Adaptive Path Blog

Yesterday I watched two insightful and thought-provoking TED Talks with experience design themes.

The first is Stefana Broadbent’s “How the Internet Enables Intimacy”. She presents meaningful commentary on the reality of how internet tools are used in a social, and intimate fashion. And I think her findings might surprise you.

The second is Pranav Mistry’s presentation on how he’s been trying to more directly connect the digital and analog worlds. His SixthSense technology is awesome, but what I hadn’t realized was how important it was for him to figure out how to do this at low cost. It’s reminiscent of Johnny Lee’s work with the Wiimote — figuring out how to use what’s readily available to enable awesome new interactive capabilities.

By our talented summer associate, Chris A. Wronski

Firstly, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design shooting for the first degree in the United States in a service design program. This summer I had the extraordinary opportunity to work alongside the Adaptive Path staff in San Francisco and gain priceless insights into practices and approaches that, unfortunately, are hard to find elsewhere.

One of the topics that has been on my mind for the past few months, continues to come up in conversation, and seems to consistently have opinions spread out on a spectrum, is execution. I refer to execution as the level of craft embraced in any given medium.

Why is execution-mindedness important?

It’s notable to remember that when given any type of material, be it a book, a film, or an illustration, people will compare that to the best they’ve seen elsewhere. They’ll compare your film to films created by expert filmmakers and your illustration to illustrations created by expert illustrators; the seeds of expectation have already been planted. When your executions fall far below the level of quality people enjoy, you’re giving them the opportunity to judge your presentation medium rather than what’s really important, your ideas.

Higher levels of execution can also be the key to ensuring deliverables live on. Months after your team was on-site to inspire and wow the client, the original stakeholders have gone their separate ways and changes to organizational structure mean no one really remembers what working with you was like. With quality client-facing keepsakes, it’s much more likely that your work is shared and remembered for years to come simply because people enjoy it. Remember, newcomers won’t get to see all of the wonderful solutions and insights you provided at first sight, they’ll be looking at a book cover, a document, or a presentation slide.

Finally, attention to detail within the most mundane documents (invoices, internal communications) show people who you are and how you choose to extend that to others. Don’t let them question your content or culture by giving them an ill-prepared frame to view it through.

Constant execution-mindedness has pitfalls, too

With all that in mind, overt attention to execution is not something we should practice all the time. At times, I’ve seen execution treated as a higher priority than other areas of the design process. Little time would be spent addressing the true merits of a design mindset and more would go into addressing the physicalities of a prototype. Sketching is often seen as the go-to place for coming up with ideas but far too much I’ve seen people aching over improving the line quality on a sketch that—failing to address the constraints at hand or being no where near in tune with the mission of making great things—should just have been left behind. Put shortly, prioritizing execution over a knowledge-based process is not built for creating the best ideas but instead for putting lipstick on a pretty obscene amount of pigs.

At the wrong times, high levels of execution limit our ability to provide the best solutions. We all want to improve our sketching skill, but there’s a difference between sketching to explore or communicate and sketching to present. There’s no reason to bog yourself down going overboard refining sketches during an exploration phase if you don’t think it makes sense as a step in the process.

Then there’s resources. Sure, it’d be easy to start demanding better output, but that’s not how you orchestrate change in a sustainable way. Let’s use the example of film again because it’s quickly becoming a hot-button medium for outlining large-scoping work. We haven’t made films before, and yet now we feel they’re necessary. We may not have the resources to get expert filmmakers on board, and yet we can’t let our chosen medium take away from our great work. What do we do? Keep it simple, expand on the skills that are already there.

Strike a balance

By extending your talents in other mediums to these new ones, you can not only begin a process of progressive movement towards a higher level of execution, but also create a style that identifies your unique approaches. If you’re great at cartoony sketches, bring that into the films you make. Keep things comfortable, but encourage your team to explore. When it finally comes together and you’ve handed your client a creative and beautiful take on something others substituted with stapled 8.5×11 sheets of paper filled with black and white text, you’ll know why it was worth it.

Ideally, the goal to shoot for is probably somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. You don’t want to start grossly excluding the gritty wonders of the design process in exchange for gloss, but you don’t want to let your work get misrepresented as something that belongs under a pile of papers either. Yes, there is extra effort involved, but will it all end up benefiting you in the end and help make everyone involved happier, more excited, and more aware of who you are? You bet.

