Adaptive Path Blog

I tweeted a while back that it’s been discovered you can boost creativity with side-to-side eye movement. People who watched a target moving side-to-side for 30 seconds have been tested as producing significantly more ideas when immediately given a creative task. This technique is, “thought to increase the cross-talk between the hemispheres.”

So I put together both a PowerPoint and Keynote file to help you do the same thing. Try it out before your next design session, and let us know if you think it works!

I’m terrifically excited to announce MX 2010, the conference for people who take a leadership role in guiding better experiences into the world. If you need to guide, lead, or drag your organization towards delivering great experiences, this is the event and the group for you.

It’s career-shaping content
We’re ecstatic about our keynote speaker Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, one of the most enlightening and effective communicators on what it takes to empower design teams and deliver experiences the increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

We’re also bringing back Margaret Gould Stewart, previously of Google and now at YouTube, she’s arguably the most loved UX team leader and the most refreshing and practical thinker in our practice.

Plus we have Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction, who’s changing the way organizations are delivering customer service in the future. We also have Dan Saffer, popular speaker from Kicker Studios. Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path and Harvard Business Review blogger, will be sharing his most recent discoveries of how organizations make great experience happen. And soon we’ll share more exciting speakers including members of some of the most highly rated customer experience organizations around.

It’s what matters right now
We’re maximizing speakers and content around the topics that make a difference right now to UX leaders. That means we’re addressing head on:

• Creating and communicating an experience strategy
• Organizational buy-in and change to deliver great experiences
• Delivering meaningful business results
• And the emerging trends you need to plan for today

It’s super-concentrated
We’ve been hard at work devising a super-concentrated form of MX, packing into a day-and-a-half more great leaders, more examples of success and failure, and more ideas about how to make things happen. To do it, we’re featuring many short-format sessions and speakers sharing the very best and most essential ideas as focused and fast as they can. For a day-and-a-half of your time, you’ll be leaving with a boat-load of new ideas and new practices for the rest of 2010.

Come make your 2010 great
Come to San Francisco March 7-8 and join our focused community of UX leaders who are sharing and shaping the practices of our field. We have a great low room rate at the event site, the lovely Intercontinental San Francisco. Register now and get in cheap. Do it! And make a big difference in your year for 2010.

Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.

Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like the balanced answer he drew:

However, I had to go back and dig deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between his diagram and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:

One thing I love is when someone’s able to step back from the trees and see the forest. Few do that better than Jesse James Garrett. At our recent UXWeek event Jesse took appraisal of the State of User Experience, giving new perspective on what the intent and practice of user experience is all about, and what new challenges await us.

It’s important to take the time to watch this presentation because of the new footholds Jesse creates for UX. First and foremost, he takes on “mediumism” or the tendency for design to have to be about a medium rather than the medium-independent design of experiences. Then, he offers a practical definition of experience design that shows the strengths and missing of today’s UX practice in a new light:

“experience design: the design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.”

Watch the video, and Jesse will lay out the means by which we can tackle the challenge of human engagement head on. But be warned, “the user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure.”

Jesse James Garrett | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Smelling a fire and listen to sirens this weekend I realized something was up. Searching traditional media outlets like the local paper and TV stations provided no news. But a quick keyword search on twitter found plenty: an exact address and plenty of photos.

I wasn’t tweeting or following a friend, but I was getting some of the most valuable information I ever had from twitter. More on that in a second…

Inverting perspective
I love collecting stories where inverting one’s perspective on a problem tends to change everything. Two quick examples:

First example: During WWII, the (in)famous Robert McNamara looked at the statistics for U.S. bombers. The bombers were being inspected after they returned from mission, the bullet holes in the planes were tallied, and the places where there were the most holes is where additional armor would be added. McNamara realized that the analysis was backwards. He inverted his perspective on the problem. The planes that returned with holes in them were the planes that survived. Planes, he proposed, should actually be supplied with additional armor in the areas the returning planes didn’t have bullet holes. These were the places that the shot down planes had likely been hit and therefore didn’t make it back.

Second example: Sylvan Learning Centers CEO Douglas Becker was touring overseas looking for opportunities in educational testing. Sylvan was active in tutoring children, and they intuited that standardized tests like Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) could be a smart opportunity. As the story goes, he watched on his overseas tour as long lines of people stood waiting to take a TOEFL tests outside of testing locations so they could apply to U.S. colleges and universities. Normally, you’d think, “that’s a great business… let’s create our own testing centers!” But Becker thought differently. He inverted his perspective on the problem. He realized that for each person in line, there were probably another 10 people who’d like an U.S.-styled college education right there in their home country. In 2003 they sold of the tutoring chain, changed their name to Laureate Education and focused solely on the secondary education market for these types of students. By 2005, Laureate’s market capitalization of over two billion USD was 3 times that of the new parent company of the Sylvan Learning Centers chain.

So, yea for inverting your perspective to see opportunities.

Inverting social media
So the fire-reporting experience I shared with social media made me realize that the real opportunities in social media just might be catering to the non-participants rather than the current participants — helping them become consumers of it, rather that contributors to it.

