Adaptive Path Blog

We have some serious Deborah Adler fans floating around the Adaptive Path offices and are excited to have Deborah keynote day two of this year’s UX Week. I remember the first time I saw her work on the Target® ClearRxSM. I said to myself “That is exactly the kind of work I want to be doing!” She took a serious life threatening problem and, driven by passion and curiosity, elegantly transformed the way an entire industry thinks about the distribution of medicine.

Register for UX Week before May 11 and get early bird pricing!

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Here at Adaptive Path, we enjoy bringing smart people together to share ideas and spark debate. As the Program Chair for this year’s UX Week, I am having a great time scouting talks, discussing ideas with speakers, and planning a fun, challenging experience for you this summer.

With that, I’m pleased to announce the User Experience Week 2007 agenda. It’s a work in progress, with more speakers and events to be added in the coming weeks. Hope to see you there!

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Many times, the most effective interactions aren’t media- and or technology-based. They are just people, interacting with each other. I was reminded of this today at SFO, waiting for my flight to Las Vegas for the IA Summit.

I travel a lot. As I stood at the check-in kiosk, staring at the “delayed” notice flashing insistently at me, I got that sinking feeling in my stomach, felt my bags get heavier and my throat get drier. Travel stress set in.

I staggered over to the security line, boarding passes and ID in one hand, wallet in the other. My backpack and camera bag were falling off my shoulders.

“If you are carrying mascara, toothpaste, mouthwash, hair gel, whiskey, vodka, liquid makeup, lipstick, lotion, or any other liquid it must be under 3 ounces and you must remove it from your bag for inspection. All liquids must be under 3 oz in size. This means that if you have a 9 oz tube of toothpaste with only one ounce of toothpaste left in it, you cannot take it through security. If you have water bottles you must…”

Like a town crier, the TSA officer’s booming voice listed the things you could bring and the things you couldn’t. He cracked some jokes. People giggled. They asked him questions.

He went on and on. “He thinks he’s funny,” I muttered. But I wasn’t laughing — I was tired and annoyed. Just as I began to feel like some sad proletariat in an anti-utopian novel, I heard the following exchange:

“Do they make you say that stuff?” a passenger asked. My ears perked up.

“No, but it seems to help.” the TSA officer said brightly. “We have this sign,” he gestured towards a sign I had completely missed, “but it turns out nobody reads the sign and nobody listens to recorded voices.”

Standing there, stressed out in the security line, I was reminded:

I can design all the signs I want.

I can record James Earl Jones dramatically reading liquid requirements.

I can make web sites, pamphlets, and kiosks.

But, if harried air travelers don’t listen to recorded voices and they don’t read the signs, well, I might as well be Sisyphus, pushing a giant rock up a hill for all eternity. And I’ll bet a bazillion dollars those harried travelers aren’t checking the web site for liquid regulation updates.

As the TSA officer reminded me, people will listen to a human being, especially a funny one, standing right in front of them. If he tells them what they need to know and nicely answers questions they have, well, the travelers might actually listen. His solution may not be elegant or flashy, but it worked.

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In my experience, many of us in the design profession have perfectionist tendencies. We are often idealistic with high standards for ourselves, our work, and others. There is nothing wrong with striving towards excellence as long as it doesn’t paralyze you. Which, of course, is the fundamental problem with perfectionism — we become so hung up with creating the perfect thing that we plan it, we think about it, but we never do it.

One way to deal with perfectionism is to focus more on the quantity of output rather than quality. If you make a lot, you are more likely to develop something of higher quality. In my photographic work, I certainly know that shooting in quantity yields a richer library from which to build my body of work. The more I shoot, the more I see, the more I understand about my work, the better I get. Successful writers also have similar habits. Write regularly, write a lot, write first, edit later.

I would argue that some design and development processes tend to institutionalize perfectionism and ultimately result in lower quality products. With tight timelines and budgets, it can seem like you have only one chance to get it right. Waterfall models, common in the enterprise or outsourcing, often require that designers deliver complete “perfect” designs to be perfectly executed. Organizational pressures to mitigate risk means teams spend a lot of time planning and validating work which can make it difficult to really explore problems creatively.

A question for you: What tools have you used to combat perfectionism either in yourself or within your organization?

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Over the last year at the Institute of Design, I have been researching the tools, methods, and processes that highly successful organizations use to continuously produce high quality work. I spent some time with the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago-based theater best known for their long-running production “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” Each week for the last sixteen years, the Neos write, direct, and perform 30 plays in 60 minutes (yup, that’s about 2 minutes each). According to the tenets of Neo-futurism, Writer/Performers must draw from direct experience. The result is a kind of living newspaper, filled with funny, political, intensely personal, even gross-me-out outrageous performances.

The Neos sell-out their weekly shows regularly (and buy pizza for the lucky audience if a sell-out occurs). They have die-hard fans that return year after year, gaggles of friends in tow. Since the Neos develop 2-12 new plays per week, you could conceivably attend the show once a month and never see the same play twice.

What’s interesting to me about the Neos is that members have internalized a highly efficient system that both supports wild creativity and forces ideas to be tested. Within this system, the Neos can play and explore. They have methods for evaluating the viability of a play, for facilitating collective decision-making (what plays stay in, for instance). They even use a volunteer system to share the less desirable tasks like running meetings. Finally, they deal with territorialism by giving Writer/Performers complete control (with input from other members) over their own plays.

I see a great deal of frustration and lament about existing design processes. As the web grows up, it seems we are wrestling with our own legacy issues. Many very smart people have developed all kinds of ways to support collaboration. Sometimes processes work really well. And sometimes they just get in the way.

When I was a kid, I spent hours climbing trees and hanging upside down from the branches. I could see my house from above, from different angles, and upside-down. Seeing the world in a different way helped me understand the place I lived. Sometimes you can illuminate a difficult problem by coming at it from a totally different direction. Working with the Neos has helped me see the systems I work in in a new way.

This summer I’m shining a bright light on practice development at Adaptive Path. Peter and I are looking closely at the way Adaptive Path does its work. Since Adaptive Path tailors its methods to a consulting engagements particular needs, the challenge here is to find ways that Adaptive Path can develop great ideas without being bound by a rigid process.

If you want to read more about the Neos, you can download my paper “A Platform for Sustainable Creativity Lessons from the Neo-Futurists.” You can also download the presentation slides I gave at a recent Adaptive Path brownbag.

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