Adaptive Path Blog

Tomorrow kicks off the IA Summit 2009…a gathering of souls with a passion and vocation for information, design and making things findable (oh, and so much more!) It promises to be an energetic and spirited conversation, filled with workshops, talks, hallway synchronicity, new perspectives and new directions.

I’m really excited about attending two of the pre-conference workshops: Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times with Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Matt Milan and Joe Lamantia; and The Architecture of Social Websites with Christina Wodtke, Bryce Glass, Christian Crumlish, and Joshua Porter. There’s a whole host of interesting ideas bubbling around the IAsphere this year. The week promises to be a true high point of the season.

Adaptive Path folks will be out and about, so track us down…

• You can find Leah at the pre-conference workshop Sketchboards and Prototyping — Methods for Rapid Iterative Design (co-taught with Todd Zaki Warfel.)
• On Friday, Chiara’s telling us all about The Semantic Web: What IAs Need To Know About Web 3.0
• On Sunday, I’ll share my adoration for my favorite lifeform (and the lessons it holds for us) in Lessons from Slime Mold: How to Survive and Thrive in Ever-Changing Organizational Environments
• And stay for the rousing end with Jesse James Garrett, who sends us back into the world inspired and invigorated with his closing keynote.

We’re seeking a good place to have a round of drinks on Adaptive Path on Saturday evening. So if you’re at the Summit, watch twitter or grab one of us to find the place.

See ya in Memphis!

I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Sara Beckman, a member of the faculty at the Haas School of Business. Sara will be speaking on Communicating the Value of Design at our upcoming MX 2009 conference.

Embracing your inner “quant” changes the game for many design leaders. How do you move from the often subjective language of design to speaking a new dialect of business impact measured in numbers? In this conversation, Sara talks about approaches to assessing overall value, how having empirical data can unlock key strategic conversations, and tips for focusing efforts on the measurements that matter most.

You can read the full essay here.

But the essay is just one step in this very important conversation…hear more from Sara and other design leaders (and hobnob with the folks at the vanguard of leading experiences) at MX 2009 in San Francisco, March 1-3.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

I admit it: living and breathing the Internet, I sometimes forget where we were and how far we’ve come.

And then there are times when I look back and gasp. This KRON news story from 1981 does this.

Really, the coverage speaks for itself:

So the only question remaining is…if we can come this far in about 28 years, then where’s my jet pack?

It’s exciting to see smart, thinky people’s ideas hit the uber-big time. And if they are visual-thinky types, it just makes my heart go pitty-pat all the faster.

So we’re thrilled that Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin is culling kudos from across the digital realm. We first met Dan in September, when he spoke at Adaptive Path about his inspirational ways of integrating visual communications for solving business problems. His insights are intriguing, fun and insightful, and the event was a hit.

Now we get to congratulate Dan for his major wins in the publishing arena:

• Amazon:  #5 of the Top 10 Books 2008 : Business and Investing
• Business Week : Best innovation & design books of 2008
• Fast Company : Best Business Books of 2008
• Best of BNET : #4 of the Best Business Books of 2008
• Business Pundit: #4 of the 10 Best Business Books of 2008

Sad to have missed the September event? No worries! Dan will be speaking at MX 2009 : Managing Experience through Creative Leadership, March 1-3, 2009. It’s your chance to hear what all the buzz is about, and to claim your inner visual practitioner.

Congratulations to Dan, and please join us in March to see him up close and personal at this marvy Adaptive Path event.

You can register for MX 2009 here.

(psst! Between now and the end of the year, you save 15% off our already discounted registration fees with the promotion code RNSB (Register Now Save Big.) But don’t tell anyone else. It’s just between us…)

Braaaaains from Brain Traffic, that is. Congrats to our colleagues over at Brain Traffic for launching their site redesign!

Kristina Halvorson and her merry band have taken up the charge of filling the world with smart, useful web content. As thinkers, do-ers and dreamers, Brain Traffic is committed to making sure that words are a critical part of any online strategy.

I had the pleasure of co-authoring an essay with Kristina earlier this year (Death to Lorum Ipsum and Other Adventures in Content) and her quote captures the essence of the content challenge:

I feel sorry for the poor, poor words that no one wants to take responsibility for. And I feel especially sorry for site users who end up with a terrible experience because, after all the money was spent on UX strategy and interface design, the content still ended up sucking. — Kristina

It’s an important topic in the nature of products: what we write, the tone of voice, the way a product or service communicates about itself is shifting to become evocative, not prescriptive. And our content strategies, words, and writing need to evolve as well. It’s easy to fall into the trap that words belong to someone else. But that’s increasingly a strategy for failure, not for success.

I’m eager to read what Brain Traffic has to say on the topic.