By our talented summer associate Dane Petersen

When you think of a computer, what sort of image pops into your head? Perhaps you see a screen, keyboard and mouse. Maybe you think of a laptop, with its screen, keyboard and touchpad all built into the same unit. If you’re particularly crafty, you might think of a mobile device with a touch screen.

The truth is, none of these objects are actually a computer. They are merely the tools that we use to interact with a computer. We traditionally input data using a keyboard and a pointing device, and the computer in turn outputs information on a screen. A programmable thermostat employs a similar interaction, using buttons for input and an LCD display for feedback. Even on the iPhone, an incredibly innovative mobile computing device, these familiar desktop interactions are still present. Your finger acts as a pointing device, the screen produces visual outputs in response to your input, and you can summon an on-screen keyboard for inputting text.

This desktop paradigm of interaction has been with us for many years, and with the iPhone, Android and Pre it seems to be reproducing well in a mobile setting. However, the “computing” function of a computer, in that it takes in and processes information, requires no particular form factor. As processors get smaller and more powerful, it seems our only limitation is what tools we will use to get information into, and out of, the computer.

Speculation anticipates that the future of computing will involve an ecosystem of mobile devices, touch screen tablets and netbooks, but we need not confine ourselves to this inevitability. To assume that all computer-mediated interactions should be shoehorned into a paradigm that implies a pointing device and screen, is to flagrantly dismiss what is wonderful and unique about our human existence.

Humans are physical beings that exist in a physical world. This “being” is an experience that we all share; a rich, experiential understanding and familiarity with our physical environment. People have an incredible capacity for subtlety and nuance that remains largely untapped in existing digital interactions. Demanding that all our computer-mediated interactions happen through the common screen is an insult to our senses, and an insult to what it means to be a living, thinking, feeling person.

As experience designers it is our duty to celebrate, rather than subvert, the deep, shared experience we have as physical beings. We share a highly-evolved capacity to process an infinite variety of inputs from all of our senses, and are capable of interacting with our surroundings in any number of ways. Our interactions with computers should be no less varied.

Already there is a rich library of interactions in the gaming realm that celebrates the rich, shared tradition of our own physicality. New input mechanisms from Wii Fit to Rock Band all invite unique interactions, and Microsoft’s Project Natal elevates movement-based control to a new level.

These games all involve wonderful physical interactions, but they’ve only scratched the surface of human capability. They break the desktop paradigm in terms of new forms of input, but still depend on a screen for outputting feedback to the player. The use of sound, music and vibrations in gaming helps to enliven the immersive experience, but they remain as supplements to, rather than replacements for, visual feedback.

Moving digital interactions into the physical world can have tremendous value, but developing a compelling experience without the use of a screen can be extremely challenging. In seeking inspiration for these emerging types of analog interactions, it helps to turn an eye to history, to a time long before our interactions were mediated by digital screens.

Based in San Francisco, the Mus√©e Mecanique has an incredible collection of antique coin-operated arcade machines, player pianos and nickelodeons from the late 1800s and early 1900s. That there was tremendous innovation at the turn-of-the-century in these penny arcade games, in step with the tremendous innovation in today’s games, is no coincidence. Entertainment is business, as true then as it is now, and most wonderful things manifest themselves as novelties before they are recognized as something truly useful.

One such device was the Mutoscope, a coin-operated moving picture device built around the turn of the century. As you look through the view port and turn the metal hand crank, it flips through a stack of still photographs like a mechanical flip book. There is something compelling about the materiality of actual physical photographs, and the act of manually animating them is indescribably delightful.

This video features a Marilyn Monroe reel playing on one of the museum’s Mutoscopes. It’s pretty racy by historical standards, in that people are actually kissing one another, but rest assured that it was approved by the New York censors.

This video shows an Englehardt Coin-Operated Orchestrion from 1915. The device reads a perforated paper roll, similar to a punchcard, and translates the bits into notes for each instrument. Even though you are not controlling the device yourself, there is something delightful about real physical instruments controlled by digital punches stored on an analog medium.

The museum has a diverse collection with hundreds of other arcade games, including fortune tellers, music boxes, shooting ranges, car races, and even an animated opium den. While the interactions themselves are quite simple, their experiential qualities are incredibly rich. The coolness of a metal handle, the warmth of a wooden cabinet and the lavish Victorian ornamentation all contribute to an incredibly engaging, tactile experience.

Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror represents a modern interaction that does a wonderful job channeling the delightful, tactile experience of these old analog devices, and giving them new form with invisible computing technology.

