Adaptive Path Blog

When one of the largest, most heavily-trafficked sites on the web redesigns, it’s bound to make some news. MySpace is launching a series of improvements to its design and architecture, and Adaptive Path is enormously proud to announce our involvement in that effort. For the past six months, my team and I have collaborated with an amazing team of MySpace designers and engineers to create the next evolution of the MySpace user experience.

As you may have read on TechCrunch, next Wednesday a completely redesigned MySpace global navigation and site home page will launch, bringing what Adaptive Path focuses on – constructing elegant and intuitive experiences for users – to a massive scale. With each design decision being weighed by its impact on tens of millions of users, this redesign represents some of the most challenging and exciting work we’ve ever had the opportunity to engage in.

MySpace began its redesign efforts in September, and has been gradually changing the site since then. Adaptive Path began working with MySpace shortly thereafter, and the changes coming this week represent the debut of the MySpace-Adaptive Path collaboration. There will be opportunity to discuss our work in detail, but for the time being, I want to express some gratitude to the people that made all of this possible. On the AP side, I want to thank my colleagues Teresa Brazen, Alexa Andrzejewski, Todd Wilkens, Todd Elliott and Jesse James Garrett for ensuring the exceptional quality of our work and our collaboration with MySpace. I also would like to thank the immensely talented and dedicated MySpace team: David Leslie, Mari Bower, Phil Cheung, Sharon Nguyen, Jennifer Zweben, and Jake Levine.

The level of executive sponsorship for this effort was amazing. This redesign would not have happened without the efforts and oversight of Tom Anderson, Tom Andrus, Steve Pearman, Amit Kapor and Chris DeWolfe.

The upcoming launch represents the first phase in a MySpace Renaissance that will fundamentally improve the MySpace user experience. I’m delighted to have reached this milestone alongside the MySpace team, and eager for what comes next.

Read what people are saying:

• Screenshots of MySpace’s redesign, coming next week
• MySpace to release major site redesign
• MySpace to Shake up Its Layout

I’ve posted the slides from my presentation at last week’s MX Conference here in San Francisco. Titled “A House Divided: Two Perspectives on Managing the Customer Experience,” this talk is an evolution of my past efforts to pull from my prior career as a professional cook.

Here, I use my restaurant experience as a lens to interpret Glushko and Tabas’ work on getting front and back stage organizations to cooperate in delivering superior experiences. I hope you enjoy it.

Tony Conrad announced today that the Sphere team have been acquired by AOL. Sphere approached Adaptive Path in their “early days as a fledgling blog search engine,” looking for assistance in translating their technology and vision into a compelling product. As the interaction designer who lead the engagement, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the co-founders, working to refine their vision for Sphere into the first iteration of  the product.

Since our work together, the evolution of that vision has seen the launch (and rapid success) of the Sphere Related Content Widget, the piling up of premier media partnerships, and a great amount of buzz. With this latest announcement, I’m delighted to see how far the product and team have come since our first sessions around the whiteboard. Adaptive Path is happy to extend our congratulations to the entire Sphere team on this accomplishment.

This week I had the opportunity to talk with Adaptive Path’s old friend Matt Jones, Co-founder and Designer of Dopplr. He’s one of our featured speakers at next month’s MX conference. Some excerpts from our conversation over instant messenger follow, and the whole interview can be found over at my own blog, the Second Verse. Matt and I share a mutual love for some very particular (peculiar?) subjects, so the interview explores some unpredictable territory: the Situationists, Jack Kirby inventions, Grant Morrison, movement in hyperspace, and what the success of the iPhone means to the rest of the mobile device industry. Matt was kind enough to share a ton of information about his perspective and his influences – I hope you enjoy reading the interview.

Also, be sure to remember to register by March 31st for MX – On April 1st, the price goes up. MX is on April 20-22 in San Francisco, the price right now is $1,495. After March 31st, the price jumps to $1,595. (You also get a free iPod Shuffle when you register for MX by March 31st). So register today!

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Adaptive Path emeritus Lane Becker has been very busy building his newest endeavor, Satisfaction, the “people-powered customer service” application. He and his team have organized a one-day conference here in San Francisco called (appropriately enough) Customer Service is the New Marketing. The event takes place on February 4th, and is focused on imparting some important ideas about “how smart organizations are turning customer service from just a cost center into an engine for building culture and creating evangelists.”

The speaker list looks great; in particular, I’m looking forward to listening to Alex Frankel (who’s book, Punching In, I’ve been greatly enjoying) and Michael Murphy, head of customer service for Virgin (APers are HUGE fans of Virgin America’s airline experience). As a favor to readers of the Adaptive Path blog, Satisfaction is offering a 25% discount code for registration; just type in PATH when you get prompted.

Brandon Schauer, myself, and a few additional members of the AP team will be in attendance. We hope to see you there.

I was pleased to be asked to contribute an article to Ambidextrous Magazine (from Stanford’s d.school) in their upcoming “Food” issue (available soon). What’d I write about? Well, it’s been a number of years since I stopped cooking professionally, but I have been struck by what I think some interaction designers could learn from watching how a restaurant kitchen operates. My original pitch sounded like this:

Chefs organize their cooks and their space with a few key principles in mind: maximizing consistency of product, ensuring creative freedom to experiment, and encouraging effective problem solving under incredibly stressful conditions… For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance these principles effectively.

