Adaptive Path Blog

Conference organizers and associated graphic designers: when you are making conference badges, here is what attendees need to see (in order of importance):

1. First Name. BIG! I don’t want to have to stare at people’s badges any longer than I need to. A rapid glance should boldly display the wearer’s first name, often to just refresh my memory or as a cue if I’m looking for someone I haven’t met but want to.
2. Last name
3. Company
4. Hometown

Possibly Title should be added to this list, but I’m of two minds. One is: who cares about titles? but the other is, well, I do. I want to know what someone does in order to see what kind of conversations I’m likely to have with them.

Not so important: the name of the conference. Duh, I get it; I’m already here. Also unimportant: the sponsors. Not for the conference itself, of course, but on the front of name badges their logos are just visual clutter.

Back of the badge should have the schedule, with preferably both the title and speaker for each talk. If space prevents that, title is more important than the speaker’s name IMHO. Unless the speaker is famous, titles are easier than names to remember.

One more thing: the strap holding the badge should be adjustable. Too often it is way too long. It should hang at chest level, not at belly/waist level. Low-hanging badges can’t be seen sitting down at a table, and if staring at chests is rude, staring at bellies (or below) is probably worse.

This all seems so common sensical as I put it down, but it is amazing how often it is gotten wrong. Even by people who should know better.

Sneaking in last week was Brandon’s essay on The Long Wow. An excerpt:

Deep customer insights and empathetic design pave the pathway to wow moments. By diving deep into a customer’s life and closely observing their behaviors, you can wow your customer by addressing needs that they’d never be able to articulate. By immersing yourself in the customer’s wider world of emotion and culture, you can wow them by attuning the offering to practical needs and dimensions of delight that normally go unfulfilled.

When a company uses empathetic design methods to create moments of wow over and over again, it bonds with customers at a level far beyond the realm of gold-colored plastic cards. OXO introduced over 50 products every year, wowing customers with purposeful improvements through the re-imagination of common culinary tools.

Few companies consistently translate rich insights from their customers’ lives into new and better offerings. The few that do can achieve a Long Wow, continuously delivering wow moments and building a true, deep loyalty that transcends traditional loyalty programs.

Read the essay.

When we design products, we’re often extremely concerned with the features of the product. After all, those are the things we market and spend a majority of our time designing, right? Features are what go on the box or how we pitch the project to users. Especially for those of us who cut our teeth on web design, there wasn’t much else except chunks of features and content. Transitions? The page loading, that was the transition between bits.

But now, with increased processor speeds, new interaction paradigms, and richer interactions possible on most platforms, the in-between stuff–transitions, animations, interaction logic, the connective tissue between features and content, how everything fits together–is becoming ever more important. One could argue that this is where the experience design flourishes the most.

Features will eventually be copied and become obsolete. Right now, someone is out there copying your features! But the experience of using your product is significantly harder to duplicate. You can make a Windows machine look and kind of act like a Mac with some effort, but it isn’t going to work exactly like one. Why? Because of the in-between stuff, the little moments that make a Mac a Mac and a Windows OS a Windows OS. I think a case could be made that the reason a Linux OS was never adopted by general consumers was, in part, due to the lack of the in-between moments that give systems their character.

The in-between stuff also extends to the “under the hood” stuff too. Preferences, settings, and the other bits that are there just to make the rest of the experience better, well, those need to be thought about and designed too. Too often (and I am as guilty of this as anyone), those parts of the system are left until last and hastily designed–if they are looked at by a designer at all. The details count. Details are places for delight and cleverness, for small moments that say that someone, somewhere cared and bothered to think this product through. Design is in the details.

Tons of press and posts, including some from my colleagues here at Adaptive Path, have touted the iPod/iPhone and iTunes ecosystem as a great model for how product systems should be. But it is my contention that at least one of those products–iTunes–is not really a very great application, especially now that Apple is making it the core of a suite of devices.

I’ve always thought iTunes was hard to use, and it has only grown worse over the years, as we now don’t have hundreds of songs, we now have thousands–in some cases tens of thousands–of songs, podcasts, movies, TV shows, radio, ringtones all in one long, long list. Working with iTunes has become as pleasurable as working with a spreadsheet. It needs a complete overhaul.

I will grant that iTunes is the Little App That Could, taking on way more than it was ever supposed to. It was never designed to be a digital hub. Or if it was, it was never designed well. How it handles different media is klugy. Playlists are, at their heart, just folders. The new iPhone addition to iTunes had to add tabs into the center pane. TV shows are clustered one way, movies another. It’s become a dog’s breakfast, and frankly, iTunes was never that pretty or engaging application to begin with. Winamp is aesthetically far more pleasing.

