Adaptive Path Blog

Clients often come to us to help them develop a better sense of their users. To do so, we venture into the homes of people who are using or may be using our client’s product. Armed with audio and video recorders, we interview them at length. In the course of these interviews, we naturally develop a sense of empathy for these people: We see their homes, we meet their housemates, we make eye contact, and we share a physical space for over an hour.

After the interview, we are tasked with the challenge of articulating what we saw, heard and felt. We rummage through our interview transcripts and notes using a variety of methods and tools. We then produce personas and story-scenarios that document the characteristics, behaviors and motivations of the people we spoke to. Done right, these personas and scenarios help our clients develop a sense of empathy for their users.

But ultimately, there’s no substitute for actually being there, talking to real people, and experiencing it first-hand. To that end, we always encourage our clients to join in on our home interviews. Sometimes, all it takes is a day out of their office and into the lives of their users for a new perspective to settle in. Sometimes, it’s the real, live response to a question they’ve been holding on the tip of their tongue that finally convinces them.

So to all our clients, present and future: “Please, come with us. Take a plunge into the world of your users.”

I was cleaning out my desk (= hard drive) this week and found a research artifact we created for the Charmr project that was never fleshed out in time for the release. So I took some time to touch it up.

Before proceeding, keep in mind that:

• Diabetics’ motivation ebbs over time because diabetes is incurable.

The diagram tells a story of different people that we interviewed. The widening/splitting of the line represents different groups of people going their separate ways (so to speak).

The visual style was inspired by C.J. Minard’s Napoleon’s march map.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, is a action-adventure game for the Nintendo DS in which you control a blond adventurer with a pajama cap and sword (pictured below) using a touch-screen stylus. I was playing it the other day when…

My fairy sidekick told me that I should try “pressing” the seal from a map I just had discovered in a dungeon (displayed on the top screen) to my map (displayed on the bottom screen).

I remembered that several hours ago, I had to scratch a secret spot on the map to reveal another seal. So I spent five minutes aligning the two maps, then scratching and tapping on the touch-screen with my stylus. Unfortunately, this did not “press” the seal onto my screen.

Next I tried drawing the seal onto my own map complete with meticulous shading. Still no reaction. Frustrated, I tried to direct my character out of the map room. But my sidekick fairy barred my exit, turned me around and repeated that all I needed to do was “press” the seal onto my map.

Ten minutes of scratching and tapping later, I was about to give up: I imagined the triumphant feeling of closing shut my DS and tossing it into a corner. Then I realized, “Wait a second, if I close my DS then the two screens (or maps) will touch!”

Scared that it might power off my game, I carefully closed the lid of my DS.

I waited.

The green power light winked. My heart fluttered. I opened it back up — puzzle solved.

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Looking for interaction design inspiration? Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.

(Tom Armitage alluded to this interaction in his comment to my last post.)

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, is a action-adventure game for the Nintendo DS in which you control a blond adventurer with a pajama cap and sword (pictured below) using a touch-screen stylus. I was playing it the other day when…

The hint told me to blow out the candle. I needed to blow out the candle to solve a puzzle.

Confused, I wiggled and moved my stylus across the screen to control my character: I ran into the candle, slashed at the air with my sword, and did a rolling attack. No results. I tried a spin slash. I threw some rocks at it. Nothing. I circled back and checked the hint. It just told me to blow out the candle again.

And then I had an epiphany: I took my stylus away from the touch-screen and blew.

More precisely, I blew into the microphone and out went the candle. Puzzle solved.

Looking for interaction design inspiration? Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.

(Stay tuned for an interaction that surprised me even more in Part 2 of “Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.” Coming soon.)

During my two years in college, my friends and I would occasionally flip through our class year’s face book.

No, not facebook.com, but the actual physical soft cover booklet called the Class Album: new students face book. Each page had nine black and white photographs, and each photograph had a name under it. We would flip through it, muttering things to ourselves like, “Oh, I know that person”, “Who’s that?”, “Wow I nearly didn’t recognize him” and the inevitable, “Dude, she’s hot.”

Then came facebook.com (or thefacebook.com as it was first called).

Instead of skimming page upon page of old high school photographs, trying to decide whether he/she was someone I’d want to meet, I could access entire profiles of information. And I could see if someone was Single, In a Relationship, In an Open Relationship, Engaged, Married, or Complicated.

We could now scurry home, open our laptops, and check out That Stranger From Class. What was her major? Who did we know in common? What kinds of movies did she like? And, is she single? This replaced the Hot Or Not aspect of the old physical face book, and people flocked to register. Back then, registering a Facebook account was relatively simple: there were no applications, no news feeds, no events, and not even a wall.

Facebook announced recently that profiles would soon be searchable from Google. As it opens itself up to the world, will it become a face book for the world? Or will the idea of a face book crumble once it is taken out of college campuses?

Credits to Frank Yu for pointing out the face book to Facebook design metaphor.