.tv is now broadcasting their recording of the panel:

Some of the issues we didn’t have time to hit on that I really feel are a part of this discussion on conscious capitalism:

• The design stage for a product or service is worth investing in. It’s when 80-90% of a product’s life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined (Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism), but it’s also the best time to incorporate insights about people and their needs. The design stage is often rushed through to be first-to-market, but that’s rarely that big of an advantage — anyone remember the first MP3 player? (hint: it wasn’t the iPod.)
• People’s attitudes towards consumption are hopefully nearing a change. Individuals in the U.S. consume roughly twice as much as they did 50 years ago, and 99% of what we buy isn’t even in use 6 months later (Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff). But recently there has been a shift in attitude, where some consumers look to buying more services and experiences (e.g., travel, spas, OnStar) as a sign/use of their wealth rather than buying more goods. And while new consumer markets are springing up around the world, many of them can leapfrog bad old systems of production and consumption.
• A 21st Century business will operate (not just talk) differently than the old models. Some qualities I foresee: [1] a strong passion for addressing the needs of a customer over the short- and long-term; profit is a by-product of this passion; [2] a focus on services and experiences; designing, supporting, and continuously improving a total customer relationship; [3] measuring development in means other than just aggregate growth more sales isn’t the sole indicator of a better business.

Big thanks to Kevin O’Malley of TechTalk for hosting a great panel!

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Something we’ve intentionally folded into our upcoming Managing Experiences conference in San Francisco is several quick sessions on topics that will soon impact everyones career in user experience. And we’re very excited that one of these sessions is with Matt Jones, a talented designer previously at Nokia and the BBC, but now founder and lead designer of the Dopplr service—a very useful social network for frequent travelers.

Last week Dopplr was featured in TIME Magazine, where it’s clear the utility and experience of the service is so much more important than its status as a social network.

“Dopplr… allows you to plug in all your travel plans for months ahead, and see at the click of a button which friends’ and colleagues’ journeys will overlap with yours…”

“You never know whom you might meet on the road. But if karma isn’t quite working out for you, Dopplr could be the next best thing.”

Matt Jones and Dopplr are just one of our many great speakers at MX, and if you sign up by Sunday, you can still get the early-bird pricing.

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Two of the best events we’ve hosted were last year’s MX and MXEast. MX (short for Managing Experiences) has repeatedly drawn a roster of very bright and inspiring speakers and an equally bright and engaged audience—people who lead UX teams, people who are responsible for shaping or managing a product or service’s experience, and leaders who’s job intersects with user experience.

At MX San Francisco on April 20-22, we’re looking to continue to push the conversation of what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. We’re assembling the strongest and most influential voices on the topics of organizational change, user experience strategy, and the leadership of creative teams so they can share with you ideas and practices that will impact your own effectiveness in delivering great experiences.

Here’s just a sampling of speakers sharing their best ideas and know-how:
* Peter Coughlan of IDEO—lead of IDEO’s business Transformation Practice.
* Chip Heath—Stanford University professor and the author of Made to Stick, a person who knows how to communicate great ideas in simple ways that can lead to real change
* Chip Conley—founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hotels, a widely successful California boutique hotel company focused on great guest experiences
* Cordell Ratzlaff—you may know him as the man behind Mac OS X, but he’s been championing an effort within Cisco to change product and service design from a requirements-driven system to a culture focused on customer experience.
* Ryan Armbruster—so loved at MX East, we had to bring Ryan back; at Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Lab and now Chief Experience Officer a radiation oncology practice, Ryan successfully integrates user emotion into the design and development of new healthcare experiences
* Scott Hirsh—founding principle at the Management Innovation Group, Scott’s experience in consulting executives on how and where to integrate UX into their business gives him unique insight into the opportunities and challenges for all of us.

We know the value of hands-on learning, so we’re very happy to have Adaptive Path’s Kim Lenox leading her popular Process Reboot as a pre-conference workshop on April 20. It’s for anyone ready to rethink and reinvigorate their UX processes to more regularly create innovative results.

And we also want to prepare you for what’s ahead, so the MX program will feature several short sessions on topics like mobile, social networks, and new forms of interaction design that may soon be impacting your career. We’re lining up great forward-thinkers like Adaptive Path’s own mobile expert Rachel Hinman and co-founder of the Dopplr social networking service Matt Jones to help shine a light on what’s next.

So this is a call out to all you creative leaders who want to add to the discussion and join us as we move ahead in getting great experiences out into the world. The early-bird pricing ends this Sunday, so be sure to sign up ASAP as save $300-400.

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As designers and researchers, we’re all part of a very critical point in the production process for goods and services. Not only do we shape how desirable, effective, and usable the result is, but we also influence what materials will go into or support the offerings we design, what process will be used to support them, and the impact the offerings have in the lives of the end users. 80-90% of an offerings life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined during design*, baked into the good or service in a way that’s much harder to change later on.

This Wednesday evening, I’ll join a great panel of speakers at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to discuss Conscious Capitalism: Resolving the conflict between consumerism and progressive innovation. (There should still be room for you to make reservations online.) This is a conversation I’m really interested in diving into with the panelists—addressing how an understanding of humans and sustainable business practices are both requisite for a real 21st century business strategy.

As a warm up to the panel, check out the story of stuff and then come join us at the Commonwealth Club!

*Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism

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Leah and I have been piloting some new approaches to get around some of our frustrations with the limitations of wireframes:

• they can focus time and attention on all the wrong details and activities
• they constrain creativity
• they split up designers and teams to work alone

We call our approach “sketchboards,” a technique that allows designers and teams to explore and evaluate a range of concepts, getting to better UX solutions faster. We’ve found that this approach:

• allows us to iterate faster towards more creative solutions
• better supports the design of flows and highly interactive experiences
• incorporates the input of the entire team; our clients and partners love it
• defines what we need to document in wireframes, or just skip ahead and begin prototyping

The video below takes you quickly through the sketchboard technique, but be sure to read the essay that contains more details, templates, and examples.

Leah and I will be sharing this as an agile-friendly approach in a workshop titled “Good Design Faster” at UXWeek 2008. Come join us!

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