Mmmmm content braaaaains. My favorite.

When a long-standing Internet brand and IAC property redesigns, it’s bound to garner much buzz and attention. Citysearch, a pioneer in the local search market, recently unveiled the beta of their site redesign. Adaptive Path is thrilled to see the beta and is proud to announce our involvement in that effort.

In early 2008, my team and I had the opportunity to work closely with the very talented Citysearch team to redesign the Citysearch web experience and to take local neighborhood search to the next level.

As you may have read on TechCrunch the beta site’s key themes ripple through the entire redesign:

• More local : Expanded local coverage now reaches deep into your local neighborhood. It’s easier than ever to find local businesses and activities that are near to you, since the new site hones in on over 75,000 towns and neighborhoods. And the information about local businesses restores the balance among key voices: users, city editors and merchants.
• More social :  It’s easier than ever to participate, contribute reviews and post opinions. The new site also provides deeper connections with social networks, starting with Facebook Connect.
• More intuitive : Streamlined search and navigation gets you to content easier than ever, while simplified registration and review posting makes it quick to get involved.

Citysearch was hard at work on redeveloping their technical infrastructure when they approached Adaptive Path last winter. Adaptive Path began working intensely with Citysearch to design the interfaces and interactions that would leverage the new opportunities available in their technology platform. The beta site represents the resulting work from the Citysearch-Adaptive Path collaboration. The level of collaboration with the Citysearch team was intense. We worked side-by-side to envision the new site and craft the new Web experience.

As the site design rolls from beta into full launch, there will be an opportunity to discuss our work in greater detail, but for the time being, I want to express my thanks to the people that made all of this possible. On the AP side, I want to thank my colleagues Chiara Fox, Lucie Moses, Margaret Shear, Peter Merholz and Todd Elliott for ensuring that the resulting Citysearch experience was exceptional, and for the energy and enthusiasm that characterized our collaboration with Citysearch.

I would also like to thank the immensely talented and dedicated Citysearch team: Annouchka Yameogo-Stanzler, David Arnerich, Edmond To, Eric Small, Hal Oreif, Holly Van Dyke, J.F. Boisvert, Mike Phillips, Moonie Lantion, Nils Devine, Robert Moritz, Rob Rhoden, Sue Antico, and the ever-inspired, ever-energetic Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti.

The beta represents a new phase in the Citysearch experience…one that will fundamentally improve user engagement in local content and knit together social media and local search. I’m delighted to have reached this milestone alongside the Citysearch team, and eager for what comes next.

Read more about the beta launch:

• The New Citysearch Launches in Beta, Goes Hyper-Social With Facebook Connect [TechCrunch]
• Citysearch pulls a total overhaul [CNet]
• IAC’s Citysearch Covers 75,000 Cities, Neighborhoods [MediaWeek]
• Citysearch Integrates Facebook Connect and Enters Hyperlocal Review Race [Mashable]
• Citysearch Becomes More Social and Mobile [ReadWriteWeb]
• Citysearch Rebuilt to be More Social, Local and Mobile [Citysearch]

I get a lot of emails about stickynotes: art projects, new products, interesting tools. There’s a lot going on in the world of “small things that stick to other things.”

But one thing is still missing: a simple, flexible tool for doing lightweight stickynote sorting and clustering exercises remotely. I’ve looked into a variety of desktop apps, web apps, etc. and they all have some achilles heel that keeps them from doing exactly what I want. (I know, I’m picky, but still…)

Then a while back, I got an email from Mike Padilla who came to my Stickynote Ninja session at UX week 2007. He let me know about a new service he was developing: an a note-based tool for remote review for web app/site prototypes.

Protonotes is now live and it’s really nifty. It’s not really designed for remote collaboration in general, it’s designed pretty specifically for annotating prototypes within an organization. But it has 3 wonderful things going for it:

1. It’s super-easy to implement: in 10 minutes, you can have it up and running. All you do is copy & paste a few lines of JavaScript into your prototype to activate the app.
2. It’s lightweight: the interface is nothing but a bar across the top of your app, so it doesn’t get in the way, and it toggles with hide/show.
3. It’s agnostic: it works on all platforms and many, many browsers, and works the same way each time. So you know what to expect.

Oh, and it’s free.

After playing with it, it seemed to do most of what I wanted…the only thing missing was a surface to put the notes on. So I created a super-simple set of layouts to experiment with.

You can see the simple layouts and play around with the notes at: http://www.intelleto.com/protonotes

Just keep it clean, people.

In the daytime, I work on creating experiences, building models of abstract concepts, making interfaces, feeling deluged by email and navigating the myriad of human contacts that make work and life play nice together.

