Adaptive Path Blog

Earlier today I had a delightful chat with Julie Peters, Brand Manager at Virgin USA, and speaker at our upcoming MX San Francisco 2008 conference. You can listen to our conversation (45 minutes, MP3), which addresses topics as varied as: the Virgin Brand; the importance of hiring the right people; how Virgin incubates and spins out businesses; what “innovation” means for Virgin; the challenge of delivering the Virgin experience; and plans for traveling on Virgin Galactic. She provided fascinating insight into how Virgin operates, and I hope you appreciate it.

And don’t forget, one lucky person who registers for MX San Francisco by Friday March 14, 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time will be chosen at random to receive their choice of either one round-trip ticket wherever Virgin America flies (in honor of Julie), or a spa/massage package at the conference hotel, the Mark Hopkins.

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BusinessWeek recently ran a piece titled How To Reenergize Starbucks, which addresses the return of Howard Schultz to help Starbucks reclaim its original spirit. The story solicited commentary for a stable of design+business folks, whose responses I found disappointing.

The folks at hipster coffeehouse Ritual Roasters dressed up as Starbucks Zombies for Halloween. Flickr link.

(The following is a combination of ideas/concepts from me and Brandon)

Starbucks is a company we think about at Adaptive Path, as it’s success was very much built on its experience design. We use Starbucks to explain the experience strategy tool of the Elevator Pitch:

For people who have 15 minutes to spend on themselves, Starbucks is a familiar social experience that brings comfort, reliability, and enjoyment to the everyday coffee-drinking routine.
Unlike other habits, rituals, and indulgences, Starbucks consistently delivers your day’s best break as a personal experience wherever or whenever you need it.

As such, unlike many in that BusinessWeek article, I don’t think it’s about The Coffee. Starbucks has to deliver a basically good product, but they don’t need to deliver a superlative product. And they definitely don’t need to sell $1 coffee — that sends exactly the wrong message, in that it moves Starbucks to the bottom of the pyramid, and turns them simply into a volume operation.

What they need to do is make the store experience inviting, not so much about pushing product, but about being that Third Place (not home or work) where people can get a respite.

“Welcome To The Third Place”, an image from a Starbucks in Australia. Flickr Link.

Starbucks needs to engage with The Long Wow. The need to assess their touchpoints for delivery — The retail environment (including music, smell, etc.), the staff and service protocol, the beverages/food, the packaging, the wifi, the streetscape (where and how it fits into the neighborhood), etc.

They need to reconsider their customers’ needs (which may have evolved since they first opened). What do you need at a third place other than a drink or a light snack? You might need a private place to chat (think bench in a park), a good place to read/study (think library), or a place for casual conversation (think bar). There’s still plenty of room in which to sell services or product, but it’s clearly not about feeling more like a shopping mall.

Approaches to consider:

+ Allow the stores more control over how they engage with their community. This is the Whole Foods model. Each Whole Foods store has a high degree of autonomy for fitting within their community. Whole Foods has been able to grow, yet still achieve that “transformative” quality for their customers, and I think this is key.

Flickr Link

+ Take advantage of the fact of real estate. Apple Stores’ success hinges on recognizing that in a physical environment, you can have a remarkable set of high-touch interactions, with merchandise and other people, that can really elevate your experience. Apple uses their stores physical-ness for classes, genius bar, lengthy trials of the products, and, to a certain degree, a cool place to hang out. Starbucks could benefit from such a mindset, with things such as book clubs and other affinity groups. Starbucks could reach out to its community and serve as a hub/meeting place for such things.

+ Let employees and service designers play with the service protocol; today, you order a coffee and pick it up a few seconds later. Nothing special or unusual ever happens during the service. Employees don’t have the means to delight or surprise a customer, or just make a customer smile. Their “cheer-chain” was a poorly handled PR stunt, but it illustrates that delightful variations in service make for a good break. It just has to be genuine, which means from the initiative of staff and not from the corporate playbook.

