Adaptive Path Blog

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!

Wharton business school’s recent article on Monster.com describes what decisions monster.com is making as it finds itself in ‘middle age,’ when the old competitors have made way for new ones (LinkedIn, Craigslist):

• Grow internationally — even though they face local competition in other markets like Europe, India, China, and Mexico
• Re-diversifying into more types of businesses and brands — they sold off other businesses in the late 90’s to focus on Monster, but recently diversified to now own Tickle.com, Military.com, FastWeb and others.

Wharton faculty suggest other decisions Monster will still need to make:

• how to protect itself from low-price, high-volume Craigslist who posts twice as many jobs at a much lower price
• how to “address the cyclical nature of recruiting” — web job seekers, “are more likely to change jobs and less likely to be unemployed than non-wired job-seekers”

Sadly, the approach recommended to address the latter bullet is, “create a social networking site,” a popular panacea that’s easy to list and hard to do right.

Many UX people find themselves in organizations that are dominated by other schools of thought: business management, engineering, etc. That’s just one of the things that I find so inspirational about talking to Ryan Armbruster about the Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Program. The program integrates research and design methods into the culture of medicine and science at Mayo Clinic to repeatedly generate meaningful changes that improve the lives of patients and the effectiveness of the medical system supporting them.

Ryan spoke to the ability to connect design to the core values of the clinic in our recent interview:

“Mayo Clinic is open to the design-centered program because its values are rooted in patient needs. This value of patient coming first is in the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization.

Having a design program to articulate what those needs are and informing better solutions is a logical addition. That’s why design has been applied in the organization to play an important role in informing how our services are created and delivered.”

Ryan will be speaking on the transformational power of designing for emotions at Adaptive Path’s upcoming MX East conference. (When registering for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG to receive 10% off your final price.) During our discussion, I got a chance to understand more of how emotions applied to his work at the Mayo Clinic:

“What’s interesting in healthcare — as well as any service industry — is how to deal most effectively with the uncertainty of human emotions and human behavior. Emotion is complex. It’s not a rational system. As much as you want to try to design a service or a system that’s reliable and consistent, it won’t be effective if it doesn’t adapt to the many different situations that are present in the complexity of human emotions. But when you successfully design for emotion, it can dramatically influence the outcomes, such as a patients’ health.”

Check out the whole interview.

In a recent conversation on the dplusb.org blog, Jess McMulln and I discussed some of the base assumptions of what the ‘design thinking’ term is all about and where design thinking can fall short. A couple of excerpts:

Jess: “Now design thinking is great, and one of the reasons it gets hyped is because its novel and people hold out hope for a silver bullet. I think it gets reinforced by some people in the design community who make the leap from the fact that ‘I identify as a designer, and therefore I am a design thinker, and I can make these great strategic contributions if they’d only let me.’”

Brandon: “Just diagnosing the real business problem is a challenge [for design thinking]. Is the market growing or shrinking: is there going to be more pie out there in terms of the market, or am I going to have to steal pie from other people? What are my competitors doing and can I trip them up by releasing capabilities that they can’t copy? How can I do things that are competitively smart? What are the real forces that are at play in the marketplace? It’s probably not just features and customer empathy.”

Design is a powerful tool for businesses to adopt, but our discussion points out that designers can’t expect to have that impact without an appreciation for the critical thinking brought to bear from a business viewpoint. See the full conversation.

A recent story, that’s quickly becoming a classic, is the origin and design of the Target pill bottle and the surrounding ClearRx system. It’s an inspiring and instructive story about the ability of design to impact business and to change people’s lives. In advance of her keynote at User Experience Week, I got a chance to talk to Deborah Adler, designer of the ClearRx pill bottle, about her experience:

Brandon Schauer [BS]: Your session at UX Week it’s titled “ClearRx from Masters Thesis to Medicine Cabinet.” Can you give us a quick summary of what ClearRx really is?

Deborah Adler [DA]: Sure, ClearRx is a packing system for people who use prescription medicine. It makes it easier for people to understand how to take their medicine.

BS: But Target didn’t ask you to design this?

DA: They did not. Actually, my project began as a student project. I was getting my Masters at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and the program is called Designer as Author; you have to come up with a product and effectively and eventually bring it to market. At the time, I was coming up with my thesis and my grandmother accidentally took my grandfather’s medicine; they were both prescribed the same drug, but just different dosage strengths. When I looked in their medicine cabinet, I wasn’t at all surprised by their befuddlement because it turned out that their package was practically identical. So that’s when I decided, “Hey, maybe I’ll redesign the prescription bottle for my thesis.” And that’s what I did, and after I did that I brought it to Target.

