Adaptive Path Blog

How do user experience designers tell their story in a relevant, meaningful way, to audiences who have no exposure to user experience design (UX)? UX practitioners are keenly aware that everything we use in our lives was designed by someone. But, outside of our industry (and related ones), most people aren’t aware of the many decisions that were made (or not made) on their behalf when a product or service was designed.

I starting exploring this issue about communicating the value of UX a little over a year ago in my podcast, Tea with Teresa. One of the highlights from my show was a conversation with Jesse James Garrett called “What the Heck Is User Experience Design??!! (And Why Should I Care?)“. That podcast laid a great foundation for explaining UX to new audiences. But, I decided I wanted to push the challenge of communication even further and see if I could explain user experience design to a particularly difficult audience: high schoolers. I figured if I could make UX meaningful and relevant to these kids, I could probably explain it to anyone.

So, I approached my friend Ben Chun about doing a presentation to his Introduction to Programming class at Galileo High School in San Francisco, CA. He thought this would be a great start to a project they’d embark upon this year: designing an educational computer game for 5th graders. My goal was to prepare them for that project by communicating two key things:

1. Make things for people.
2. Those people aren’t you.

Before the class, Ben warned me about the attention span of his students, and boy was he right. The thing about high school kids is they won’t pretend to be interested if you’ve lost them. Adults at a conference will gaze forward in your general direction, but high school kids will just put their head on the table and go to sleep. If you ever want to get a real gauge of how interesting a speaker you are (or how well you’re really communicating), I highly recommend it, humbling as it is.

Not everything I tried worked (I got some heads on the table a few times), but a few tactics and explanations seemed to strike a chord with them, and I thought I’d share them here with you:

1. Funny examples of design failing out in the world (from FailBlog.com)

2. Interacting with a product or service should feel like a good conversation.
Who wants to deal with a person or thing that acts like this when you interact with it:

(Ignores you)

(Is self-absorbed)

For an adult audience I would have used a date as an example — an idea I got from Jesse James Garrett – but since high school kids don’t really go on formal dates (or so their teacher told me!), I changed it to a conversation.

3. Before you make something, learn about the people who will use it.
Otherwise, it’ll feel and turn out like:

Trying to buy a present for someone you don’t know (like your uncle’s boss).

Making dinner for someone you don’t know (What if they are vegetarian but you made steak?).

4. People like and need different things.
So it’s important to find out what those wants and needs are. For example, during Rachel Hinman’s project “90 Mobiles in 90 Days”, her niece designed a mobile phone with the features she really wanted, like:

1. Snail button that turns into Barbie when pushed
2. Screen with swimming pool inside
3. Snow White always attached by golden string
4. A red button that when pushed, makes the phone turn into anything
5. Snow White store and candy store attached

Key point: Not everyone wants a snail button that turns into Barbie!

5. The user is not you, so don’t design for yourself.
Activity to show how different we are:
1. Three people are asked to leave the room and are not told why.
2. One at a time they are invited back in, asked to sit and close their eyes, then asked to describe the room in detail.
3. The rest of the class takes note of how each person values/pays attention to very different things.

6. Finding out what the user really wants or needs (user research)
Sticky note activity:
1. Everyone gets a sticky note pad and has 5 minutes to write as many questions as they can for the potential users of a pretend product they are making.
2. Post all questions on a wall together, cluster questions that are about the same topic, discuss, and agree upon a key set of 10 questions.

Turns out the kids loved the race to write as many questions as they could in a time limit. Ben said you almost never have a room of focused, quiet teenagers like we had during that activity. He also wrote about this exercise on his blog, And It Moves: Adventures In Teaching and Technology.

Those are some of the highlights from my attempt to make the complex simple for an audience that had never heard of user experience before. I learned a lot about which of my explanations really make sense to others. And as I continue in this exploration of communicating UX, I’d love to expand my tool kit by hearing about exercises, analogies, and other approaches any of you have had success with! Please share here!

Some new analysis about how to reach customers triggered an interesting conversation within the walls of Adaptive Path . We thought we’d share our insight with readers and get your feedback.

Two prominent articles on the topic make the the case that “Brands must stay focused on where customers already are”. Steve Rubel makes the claim:

“I believe business web sites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or for utility. Brands will shift more of their dollars and resources to creating robust presence where people already are and figure out how to activate employees en masse in a way that builds relationships and drives traffic back to their sites to complete transactions. Media companies will do the same – they will be ‘headless.’”

Henning doesn’t buy it:

“Brands still have the desire and need to tell their stories and deliver content/service/products in a way that is centralized and owned by them. Sites will remain an attractive option to those wishing to do so. This doesn’t preclude complementary channels like the social media he is writing about. What seems to be more important than choosing the one right channel is choosing the right mix and having flexibility in your commitment to social media so you can follow your users. Consumer product manufacturers (Nike, Sony, Apple) face the same decisions when they decide where to sell their goods.

Also the whole headless company thing? It won’t make sense for a lot of people.”

I agree with Henning more than with Steve. The web has given brands an opportunity to create their own little place to talk with customers unlike any medium before it. That power, control, advantage, whatever is intoxicating. Mobile apps are an extension of this. More and more brand-specific apps are being created. In December, Brand Week found Target, Walmart and Disney amongst the top 50 most popular free apps.