To finish, It would be marvelous to see Starbucks manage and operate based on experiences. They should own:

• the morning stop on the way to work
• the private chat
• the study cram session
• killing time before your meeting/date/etc.
• and keep identifying more while re-inventing the ones that have grown tired

And each store should know which of these experiences they support, and identify which customers are looking for which experience and support them in it.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending an hour chatting with Chip Conley, CEO of boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre Hotels, and keynote speaker at our upcoming MX San Francisco conference (April 20-22).

You can listen to the interview (MP3). Be warned that it doesn’t have a formal introduction. It begins with us kind of mid-conversation, and just goes from there. In the interview, we talk about recession planning, service design, systematizing experience design (JDV uses a tool called “experience report cards”), team dynamics, succession planning, and all manner of things. It’s a bit free-wheeling, but I think you’ll enjoy it.

To provide some context for the interview:

Chip has just written PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, which you can see me reading on BART here:

I hate business books. They’re typically trite, self-serving, and poorly written. At best they have one good idea that takes 10-15 pages to explain, and then another 200 pages of filler so that it warrants being sold at Barnes and Noble.

PEAK, and I’m not just saying this because he’s a speaker, is actually worth reading. I’ve been a fan of Chip’s for a while, and one reason is his honesty, forthrightness, and, as a CEO of a $200 million company that employs over 2,300 people, his willingness to engage with the emotional, squishy, unmeasurable. Actually, not just willingness–he recognizes how essential such things are to achieve long-term success. His book gets at this by way of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which Chip translates into serving employees, customers, and investors.

When Chip talks about engaging customers, he sounds very much like an experience designer — he discusses ethnography, and the importance of satisfying unmet needs. He also has fantastic ideas for maintaining not just employee satisfaction or loyalty, but deep engagement. Ideas that I could see working for our 35-person firm as well as larger enterprises.

If, after all this, you’re hooked, don’t hesitate to register for our MX Conference (and use the promotional code BLOG for 10% off). You’ll get a chance to meet Chip, and many other interesting folks as well!

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Microsoft is holding MIX, its annual “future of the web” conference in Las Vegas next month. Kim Lenox and I are excited to be bringing our message to this venue as part of the user experience track debuting this year. On March 6th we will lead four intensive sessions over the course of the day. Each session includes hands-on activities where you get a chance to really learn something new. We are focusing on design strategy, interaction design, information architecture and design methods. Participate in the entire day with us and you will take away all the techniques needed to be successful in defining and designing your next product.

If spending a day with Kim and I in Vegas is enticing enough by itself, then maybe you’ll want to come check out a sneak peek of new IE8 features or compete against your peers in Rock Band.

If you are going to attend, then please drop me a line at <danh at adaptive path dot com>. We hope to see you there!!

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Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger received scant notice compared to its attempts to acquire Yahoo! But I find the news more interesting. Microsoft, intentionally or not, is moving to establish itself across a range of platforms and form factors… They’re moving more strongly into the “ubiquitous computing” space than any other major company.

They are active in:

• desktop PCs
• laptop PCs
• tablet PCs
• mobile phones (Windows Mobile before, and now the hardware, too)
• portable media devices (Zune)
• wall/table computers (Microsoft Surface)

And Microsoft has a big pile of cash it’s sitting on, which will give it plenty of opportunity to figure out how to make these pieces work together. And allows for plenty of mistakes (SPOT watches, etc….)

It’s so easy to dismiss Microsoft as the lumbering has-been of technology, but no one else is engaging in such a range of connected technologies…

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“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

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A couple weeks ago, I spoke with car-sharing service Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith. Scott is presenting at UX Week 2008 in August. You can listen to our conversation (40 minute MP3), or read excerpts.

Zipcar is definitely a services firm whose star is ascending, and a key element to their success is the experience design of their service. It’s right there in their mission statement: “Our user experience strives to elegantly combine the promise of the Internet with wireless communication and online communities.”