But when I get home, I sketch, hum and play with math.

I’ll make one thing clear: I’m terrible at computation. I still count of my fingers on occasion. I thank the heavens for the little digital calculator on my computer. But conceptual math? I’m all over it…Archimedes, Fermat, Bernoulli, Babbage, Lovelace, Mersenne, Fourier, Turing, Pascal, Fibonacci, Mobius, Descartes, Erdos, Polya…yum, yum.

There’s something elemental and patternist about math. The principles are ripe with metaphor and opportunities to apply to everyday life. Looking for transformation over time? Have a ball with combinatorics. Wondering why your inbox always approaches zero but never gets there? Hello, calculus! Yearning to think outside the box? Welcome to Abbot’s Flatland.

So today, when I picked up George Polya’s 1945 classic How to Solve It I was again inspired by the beauty, the simplicity, the utter power of math as a system to better understand life. Starting with the basics of thinking through a problem, Polya’s approach is applicable to a wide range of problems well outside the realm of numbers.

For example, I’m about to head into a series of field research interviews with people in their homes. I’ve been working to center my brain to prepare for the interview sessions. And here is what Polya says about Getting Acquainted with a problem:

Q: Where should I start?
A: Start from the statement of the problem.

Q: What can I do?
A: Visualize the problem as a whole as clearly and as vividly as you can. Do not concern yourself with details at the moment.

Q: What can I gain by doing so?
A: You should understand the problem, familiarize yourself with it, impress its purpose on your mind. The attention bestowed on the problem may also stimulate your memory and prepare for the recollection of relevant points.

That’s a clear, concise message with direct applicability:

• Know the problems and questions: What are we trying to accomplish with this research? What do we need to learn?
• Prepare yourself to wear the experience: Be vivid…what issues exist for people? What are their experiences in day-to-day life?
• Open your mind to seeing the right things: Be in tune with the problem so that your brain is primed to receive the most relevant, potent learnings from the experience.

Math, like design, is best when the concepts are so simple they become obvious. And design work, like math, is best when it’s clearly focused on solving important problems. That’s good stuff.

Thanks, Polya. You’re the best.

Tuesday’s event with Dan Roam was a lot of fun. He joined us at Adaptive Path to speak about his book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Dan is a warm, funny speaker with a wealth of stories about using pictures to solve complex problems ranging from business strategy to product design. You can see some of the photos from the event on Flickr.

I sketchnoted Dan’s talk to capture many of the ideas that he talked about. There was a lot of great info, but the phrase that stuck with me most was “The more human the picture, the more human the response.”

I think this is a wildly compelling idea. By making pictures by hand, we open up the minds of the people we are communicating with, so that they can share in these ideas. Hand-drawn images are imperfect, gestural and natural. And it’s these human qualities that make them so engaging and accessible to others.

I hear designers and strategists talk about communicating design concepts, and one theme that comes up again and again is to match the fidelity of the artifact with the nature of the feedback you are looking for. The general rule of thumb is:

• Low fidelity = High-level feedback
• High fidelity = detailed/low-level feedback

If you’ve ever presented a well-rendered, detailed illustration to communicate a rough concept and been frustrated that the feedback is more along the lines of “that’s not a good typeface” or “that data is incorrect,” then sketching may be just the tool you need.

Simple, hand-drawn pictures can’t escape their low-fi quality. Yet I think their appeal is about more than just being low-fi. People are messy and complex. Perfection may be an aspiration, but when we actually encounter things that seem “perfect” we often suspect they’re fake. Hand-crafted objects feel more authentic than manufactured ones. As human beings, we respond to natural, imperfect things with more empathy that we do to polished perfection.

Authentic, imperfect, natural, gestural. That’s a great list of design criteria. I’m all for making more human pictures that invite a more human response.

We’re excited to host Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems ad Selling Ideas with Pictures. He’ll be speaking at Adaptive Path on Tuesday, 9/23, so c’mon over and get your sketch on with Dan!

Dan will present on how to distill complex ideas into easily shared and memorable sketches. If you’ve ever stared blankly at a white board, a sticky note, or the back of a napkin this is an evening to get you inspired and started making concepts into sketches.

If you’d like to see some of Dan’s work and read what he’s thinking about, check out his blog here: http://www.digitalroam.typepad.com/. You can also read about Dan in a recent Fast Company article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/124/the-napkin-sketch.html. Signed copies of Dan’s book will be available for sale.

Details:

• Tuesday September 23, 2008
• 6:00pm – 8:00pm
• @ Adaptive Path :363 Brannan Street, San Francisco, California 94107
• Beverages and nibbles will be provided.
• Please show up on time as the talk will start promptly at 6:45.

You can rsvp here.

Hope to see you then!