So while dozens if not hundreds of groups are creating applications to help social media participants update, add, follow, and track other participants in social media networks, why are so few helping to package the best and most interesting content for the non-participants? Yes, there are a handful of examples that aggregate neighborhood news or collect tweets and updates on certain topics, but there’s far less attention here.

Do you know a service that intelligently packages the information and resources generated by social media into a form that non-participants would find truly useful?

How should a organization experiment with new ideas about customer experiences? What if they want to play with a totally new retail concept?

Starbucks asked a select group of employees create a completely new coffee house in Seattle called 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea. Peter Merholz explains that the concept store is Doomed to Fail as a inauthentic experience. He discusses why on CBC Radio’s Q program from Thursday—just jump to 1:40.

And for more backstory on the 15th Ave. concept, see Howard Schultz vs. Howard Schultz—the forth paragraph.

If you’re trying to get a better experience out in the world, the best proof of your ideas is probably just doing it. It can take months and years to plan, spec, and align organizational bureaucracies around a strange new idea. But making your idea concrete enough to be used by real people can remove obstacles, win hearts, and create real traction.

The San Francisco city government is like other governments, not particularly known for its speed and nimbleness. But recently they’ve discovered the power of calling projects “pilots” to eschew the normal policies and procedures in favor of quickly learning if an idea is in fact a good one.

Over the past 2 months the city government, in cooperation with business groups and non-profits, has turned a corner of one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco into a public plaza. The 17th Street Plaza project took 72-hours to implement, and is carefully called a “reversible trial.”

The plaza isn’t made of brick or tile; it’s just paint over the asphalt. The plants aren’t carefully gardened or well-dug; they’re temporary planters made from construction supplies.

This “use of concept” approach has big benefits:

• It costs little. The material and labor costs are much lower than a full implementation, and it saves thousands of hours of planning and debate
• It creates a lot of learning. The plaza isn’t perfect by any means, but it will help answer the important questions: Will people use the plaza? Will there be any negative side effects? What are the requirements for a plaza in this location?
• It wins hearts and minds. After seeing a real world mock-up, people have a clear understanding of what a plaza could be. It’s surprisingly better than many expected.

Listen to the words the backers, designers, users, and doubters of the plaza use when talking about the project:

Next week the plaza will be reviewed for consideration of a 4-month extension. What decisions do you think the government and public will reach about the space? I predict it’ll be extended, and everyone’s input will be well-grounded in observations from the actual plaza experience.

This “use of concept” approach isn’t new. San Francisco borrowed it from recent similar programs in New York City. It’s also reminiscent of a pliot program IdeaLab! did before launching CarsDirect, the first online car sales site on the Web—they hired a CEO for 90-days, built a simple website, and told the CEO to sell one car. The site sold four cars in a week and answered the question to which no one yet knew the answer: “Will people buy cars online?”

So if you’re ready to push your own “use of concept” out the door, keep in mind the lessons from the 17th Street Plaza:

• To get permission, call it a “reversible pilot”. Worst case is you’ll learn a lot and you’ll know the idea you have isn’t worth pursuing. Best case is you’ll have a hot new experience on your hands.
• Clarify what you want to learn. It’ll help you focus on what to pilot and for how long.
• Control costs, not details. You can learn what you need to without a perfect implementation.
• Plan the next step. Have a wrap-up date when the pilot is over and it’s time to make the right next decisions.

If you’re in San Francisco this week, please join us Thursday night for a packed evening of content and enjoyment. I’m hosting a most excellent panel of experts on service design titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services. Also, Kicker Studio is having their launch party. Each is perfectly timed for you to make both events with a very short walk through South Park.

The service design panel at Adaptive Path will be from 6-8pm, featuring three panelists with three very different points of view on service design:

• Shelley Evenson, an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley’s been an early teacher and thought leader for service design in the U.S., focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.
• Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information, and he focusins on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the “front stage” are processed.
• And Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that lead to measurable improvements on patient safety and satisfaction — demonstrating that service design has a big societal impact as well.

And it’s time let you in on two more interesting things about the panel. First, we’ll be doing a bit of light service design of the panel event itself, giving people the opportunity to think through the design of a service that they’re experiencing. The service blueprint below is one example of how we’re trying to think through the event.

Secondly, I’m asking the panelists to tell us how they’d plan and design for a new service. I’m providing them with this simple business case, and asking each to pitch how they’d shape this service:

So if you’re in San Francisco, here’s how you might structure your evening:

1. From 5-6pm go to the New Interactions: Touch, Tangibles, and Gestures panel at Kicker Studio.
2. Rush over to Adaptive Path for the Seeing Tomorrow’s Services panel from 6-8pm.
3. Return to Kicker Studio for their launch party and the opening of the Tangible Tech Exhibit.

I’ll see you there, and on twitter (#stspanel). And don’t forget to register for the panel in advance.

One major new addition to next week’s MX Conference is hands-on workshops led by experts who can stretch our thinking and skills in new directions. One of these is Josh Levine, formally of Nuetron, but who has recently formed his own new practice. He regularly leads workshops to help organizations understand and manage their brand and their customer experiences strategically.