While Apple’s devices keep getting iteration after iteration, core apps–iTunes, Mail, iCal–languish or are given band-aid solutions to core issues. It looks like Mail, iChat, and iCal are getting some attention in Leopard, but meanwhile iTunes works and feels like an application from seven years ago, and the digital world–thanks in no small measure to Apple itself–has changed. iTunes, the ugly hub in the center of Apple’s media wheel, needs some serious interaction and visual attention. I hope Apple gives it some.

BusinessWeek has an article by Reena Jana on Designing for Diabetics that features our Charmr concept.

After reading Tenderich’s post, a group from Adaptive Path decided to respond; they applied their experience at designing user interfaces to creating a concept for a diabetes-management tool that might have the consumer appeal of an iPod. Their goal was not only to challenge themselves as designers but also to work on a humanitarian product to which they could apply their knowledge of user-centric interface design.

Read the article

If ever there was an organization behind the times in its philosophy, it is the Association of Computing Machines. The ACM has has a stranglehold on technical papers for years, preventing anyone outside of their organization access to these documents without payment. This even though the ACM hasn’t written or reviewed these documents — the authors and reviewers have done all that work for free. And the thanks they get? Their work doesn’t make it out to the general public; it’s trapped behind a walled garden, where typically only those in academia will ever see or use it because their universities have an account.

ASIS&T’s Digital Library is no better. Again, you get abstracts for free, but a single paper will cost you $25 — for only 24 hours of use! Seriously? For work that hasn’t cost ASIS&T a penny. It’s highway robbery.

And to make matters worse, these organizations will gladly charge you to come to their conferences to hear people present their papers and thus make more money off the work of others. Hell, you have to pay to present your own work! It’s a racket, and I’m not sure why scientists and academics stand for it. Isn’t the point of academic work the free and liberal exchange of ideas? I’d love to look at the latest academic research when working on projects, and I wouldn’t even mind paying for it if I knew the money was going to the authors, not to parasitic organizations whose sole purpose is to guard and charge for information, not share it.

Mr., umm, Someone, tear down these walls!

In addition to my duties at Adaptive Path, I also sit on the Board of the Interaction Design Association and chair this year’s inaugural conference. Thus, I am very pleased to announce that the IxDA has opened registration for the first annual Interaction Design Association’s conference Interaction08, to be held in hip, historic Savannah, Georgia February 8-10, 2008. The conference features keynotes from Alan Cooper, Bill Buxton, Sigi Moeslinger, and Malcolm McCullough, and talks from Jared Spool, Dan Brown, Régine Debatty, Matt Jones, Aza Raskin, Jenny Lam, Sarah Allen, and Molly Wright Steenson. We also have workshops led by Marc Rettig, Darja Isaksson, Todd Warfel, and Jeff Patton.

Conference fees are $499 before November 15, $599 afterwards. Students are $299.

We’re also still accepting submissions for Lightning Sessions until September 15, 2007.

Summer television has become like summer beach reading for me: filled with guilty pleasures. Lately, I’ve enjoyed the VH1 series The Pick-Up Artist in which a guy named Mystery in a fuzzy hat and/or goggles teaches a group of nerds how to pick up women. It’s got many great cringe-worthy moments and is strangely entertaining.

Midway through the first episode, I found myself thinking: Why can’t companies use the same advice these nerds are using but instead of picking up women, using the advice to make themselves more attractive to partners, customers, and clients? Turns out, the advice translates pretty well. To whit:

Peacock theory. No one is going to come talk to you unless you put on a display. Make yourself stand out. Don’t be afraid to be unusual. But don’t take it too far. You don’t want to be a freak.

Have a gameplan. “If you don’t open, you won’t get the girl.” Have something to say to get the conversation started — with partners, clients, customers. But don’t be overly invested in them — don’t depend on their validation for your self-worth. But have something provocative to say. A question works well.

Attract, don’t comfort immediately. Once you have caught attention, don’t immediately make the other person comfortable. You want to interest them instead. This makes you more attractive. You can make them comfortable later — after they are attracted to you.

Be interesting. “If you are interesting, people will be interested in you.” Speak with passion and enthusiasm — it almost doesn’t matter what you talk about as long as you care about it. You need stories, lots of stories. These let people know you have a full life and don’t need them in it, necessarily. Make them want to be part of your life.