If you’d like to read the article, it’s available here as a three page PDF. If you take the opportunity to read it, please let me know what you think. Huge thanks to Amanda Willoughby and Evany Thomas for their careful editing work, and to Lora Oehlberg and Mike Pihulic from Ambidextrous for making it a pleasure to contribute to the magazine.

Over at TechCrunch, Nick Gonzalez does a good job of highlighting some of the primary features from the upcoming relaunch of Plazes. After spending a bunch of time in Berlin over the past few months working with the Plazes team, it’s great to see the product we collaborated on get some pre-release buzz.

In writing up what has changed between versions, Nick points out many of the frustrations that Plazes originally brought Adaptive Path in to help resolve. In pushing to simplify the product, AP helped Plazes build something that was a truer expression of their desire to facilitate interactions between people out there in the real world. We helped them to clean up how people interacted with the platform across channels in the hope of making it useful, consistent, and something that fit in nicely with behaviors their users were already engaged in.

Incidentally, the “simplification” that Adaptive Path and Plazes were able to pull off wound up forming the ideas at the heart of my Future of Web Design presentation from last month. The deck and the podcast are both hosted at the FOWD site.

The Plazes crew has unveiled the new version to a handful of preview users, and is still tightening bolts and touching up paint. I wish them luck with the final pre-launch activities, and look forward to the unveiling.

Carson Systems was kind enough to invite me to speak at their Future of Web Design conference in London last week. I took the opportunity to do some thinking about what trends I think are starting to emerge, and what role experience designers (and UCD principles) will play in what’s about to happen.

During my work on Plazes, what I realized was that a lot of new products out there are finding it necessary to change directions from the goals they had at launch. These are teams like Riya (now Like) and Topix, who are eschewing traditional iterative development in favor of extreme redefinition of their offering and its value to the audience.

The audience for FOWD was very diverse, but the presentation that emerged from my thoughts on product redefinition wound up being pretty warmly received. I framed my thoughts with some parallels to evolutionary biology, and tried to give some helpful tactics for how experience designers might go about preparing their team and their product for the “punctuation” that redefinition can cause.

You can download the slides from the talk, “User-Centered Design Principles for Evolving Products” here. Huge thanks to the Carson folks for the opportunity and the hospitality, and thanks to everyone in the audience for the kind reception.

In his post yesterday, my colleague Dan pointed out some of Twitter’s flaws, including the potential of twitters to verge on banality, as well as cause attenuation conflicts. While I’ve been a fan of the service since launch, I’m not blind to those flaws. More than anything, I’m excited to see the evolution of the product — I’m waiting for all of these little bits of ambient data that Twitter shoots back and forth to resolve into something more meaningful.

Increasing the contextual value of Twitter messages should happen without impacting my normal use of Twitter; any changes should ideally dissolve into current behavior. I’ve been saying for a while that presence and status go together like chocolate and peanut butter — they combine to define part of your online identity. So why not simplify matters and get the systems I use to communicate them to work together?

I was thinking about this during SXSW, when I experimented with sending SMS to both Twitter and Plazes at the same time. I knew that if I sent “at casino el camino” to both systems, I could simultaneously let my friends know my status and log my location for my presence history on Plazes. Even better, the friends that I have on Plazes could query “Casino El Camino?” to Plazes SMS to see who else was there (without having to spam everyone on Twitter).

What I’d like to see is Twitter integrate some of how Plazes parses SMS, since it is already using a structured grammar to get valuable bits of context from the messages I send it. In full disclosure, defining the Plazes SMS user experience is the first portion of the work I’ve done with Plazes to launch. The team and I worked hard to make it both easy to use and extensible — it employs a grammar of “at”, “in” and “on” phrases to allow natural expressions of location. I believe that an integration effort between the two products would allow the Plazes’ parsing mechanism to listen in on my twitters, so that when I send “having a martini at Pony Bar” to Twitter, it could be parsed to pull out the location data. Even better, it could do so without requiring any change in how I normally write.

Of course, not every message would include an “at,” in” or “on” but the ones that did might contain a place that Plazes knows about, that it could log to its system and associate with my account. And there’s the value add for this integration — my normal behavior of broadcasting status now generates a presence stream that can be archived, queried, and used to help me coordinate my activities and interactions with my friends. For those who don’t want the service, simple options for turning location-parsing on or off should be implemented. To encourage people to use both services (and bring their communities closer together), I’d love to see both Twitter and Plazes adopt OpenID for sign in.

As we move away from overly-centralized collaboration and coordination tools, I’m encouraged to see lightweight platforms like Twitter and Plazes emerge and become popular. I believe the two provide naturally complimentary offerings, and any form of cooperation between them could benefit a whole host of users.

Our friend Jeff Robbins of Lullabot sings the praises (literally) of one of our favorite platforms: The Drupal Song.

It’s pretty catchy, and seriously, no one’s out there writing songs about Vignette.