I caught up with Josh for 5 questions I’ve been dying to ask. Register for MX 2009 here (use the code BLOG for 10% off) and I’m sure you can ask him more in person. Here’s the Q&A:

[Brandon Schauer] You recently left your position as a brand coach and creative director at Neutron to start your own practice named The Matter Collaborative. You’ve read the financial section of the paper recently, right? Are you nuts?

[Josh Levine] Nope—now is exactly the time to start something new. Just because no one knows what’s going to happen, doesn’t mean there’s not tremendous opportunity. You just have to look beyond the paper panic to see it.

[BS] So now that that’s out of the way, just what is The Matter Collaborative about, what kind of problems do you solve, and how do you solve them?

[JL] For over ten years I’ve helped global brands engage consumers and empower employees through design, strategy, and marketing programs. I started Matter as a way to bring similar benefits to creative entrepreneurs with smaller businesses but just as big a vision. My goal is to help them increase their value and get the work they want through positioning, messaging, and touchpoint design.

[BS] You recently chaired an intense panel at the San Francisco chapter of the AIGA titled “Design Through the Downturn.” So what’s the answer? How do we successfully design through the downturn?

[JL] The bottom line is that in order to not only survive the downturn but grow your design-driven business over the next 10 years you have to embrace the tidal wave of change broadsiding our industry. Design is no longer about the artifacts regardless if its a product, an identity system, or even a website—these are all things that can be outsourced on the cheap or worse, slashed from budgets entirely. Today design is about applying right-brain thinking to solve problems in a left-brained world.

I suppose you could say this is what design has always been about. That’s true—but today (and this goes back to your first question) there’s a greater need for the non-linear, generative thinking designers employ to solve problems. Businesses have leveraged themselves to the gills. Cutting budgets and head count will only get you so far. Apply design as a problem-solving tool for businesses and you’ll discover where the real value is, and will continue to be over the next decade.

[BS] While at Neutron you helped to create and pilot their “steal this idea” newsletter. For people managing user experiences and UX teams in 2009, which idea would you recommend they steal?

[JL] One of my favorite ideas is Invisible Branding.

The term refers to those unseen elements which play a critical role in a customer’s experience, but are often overlooked because they don’t take a physical form; CEO vision, pricing strategy, and vendor selection are a few examples. This piece of the brand experience is so important, I predict over the next few years companies will begin to create teams dedicated to designing and managing invisibles. IX anyone?

[BS] So there’s brand and there are experiences. If you had to clarify these two amorphous overlapping concepts (like I’m now insisting you do) what’s the simplest way you can describe the differences and the relationships between them?

[JL] I explain to my clients that brand is just a synonym for reputation. So, how do you influence your reputation in the market? No matter the touchpoints you come up with (your messaging, your website, the way you answer the phone) it’s all part of the experience.

Brand is reputation, and reputation is the sum of customer experiences.

One caveat: while brand and experience are connected at the hip, there’s one important difference—the company can design the experience, but it’s the customer who decides the reputation.

The company (designs) the experience (is interpreted by) customers (determine)

the reputation (is the) brand.

I remember when the prior MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte predicted in his 1995 book Being Digital that,

“what [information] is in the air will go into the ground and what is in the ground will go into the air.”

He was talking about the wireless spectrum and broadband wiring, and he was predicting the inevitable, how information could easily travel through either channel to people. Negroponte called it “trading places.”

A current-day prediction of the inevitable could be another case of trading places and gray spaces: that of products and services. As time goes on, things that are products will become more like services (think iPods, mobile phones, and spimes), and things that are services will become more like products (think NetFlix, FedEx, or JetBlue).

This interplay creates interesting new experiences, and new challenges for designers. Services have become design-able experiences that need the same thoughtful care and attention that products do, if not more. The emergence of service design has revealed new approaches and tools to making services more human and more valuable.

Even more promising is the overabundance of services in our daily lives. Services make up a larger portion of the U.S. economy (about 68% in 2006) than products. And services have retained their value in the downturn. As BusinessWeek noted, “prices of goods fell 4.1% last year; prices of services rose 3%.”

And from electronic health records to green energy, tomorrow’s economy hinges on well designed services to help us all change from old behaviors to adopt new ones.

Within this broader trend, I’m happy to be hosting a panel in conjunction with the CMU Bay Area Alumni on March 19 at Adaptive Path titled, Seeing Tomorrow’s Services: A Panel on Service Design. I’m lucky to facilitate a discussion between three dream panelists:

• Shelley Evenson, an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley’s been an early teacher and thought leader for service design in the U.S., focusing on tapping into the needs of users of the service.
• Robert Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information, and he focusins on the contribution of the service’s “back stage” where materials or information needed by the “front stage” are processed. Just read his co-authored paper on the topic with Lindsay Tabas to be impressed.
• And Christi Zuber leads an internal Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente where her and her team have co-designed numerous new services with patients and clinicians that lead to measurable improvements on patient safety and satisfaction — demonstrating that service design has a big societal impact as well.

If you’d like to join us, remember to register ahead of time. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics we should cover, comment here or twitter with the hashtag #stspanel.