Demonstrate your value. Show through stories that you are interesting and worth talking to.

Set boundaries. You have to set up the rules for how you want to be treated. Be willing and able to walk away. Make them earn your interest.

Looks aren’t enough. You need game!

The Pick-Up Artist airs Mondays at 9 on VH1. More insights as “Mystery” reveals them!

If you are anything like me, you’ve at one point or another admired the hell out of the group of interaction designers who, back in the 1960s and 70s, pretty much came up with the modern set of interaction paradigms that we’ve used ever since. Guys like Larry Tesler (cut-and-paste), Doug Engelbart (selecting, point and click, windows), and Tim Mott (the desktop metaphor).

We have a similar opportunity in front of us now, to define the interaction paradigms for the next several decades (at least) in the form of defining gestural and touch interactions.

We need to not only figure out common gestures and how they could work across a variety of devices and environments, but also how to prototype and document those gestures. Now that the Wii and iPhone have introduced more physical interactions to the public at large, it’s time to step up and start making an effort to define and document a common set of movements and motions that could be used for initiating actions across a variety of platforms.

Work has been done already, of course. Robert Cravotta has done a good job with this overview in EDN magazine, and Bill Buxton has started an impressive list of new input devices and technologies. But we need to help create this shift in input devices, not just follow along behind the technology. And if we wait, well, we’ll simply find individual companies (Apple, Microsoft, Perceptive Pixel, etc. etc.) creating their own standards (as is being done now). And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, one can easily imagine having to remember a crazy amount of movements and gestures for common actions. (”Wait, to turn on the lights do I tap the wall, or wave a hand? Is this an iRoom or MS Rume?”) We’ll get a lot of ad hoc solutions — some of which will be great, some not so much. Standards and a pattern library would help.

What we need is some sort of standards board similar to the W3 or an advocacy group like the Web Standards Project. At a minimum, we need to start collecting the gestural patterns that are emerging, much as Jenifer Tidwell (and others) did for screen-based patterns. Even something as simple as the Ajax Pattern Library would be useful. The Interaction Design Association (on whose Board I sit) would seem to be a likely home and resource for some, if not all, of these things. The question is just having designers engage with the issue.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is and have launched a wiki for collecting gestural patterns at interactivegestures.com. Please contribute to it.

It’s our time, interaction designers. Let’s rise to the challenge and git r done.

We’ve been overwhelmed by the (mostly positive) feedback for the Charmr concept, and we thank you for it. Comments like this one:

I am not a techie, just a Mom with a social work degree who has a 17 year old daughter with diabetes. My husband sent me this link and I am so excited that some real interest is being shown in developing an insulin pump with current technology. If I could get my daughter Caitlyn to download her pump record, when she is charging her IPOD and downloading music that would be a miracle. Currently the pump she has can’t download on our mac so we end up doing records by hand right before the next Doctors appt, not ideal. The charmr sounds really cool, she would wear it better than she wears her med alert necklace and it could take the place of that also. From a Mom’s heart Thanks for the real interest.

really got to us. It was a scramble to get the project completed in the very short timeframe we had (9 weeks) to research, design, and create the concept movie in.

Obviously in that time frame, we had very little time and no mechanical engineering resources with which to explore fully some of the engineering challenges that the Charmr requires. It is a concept, and a concept is only the starting point for any product. Around such topics as battery life, the size of the insulin reservoir, the exact size of the pump/monitor patch, and the different types of wireless technology to tie the system together, we simply had to make our best professional judgement as to what would be reasonably available in several years’ time. And, even after some of the critiques of the concept, I’m still convinced of its feasibility in the near future.

Some have asked why we didn’t solve the problems of diabetics right now. The reason is that while there could be some incremental changes to the pump/monitor system currently in place, those changes would make only a minor difference to diabetics. They wouldn’t address the range of issues we found in our research nor would they easily fit all the design principles we derived from the research. One might easily ask why it took Apple several years to design and develop the iPhone: because sometimes you have to wait for (or arrange) the technology and business opportunities to create a product that will disrupt the marketplace. Technology sometimes has to mature, and as many have rightly pointed out, the process for getting a medical device on the market takes much political and financial will. Additionally, we simply wanted to change the way people thought about these devices and how they could be designed, and that kind of demonstration isn’t accomplished by mincing steps. Bold strides were required.

So it might take several years for the technology to mature and for all the design decisions to be made and the product to be manufactured. But, based on comments like the one above, it might just be worth the wait.