The “mirror” is composed of 830 square pieces of wood, each attached to its own motor that controls the angle and brightness of each individual square. A tiny video camera records the viewer, translating their image into pixels that are sent to the mirror in real time. The pieces of wood make a satisfying “clattering” sound as they move into place, further grounding this interaction in the senses.

Expanding on the experiential qualities of this concept, ubiquitous internet connectivity and wireless technology opens all sorts of doors for a distributed system of computers, inputs and outputs. Inspired by the arcade machines of yore, there is limitless potential to augment these traditional analog interactions with networked technology, moving our computing experiences out from behind the screen, and into the world.

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

While Dan is busy coding away at the iPhone App, I wanted take this time to share about our first project with smart.fm, a project to reimagine the smart.fm web experience!

What’s in a name? What we call something can have a profound impact on the way we think about it. And changing the way we think about something can have powerful implications on what we design and how we evaluate it. For smart.fm, the ah-ha moment came when we realized that it’s about Goals, not Lists.

Smart.fm is a learning community founded on a powerful technology that equips users to memorize anything — from the Capitals of the World to Japanese Vocabulary to the names of various Heart Murmurs. Today, you learn using Lists. A List is a set of content about a topic that is typically managed by a single person or a content partner. While Lists are a straightforward organizing principle, they don’t form natural hubs of activity. It’s hard to rally around a list.

Smart.fm partnered with Adaptive Path to transform the site into a “motivating, social world of learning.” Collaborating closely with smart.fm, our team (Me, Brian Cronin and Kate Rutter) sought out new ways to bring people together and engage them in collaboration and competition around learning. Through a series of exercises where we envisioned what the experience of using smart.fm could be like, the answer that emerged was Goals.

Instead of organizing content around topics, which people may study for many different reasons, content will soon be organized around Goals that people can form communities around. But before I get into the exciting implications of this shift, I wanted to share some of the experience-minded tools that led us to it:

1) We described the experience we wanted to aim for.

Using our Elevator Pitch “mad-lib” template, we brainstormed ways to fill in the blanks: “For people who… the new smart.fm is… It’s different because…” Ideas that emerged included “Smart.fm is like a pickup basketball game — it’s easy to jump right in and participate.” We refined these ideas into guiding principles that described the ideal smart.fm experience: “a friendly social world of learning” that “invites play” and “reveals and celebrates progress.”

2) We dissected the experience and brainstormed new metaphors for its parts.

From the experience mapping and metaphor brainstorming exercises that I wrote about previously, we selected some of the most compelling metaphors.

3) We imagined some possible experiences inspired by these metaphors.

We then explored how they could be applied to the major activities of the smart.fm experience — discovering, learning, celebrating, collecting, making and collaborating — and communicated the resulting ideas through “Concept Posters.” These posters enabled us to describe what an experience should feel like without getting into interface details. Aspects of the poster showing how “Smart.fm is like a scavenger hunt for knowledge” particularly stood out to the team — especially the idea of challenging users to create content through collaborative scavenger hunts.

4) We pictured the future.

We then used sketches of “The Homepage of the Future” to explore the best concepts further. Since a well-designed homepage tells the story of what you’re all about, sketching potential homepages can be a great way to boil a concept down to its essence using a value proposition, some featured content, and a presentation of core features or “how it works.”

5) It all came together in “Goal-Based Missions” — or simply, Goals

These explorations culminated in the idea of “Missions,” which we articulated through sketchy diagrams illustrating an exciting, game-like smart.fm where social activity is embedded into everything.

As the new activity hubs, Missions brought both learning material and social activity together in an elegant and cohesive way:

• Missions are about shared goals. While people may learn English for many reasons, people who want to “Spend a Week in the US,” “Impress their friends” or “Pass the TOEFL” will have much more in common with each other than everyone learning “English Vocabulary I.”
• Missions are social by nature. The shared goal is what brings people together. Instead of “signing up” or “enrolling,” you can “Join” or “Participate” in a Mission, competing or collaborating with other team members who share the same goal.
• Missions can be about creating content, not just learning it. The scavenger hunts idea from the concept posters manifested itself in the “Fact-Finding” aspect of Missions: If you want to learn enough Japanese for a week in Japan, but don’t know enough to build a list of stuff to learn — you can challenge others to create content for you.