What most interested me in talking to Scott was how a CEO considers user experience in relationship to other concerns. Scott mentions that Zipcar is the first services firm that he’s aware of that follows kaizen engineering principles, which were originally developed to ensure quality management and continuous improvement for Toyota in their car manufacturing. We also discussed the balance between user experience and his primary business metric, utilization, and the importance of cars not being utilized more than 40% of the time, or it would upset customers, who wouldn’t be able to find a car.

I’d also love to *see* the customer lifecycle diagram that he talks about, where they’ve mapped a customer’s entire experience with Zipcar, from awareness of the service, through joining, to leaving (which, on average, happens at about 5 years).

I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I had having it, and please use the comments section here for any further thoughts or ideas you’d like to see Scott raise at UX Week 2008. (And register using the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!)

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Just before the holiday break, I was driving on the 24 freeway right at the Caldecott tunnel when I saw that someone had put up one strand of Christmas lights in the dirty window of the little office that sits at the base of the tunnel. When I thought about it, I realized that someone did that intentionally to create a little holiday spirit in an otherwise bleak location.

When we talk about experience design, we discuss it in terms of intentional efforts to create an experience for a product or service. There are meetings, decisions, consultants, plans and well-made executions – all of this with an eye towards producing a purposeful, desired experience for an individual or group of people.

But, the person that put those Christmas lights did all those things, too. Maybe not in a conscious or thought-out manner, but there was an intention to create an experience.

So, my question is, do human beings always intentionally design experiences – even unknowningly?

Outside of acts of God or nature (things that we cannot control), we create experiences for ourselves every day. We organize our closets in a certain way to make dressing in the morning efficient, we walk certain streets because we find them pleasant, we cook our food for taste, we decorate at holidays to create a mood and tradition.

What causes us to do this? Do we simply like it? Or is there a deeper need?

As experience designers, are there ways to build upon this trait? Can we somehow expand on this assumed, basic human behavior? Are there ways to recognize these natural tendencies and leverage them when we design experiences?

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We recently had an opportunity to visit the Current TV studios here in San Francisco. They were gracious enough to give us a guided tour of their operations.

Current TV started in 2005 and bills itself as the world’s leading peer-to-peer news and information network. They are the only 24/7 television network and site produced and programmed in collaboration of its audience.

I’ve been watching them off and on over the past couple of years and have always liked how much emphasis is placed on covering stories that young adults care about. It reminds me of what MTV could’ve done had they not gone batshit crazy.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived at their studio was the amount of people they have in the building. From the outside, it seems like a small space, but once inside, it goes on and on. They have about 300 employees in the SF location with more in Los Angeles and abroad. Their offices are as unique as their programming – everywhere you look there was an individual personality to the place.

We were shown rooms where the teams edit, produce, film and write. It was also amazing to see one room dedicated to managing and collecting all the feeds that come to the network.

What really struck me though, was the vibe of the place. It truly felt like people were there to make a difference – that they were dedicated to their jobs beyond just a paycheck. Current talks about “democratizing” TV and internet content. I get the feeling that it’s more than a marketing ploy.

It’s interesting that their site is so intrinsically tied to the content on television. They strive for a 2-screen experience and they tell us that everything featured on the TV network is available on their site. I imagine that most of their audience watches TV with their computer on their lap, so why not build an experience that caters to this displayed need?

I’m really curious to see how far this goes. There are plenty of examples of user-submitted content successes in the business world today. You only need to look to the many video sites and even CNN’s I-Report project to witness how media has already been changed. Current’s dedicated network and content-rich site provides a much more focused implementation of this trend. I hope they succeed and teach us all a thing or two in the process.

Find what channel they’re on in your city here.

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The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).

We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!

Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.

Some of my favorite pics:

Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…

There was lots of writing on walls…

Though some groups preferred the floor…

And lots, and lots of stickies…

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