Adaptive Path Blog

A couple evenings ago, Adaptive Path hosted a pair of presentations on content and copy. The first speaker, Kristina Halvorson, hails from Minneapolis firm Brain Traffic. Her talk was great, (and you can see it on Slideshare) but I found it bugged me a little bit. In it, she talked about the role of content strategy, and how it is often overlooked in the development of websites. I wouldn’t disagree, but I found the tone of the discussion reminscent of discussions about information architecture in 1998… We poor unloved souls who are brought into the process too late and aren’t given the credibility we deserve. Why won’t anyone pay attention to us?

I didn’t have time to ask the question, but I think content strategists have placed themselves in this situation, because they have not drawn a connection between their work and real business value. During the first web bust, information architects and interaction designers did a lot to demonstrate how their work lead to behavior changes that had significant impacts on the metrics that companies care about (I’m not talking just about ROI, but simply tying one’s work to a business’ larger goals).

I haven’t seen the content strategy community do the same. How will businesses benefit from content strategy? By making that case, content strategists will not be the poor shmoes asked to replace “lorem ipsum” on wireframes, and will instead be involved in the planning and strategy discussions.

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Two of this afternoon’s speakers hail from software — Bill Buxton, now at Microsoft, and Scott Cook, founder of Intuit.

Buxton gives perhaps the highest good-ideas-to-minutes ratio of any speaker I’ve seen. My notes were extensive. You can get a sense of what he said by watching his talk from Interaction08 (video embedded at the bottom)– he covered many of the same themes, though he did gear it toward a more senior audience.

Some key ideas from Bill’s talk:

• Software companies rarely produce more than 2 products wholly in house. Adobe has had two - Illustrator and Acrobat. Everything else came in through acquisition.
• In the field of building construction, around 20% of costs go towards the design and architecture. Is that true in software and interactive products?
• The first industrial designers (Dreyfuss, Loewy, etc.) all started their businesses in the depression, and their businesses lasted through WWII. These people had a seat with the executives, and were considered crucial to the business’ success. After WWII, designer got pushed further and further down the org chart.
• It’s all about where design is situated. IDEO’s designers aren’t necessarily any better than the designers within an organization… But, because of their high fees, they are brought in at an executive level. The difference is having design at the executive level, not in the talent and capability of the designer.
• If you cannot come up with 5 equally valid solutions to a problem, you are probably not a designer. Come in with an open mind, and multiple solutions. And come in with your mind not made up. This is essential for criticism. If you have 5 ideas, none of which you’ve decided is best, when those ideas are criticized, *you* are not being criticized. If you only come up with one idea, and that idea is criticized, it’s easy to feel that *you* are being criticized.

Scott’s talk was mostly a story of Intuit and its success, which has largely been driven by observing users struggle with things, and addressing the unsolved problems in those struggles. Intuit has recently started a “design4Delight” initiative in order to get their customer experience mojo back. It was a good talk, but didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Except for learning that when QuickBooks launched, it had fewer features than competitors (fewer than half, in fact), and became the market leader within one month.

He also shared this quote from Intuit’s Operating Values. It’s very similar to what Brandon talks about with The Long Wow… It’s always nice to get further validation.

“What do we mean by wow? Wow means creating customer enthusiasm and delight. IT means giving customers dramatically more value than they expect…We know we’re succeeding when we inspire our cusotmers to go out and tell others about our company.”

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I’m in Chicago attending the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference. I’ll be blogging thoughts inspired by speakers.

The event started with a presentation by John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC. He emphasized that the primary challenge organizations are facing as they move forward is overcoming outdated structures. This is familiar territory to anyone who has read David Weinberger for the last ten years… Brown essentially recapitulated Weinberger’s calls for a the “hyperlinked organization.”

The basic idea is that our top-down, hierarchical organizations, pioneered by folks like Henry Ford, are optimized for efficiency of delivery. That’s fine in a manufacturing economy, but we’re seeing it breakdown in a services-lead economy.

He stressed that as a society we’re shifting from being interested in knowledge to being interested in the act of knowing, and as part of that, moving from Homo sapiens to Homo faber — we think through making. He identified the trend of tinkering as part of this, that we learn through fiddling with things. There was a death of tinkering from 1980-1995, when locked-down, microchip technologies made it difficult to take things apart and mess with them, but that we’ve seen a rebirth of tinkering, largely driven by communities finding one another online. (He didn’t mention Make magazine, or the Maker Faire, but clearly these are also part of this movement.)

One thing I wish Brown had done is to reflect on how tinkering is part of the social construction of technology, in that how we tinker, and what we make, comments on who we are as a people.

Brown was followed by Michael Citrelli of Pitney Bowes, who spoke about Dossia, and initiative driven by a group of companies that tries to deliver on the promise of personally-controlled health records, and is a reaction to the skyrocketing costs and less-than-satisfactory delivery of health care in the United States.

The morning closed out with the always entertaining Larry Keeley, who talked about the role of innovation in health care. He suggested a number of approaches for identifiying innovation:

• study new models (such as surgery happening in Asia, at resorts, that costs patients less than procedures in the United States)
• study the high end (such as PinnacleCare, a premium service that navigates the byzantine world of health care for you)
• study the bottom (such as Minute Clinic, which provides fast, affordable health care within CVS pharmacies

Larry also provided a quote from Charles Darwin that we should have included in Subject to Change:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

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With the addition of three more speakers, we have finalized the UX Week 2008 schedule. We still don’t have all the bios, headshots, and session abstracts in, but we do know what is happening at every point throughout the schedule.