While my high school sister loved the idea of “24-like” Missions, proposing there be “Objectives” and “Directors” and spy tools, the idea of collaborative Missions lives on under the more neutral name, “Goals.” Since the final wireframes were delivered, Smart.fm has already enabled collaborative list-building, and soon you’ll be able to do much more, including:

• Collaborate with others who share a goal (say, “Become culturally literate”) to create and collect learning material that will help you achieve it.
• Challenge other users to contribute content about a certain topic (such as “Hip Hop Artists” or “Internet Memes” — you can actually add content to these lists today!).
• Ask questions about things you want to learn (“How do you say ‘Experience Design’ in Japanese?”) and get answers from others.
• Earn badges for completing your goals and responding to challenges.
• See how you’re doing compared to others who are pursuing the same goal, others in your hometown, and perhaps even others who share your first name!

These are just a few of the exciting possibilities that reframing Lists as Goals has afforded, and we look forward to seeing both the name change and mindset change taking shape on smart.fm!

Hampus Jakobsson presented a fantastic talk at this year’s MEX conference about the “wild west” gold rush mentality surrounding mobile app stores. Hampus warned most players in the mobile space are merely mimicking Apple’s model, leaving many user experience challenges that hinder the app store experience unaddressed. This talk inspired a host of great discussions about many of the fundamental user experience issues that plague app stores and ways to improve the process through design.

However, Hampus’ talk brought focus to a question that’s been lingering on my mind for a while now. As the once innovative app store strategy quickly becomes “hygiene” for many in mobile, I can’t help but wonder if all this fast follower behavior is an incremental step to something much bigger.

What if the real problem with app stores doesn’t stem from Apple’s ridiculous application approval process, scalability problems, or mediocre social recommendation functionality? What if the real problem with app stores is what they are selling?

What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?

Applications as a means for both expressing and manipulating information in a mobile context is an interaction model we’ve borrowed wholesale from the PC. While application stores have solved many issues – ease in application development, downloading applications to a device, payment – it’s easy to forget the application model was originally developed for a fundamentally different context. A static context.

What if we haven’t figured out how to accurately express information in a mobile context and we are simply borrowing the wrong model?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the notion expression – how artists, engineers and designers have used creative models and methods to express information, points of view, and the possibilities of their time – and moments when breakthroughs around creative expression have occurred.

The web is a great example of inventing new models and methods to express information.

Back in the days of “Web 1.0″ the internet was a vast and unexplored frontier, ripe with untapped potential. While the internet provided an entirely new way for people to access, distribute, and experience information, in 1996 nobody really knew how to create “web experiences” that unlocked that potential.

Legions of print designers applied their knowledge of graphic design and print design to the Internet, giving rise to the phenomenon of brochureware. Some designers applied immersive spatial metaphors to the web, like the famed SouthWest Airlines homepage circa 1996. And who can forget those web sites where pages had the look and feel of pages from a book. Regardless of the model, the strategy was similar; borrowing. We first borrowed models we understood, found our footing and were then able to invent new and more sophisticated ways to express information in a this new context of the web.

Art movements have followed a similar arc. A favorite example was the transition between Medieval and Renaissance Art.

A defining characteristic of Medieval art was it’s lack of dimensionality. Artisans from the Middle Ages hadn’t figured out how to represent form in perspective. Subsequently the work was highly symbolic and representational. It remains valuable and interesting work. However, from an art-making perspective, Medieval art is a study in abstraction. Artisans from the Medieval period lacked the art making methods to represent form in the way humans visually perceive it.

In contrast, Renaissance art celebrated the discovery of perspective techniques such as foreshortening, chiaroscuro and the use of balance and proportion in the art-making process. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael became masters of depicting form in a way that closely mirrored how humans perceive it. Humans were always able to perceive volume and spatial relationships, but it wasn’t until artists of the Renaissance discovered and honed perspective techniques that artwork reflected these qualities.

Data is similar to physical form in that it has perspective. We think about it along lines of place, time, and social dimensions… yet mobile applications rarely allow us to truly experience the multi-dimensional aspects of information. Instead, similar to Medieval art, mobile applications flatten data. Users are forced to either burrow deeply into single application or pogo stick across a host of lightweight applications, often with no through lines for the data. As we begin to prism data through more and more devices – televisions, car dashboards, screens in public spaces – the application model becomes brittle. It locks us into a way of thinking about information that doesn’t accurately represent the multi-dimensional ways we perceive and use it.

What if the app stores and “wild west” application development we’re seeing today in the mobile space is a re-enactment of the evolution of the web? What if mobile applications we download through Apple’s app store are the “brochureware” of what we will experience five years from now? What if applications are a borrowed and broken model we’ll ride out until the “perspective techniques” of data representation and manipulation in a mobile context are discovered and celebrated.