Sure, the “be where your customers are” is a real and important new tactic, but while engagement at the edges will become marginally deeper, I believe that brands will continue to mostly drive customers to their own properties to seal the deal.

In a recent Talk of the Nation episode the author of Newsonomics makes a case that a major reason that news sites are failing is the unexpected lack of advertising sales. Instead of buying Flash ads on the Times they invest in their own sites and apps. To quote: “$66 billion a year U.S. companies are putting into their own marketing through digital means: their own Web sites and own outreach”.

Lane fears that my approach is just to binary.

“It’s not an either/or proposition. It’s not about being anywhere, or going to one place to “seal the deal.” Companies can no longer drive customers *anywhere*; they’re already everywhere. So the appropriate response is to be everywhere your customers already are, responding to them in the context they’ve chosen to embrace, and then find ways underneath that to centralize the information and knowledge gained through this distributed approach to customer engagement. Distributed, widgetized, accessible, everywhere.

To repeat: it doesn’t *matter* where brands want their customers to be. It matters where the customers want to be. The systems we create now need to acknowledge, embrace, and most importantly make use of this new reality — because it actually creates a great deal of information-rich data that will be incredibly valuable to the businesses that gain access to it. Makes customers way happier, too.”

Peter thinks that the notion of going “headless” could work, and actually did some work designing a model for distributed brand engagement.

“At Info.nl we developed a model called Exploding Websites which we presented at Euro IA 2009. (Focus on slides 44-52) The model deals with this near-future situation where a brands’ interactive presences are scattered around the place (“exploded”) but rely on rich profiles for context-sensitive components, deployed at multiple touchpoints. One central hub, where the brand owner is more in control, may or may not be involved.”

So who’s right? Is there a clear winner or are we really looking at a nuanced approach that takes both centralized control and democratized content ownership into account? Tell us and other readers what you think in the comments.

We are always swimming in a sea of “new”. There are new clients, projects, jobs, careers, relationships and more that we must figure out how to adapt to as we move through life. A large part success comes directly from our ability to grapple with and thrive amidst all that “new”. I’m hosting a virtual seminar tomorrow to share some unique ways to adapt to new environments – and the UX industry, specifically. This is a great seminar for those of you interested in either building or expanding your career in user experience design. You’ll walk away with a clear roadmap to create impact in the UX community and beyond. Oh, and along the way, you’ll also get some advice directly from Whitney Hess, Merlin Mann, Scott Berkun, and Rachel Hinman.

If that got you thinking, read more here: Tools and Methods to Learn, Navigate and Make a Name for Yourself in the UX Landscape

Wednesday, August 12

10-11:15am Pacific Time

Only $129

Recently, Adaptive Path was asked to take part in the Urban Forest project. Worldstudio has partnered with organizations such as AIGA and The Academy of Art University to bring this community-based, public arts and environmental initiative to San Francisco. Mayor Newsom announced this collaboration at the Compostmodern 09 design conference in February.

The Urban Forest Project is described as an unprecedented outdoor exhibition, taking root in cities all across the globe. This public art initiative challenges designers employ the idea or form of the tree to make powerful visual statement about the environment. This artowrk will be placed on light pole banners in the local community.

The tree is a metaphor for sustainability, and in that spirit the banners from the exhibition will then be recycled into totebags or some other re-usable product which can be sold. Proceeds from the sale of these unique products will raise money for a local non-profit organization in our community.

Christian and I were excited to take part in this project for two reasons. First, this wasn’t a just a design contest or an opportunity to see our fancy designs up on a banner. The AIGA SF has built a mentoring program for at-risk high school students from San Francisco youth programs such as BAVC, SF Cameraworks: First Exposures, San Francisco Youth Commission, Southern Exposure and Young Artists at Work/Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’ve been working with a great student who has a tremendous amount of raw energy that is inspiring us to think about how to express her unique vision.

Twenty five of the 100 banners will be designed by the mentoring teams. So, this gives Adaptive Path a unique opportunity to fulfill on our primary mission of helping improve people’s lives through great design experiences. While that mission is often made real through consulting and design projects, we look for places to further education and idea sharing. It’s important to us to share our methods with other designers to improve the conversation around design. Working with a young design student is an exciting chance to positively affect the future of design.

There’s not much to be said about Twitter that hasn’t already been said. Our friends over there have created something quite special and we use it every day. Sometimes we talk user experience, sometimes we complain. Regardless, it’s another opportunity for each of us individually – and as a company – to communicate to the design community and friends and family.

Our Adaptive Path account is mainly about what’s going on here at AP. Often, you’ll get a peek into things happening at the office. Other times it will be about where we’re traveling to or even about the great clients we work with. Frequently, we’ll offer discount codes for our key events – so watch out!

Most importantly, we love hearing the feedback from the people that follow us. The retweets, the comments, the disagreements and praise are all read and discussed internally. Your feedback has sparked blog posts or changes to our presentations. So, thank you for that.

Feel free to follow our other accounts for more information on our events. Or, if you want to Twitter-stalk some of our designers, we’re cool with that, too.

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