(more…)

Sony has begun some heavy marketing around it’s Sony Reader, a device which reportedly can hold “hundreds of books” for you to “curl up with.” This echoes one of the great insights from Steve Jobs when he first introduced the iPod:

“How many times have you gone on the road with a CD player and said, ‘Oh god, I didn’t bring the CD I wanted to listen to.’ To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music.”

Except that it differs in one respect… I’ve never said, “Oh god, I didn’t bring the Tolstoy I really wanted instead of Harry Potter.” People listen to music over and over and switch and mix it constantly. Books? Not so much.

I’m pleased to be conducting Adaptive Path’s first online seminar on April 5th: ‘Showing the Value of UX‘. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work.

Elaine Cohen, Director of IA at Ruder Finn, just wrote me to ask, “Is your seminar focused on how to sell UX to your company?” Rather than selling UX, the seminar focuses more on how to integrate it with your company. The material we’ll go over touches on this in a couple of ways: [1] I’ll share some models of how UX can be integrated into business processes to improve the UX-team’s perception, accountability, and role in the project selection process. [2] We’ll walk through design methods that create better dialog between you and your business parters, resulting in better experiences that also create greater economic value.

I find that when a UX team is able to see the connections between their work and business value, the selling becomes much less challenging because both you and the rest of the business are working towards the same ends.

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Here’s where you can register »

Earlier this week a memo between the Chairman and the CEO of Starbucks titled “The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience” was supposedly leaked out. Here’s a synopsis of some of our thoughts on the memo’s contents:

Ryan says:

I know the memo is allegedly confirmed, but I’m calling bulls*** on this one.

It’s just a too-tidy deconstruction of every problem Starbucks has had in maintaining it’s experience in the last 5 years. It reads more like a paean to the small, folksy store experience that only ever existed in the minds of the people who designed it.

If it is true, and written by the chairman to the CEO, then it’s a remarkable gift to every single one of Starbucks’ competitors. Differentiation based on even one of the points Schultz raises could be a nice way to increase store visits and overall consumer ratings for a Tully’s or even Dunkin Donuts.

That said, every point in there is true.

Andy says:

I agree about the points raised. They are spoken well by someone with a clear insight to the daily operations and vibe of a Starbuck’s store.

I wonder if they can undo some of the things they’ve done “for the better.” It seems inevitable that to grow as fast and efficiently as they did, some of these practices had to happen. But it also seems that it may be too expensive to turn the ship at this point.

Brandon says:

The described progression of choices (no matter who wrote it) is reminiscent of the issues we heard at the MX Conference about how over-reliance on bucket testing and other decision-making tools can lead to a short-term ROI wins but long-term lapses in focus. By making many smaller, logical decisions you may end up painting yourself into a corner, unsure how you got there.

But, hey, I shouldn’t get the last word…

Malmö University and InUse are putting on their first Business to Buttons conference this June in Malmö, Sweden. The topics focus on, “how to create positive effects for the business and for society when designing Information Technology.” Both Dan and I will be there to present, along with a nice list of speakers.

I’m especially excited to hear from Ben Jacobsen from Conifer Research, the case study of the New York Times redesign, InUse’s deep thoughts on Effect Management, and Kim Goodwin of Cooper speaking on the integration of design into your organization. Come join us… you know all you need is this one great excuse to travel to Sweden!

Last summer Adaptive Path conducted a brief survey regarding the user experience practices within organizations. [Clarification: these were voluntary surveys of individuals about their organizations' practice around user experience.] From the data we collected, we found a few interesting tidbits. First of all, the term “user experience” or “customer experience” or similar derivatives have almost a 90% usage rate across various types of companies:

No surprise there, but this next data set piqued my curiosity because of the inverse relationships that emerged. Among our respondents, the for-profit public organizations were much more likely to have a group responsible for the user experience, but yet less likely to have an executive accountable for the experience. Now these for-profit public organizations are very large (70% of the respondents have over a thousand employees), and so the delegation and localization of UX responsibilities to a specific group of people may be due to the diverse range of products, services, and activities that the organization must coordinate.

While the for-profit privately-held organizations broke about even on both of these data points, the non-profits look about the opposite of the for-profit public organizations. I could read into these patterns and say they suggest: when an organization has an executive responsible for experience, the experience becomes the responsibility of the whole organization.

However, I think another hypothesis is more likely. The non-profits and privately-held firms tend to be much smaller in size. They’re more likely to have a single product/service, or a small handful of products/services. Therefore, the creation of a successful experience is much more crucially felt within these organizations. Someone at the top has their eye on the experience, and the role can’t be delegated to separate functional group in the organization.