On Day 1, we’ve added Leah Buley, bringing her “Being A UX Team of One” talk, which was one of the highest-rated talks at this year’s IA Summit.

On Day 2, we’ve added Current TV. Current is the groundbreaking cable channel whose goal is no less than to democratize media. From inception, they’ve been a multi-channel media brand, with equal emphasis in online and offline. We’ll learn about the challenges for designing for a fractured media landscape, how to incorporate quality user-generated content, and maybe even a little about what it means to have Al Gore as your boss.

On Day 4, we’ve added keynote speaker Michael B. Johnson from computer animation pioneers Pixar. Michael works in the Moving Pictures Group, designing, developing and supporting the in-house pipeline for Story, Art and Editorial. Michael will share with us Pixar’s creative process, with stories from their actual work.

Sign up by Saturday, May 31, to be eligible for discounted registration. And use the promotional code BLOG to get an extra 10% off!

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We wrote last week about LIVESTRONG Day. Adaptive Path has many LIVESTRONG supporters. Additionally, there will be a presentation at UX Week 2008 by the folks from Milkshake Media, who worked on the design of LIVESTRONG brand experience.

To celebrate LIVESTRONG, we’ve pledged to donate $100 for every 4-day UX Intensive-Minneapolis or UX Week 2008 registration we receive through today, Monday May 19th. And use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price.

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Microsoft catches a lot of flack for some of their user experience decisions, but one invention that received a lot of warm feelings from the community is the new Microsoft Office, featuring the Ribbon. Jensen Harris, who has been writing about the development of the new Office UI for years now, has just signed on to present his Story of the Ribbon at UX Week.

Don’t forget, if you register by Monday May 19th, $100 of your registration fee goes to support the LIVESTRONG Foundation.

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Among the podcasts I subscribe to is BusinessWeek’s “Innovation of the Week,” featuring interviews with people on the subject of design and innovation. So I was excited when BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella asked me to talk with him about our MX 2008 conference, and our new book. You can listen to the interview.

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As Roland mentioned in an earlier post, last week we had a lunch time visit from Andrew Blau, the Global Business Network’s head of practice. It was a great talk, and the team started sketching all these ideas they had in relation to what was discussed.

GBN is best known for their scenario planning practice, wherein they work with a client to create a set of stories (usually 3 or 4) about the client’s business 10 years out. These stories are purposefully diverse, so that they can help the business prepare for any number of possible futures.

It made me think about the role of futures in our experience design work. Design is an inherently futurist activity — planning and sketching things that don’t yet exist. We’ve begun to engage directly with futurist notions in our work, whether it’s tangible futures (designing the poster that will trumpet our success), concept videos (what will it be like to interact with mobile devices in 3-5 years), prototypes, and more. What I realized is that, in our practice at least, our application of futures thinking pretty much stops 3-5 years out. I scrawled the following on a whiteboard, as I considered how our experience design work and GBN’s scenario planning work complements one another. Be warned, it’s barely half-baked!

I found myself wondering if experience design is in it’s nature limited to crafting futures no more than 3-5 years out (what we generically call Visioning). If you get out much farther than that, your ties to designing for actual human engagement get pretty thin, because there are so many variables that you’re needing to design for multiple possible futures, which is quite taxing.

Now, I don’t know if I believe that experience design is limited in this fashion… Even we are working on a concept video for 2018. But I wanted to get this out there because I think there’s a lot of opportunity to explore the intersection and integration of experience design and futurism, the role that experience design can have in charting paths for organizations. I’d love to hear what you think!

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Just a quick note that after tomorrow, the registration prices for our UX Intensive  Minneapolis and UX Week 2008 events goes up. UX Intensive offers 4 days of intense training on core user experience practice. UX Week mixes inspiration with information, offering sessions on a variety of essential topics, half-day workshops on subjects like storytelling and sketching, and field trips to museums to learn how experiences work in other realms.

Use the promotional code BLOG and get an extra 10% off!

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The schedule for UX Week 2008 continues to form, and with every update, there are amazing new speakers.

We have added a number of main-stage speakers. There is design critic, science fiction author, and all-around mindblower Bruce Sterling, the information architect for TheDailyShow.com Audrey Chen, and human-robot interaction designer Aaron Powers. Peter Samis, curator at SFMOMA, will discuss the design of the whole visitor experience for their upcoming Frida Kahlo exhibition. And Katherine Jones and Randall Macon from Milkshake Media, will talk about their experience designing brands that build community, including Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG Foundation.

We’ve also added workshops. Adaptive Path founder and book author Indi Young will teach how to Unpack Stories to Serve People Better. CMU Design professor Mark Baskinger will follow up his excellent article in the latest Interactions magazine with a workshop on Drawing Ideas: Quick Sketching for Interaction Design.

The workshops are new to UX Week this year. On Day 1 and Day 2 we’re having seven of them run simultaneously — you’ll have to choose one each day. We are giving preferential choice based on when you register. The earlier you register, the better chance you’ll get your top choice! We will launch a workshop picker closer to the event.

Also, Sign up by April 30 and save $400 off the full registration price. Use the promotional code BLOG and receive an additional 10% off!

To give an additional taste of what’s to come, you should see Johnny C. Lee’s presentation from TED. It’s only 6 minutes long (we’ll have him on stage much longer.)

And here’s a recent talk by Bruce Sterling at an Interaction Design conference in Germany.

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