If applications go away, what will replace them? Compelling data visualizations? Adaptive interfaces? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts…

Our pal Jeffrey Veen just posted a talk he gave at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo. Those who attended UX Week 2008 got to see a version of that talk seven months earlier (and you can see it here).

Given the coverage that Jeff’s talk is getting, I thought you might be interested in a couple other talks from UX Week 2008 that look at interface and interaction innovations. The first comes from Michal Migurski at Stamen, discussing their approach to data visualization (17 minutes):

Michal Migurski | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

The other comes from Darren David and Nathan Moody of Stimulant, sharing how they approach the design of large-scale multitouch interfaces (25 minutes).

Darren David & Nathan Moody | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

What’s most exciting for me is that Michael, Darren, and Nathan will all be teaching hands-on workshops at UX Week 2009. This will give you a chance to learn directly from these experts, and prepare you for the imminent design future. (Use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price!)

Will we look back on the desktop experience of today in much the same way we reflect on computer punch cards of yore? If so, when will the desktop and mouse become irrelevant? How do people who want to explore the world of technology experiences that are free from the tethers of the keyboard and mouse begin?

These along with a host of other thought-provoking questions were among the topics of discussion, debate, and jest at last week’s Beyond the Desktop panel discussion. I was honored to be in the company of six brave and talented designers who are exploring the frontier beyond the desktop and thrilled to see such active interest in this topic by the San Francisco UX community.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes of the evening:

We’re still skeptics and I think that is an important perspective to have. I wouldn’t say the technology that we work with is better than anything out there right now, it’s just different. A lot of this is still a hammer looking for a nail. People come to us and say, “we want a multi-touch application.” and we say, “Why?” The challenge for us is developing an understanding for what this technology is well suited for. ~ Daren David

We use play in a lot of our design process. We find as we design stuff, we end up opening a box of things and emulate experiences on the table that way. That is one of the big things that has changed for us – our deliverables have gotten more physical and less visual. ~ Nathan Moody

The truth with all these emergent interactions and interfaces is that the conventions haven’t been established, so you don’t actually know how to work and you end up experimenting a lot more. ~ Noah Richardson

Prototyping used to be a luxury, but these types of emergent interactions, it is an important part of the design process. ~ Daren David

Often times the technology we’re designing for is still being developed. So there’s a lot of give and take and trying to understand what is possible… so we often have to attack from both ends. ~ Jennifer Bove

How do we go from bling to kaching? This is new and shiny right now, but five years from now when this become ubiquitous, what will be the meaningful experiences? And what will be the proper uses of these kinds of technology? ~ Daren David

It really comes down to experimentation. The recognition about a lot of this stuff and the reason I think a lot of people are here is that everybody recognizes and has this feeling that there is potential in this stuff, but we don’t really know what it is.
~ Jeevan Kalanithi

The common element all these interactions share is that they’re all more sociable. ~ Brett Fitzgerald

I have two Roombas in my house and they engage in gladiatorial combat. It’s awesome. I don’t feel like they’re gonna get hurt because they look like frisbees. ~ Nathan Moody

When your Roomba saves your life you won’t feel so cavalier about them. ~ Daren David

… there was a project that reminded us how different emergent interactions can actually open up different affordances and provide accessibility to people who haven’t had it. I have a two-year-old daughter and she instinctively knows how to use my iPhone. It’s frightening. And to see her walk up to the television and try to swipe it… you realize that some of the things being created by natural user interfaces really open things up…. I tend to be fairly optimistic with respect to technology and I think there is this notion of accessibility in a lot of the work that we are doing that we can take a fair amount of pride in. ~ Noah Richardson

I would advise people who want to start exploring interactions beyond the desktop to start by looking at the applications or experiences on the desktop they are currently designing and understanding that it is an instantiation of something that is probably broader. Start thinking about what happens when a user walks away from the computer. What are other the other opportunities? ~ Jennifer Bove

For those of you unable to attend the event, here’s a video of the 90 minute discussion:

Beyond the Desktop Panel Discussion from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Sketch note by Kate Rutter

Photo credits:
Panel discussion photo courtesy of Allison McCarthy
Sketch note photo courtesy of Jennifer Bove

Last week, Tim O’Reilly delivered a short address at the Web 2.0 Expo where he offered insight into the five applications he believes point the way for the evolution of the web.

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and Moore’s Law will need to be applied to humanity’s greatest problems. (via ReadWriteWeb)

He cited Google Voice Search on the iPhone, an application that combines both voice and sensor input, as an important technology to watch.

One of our panelists – Noah Richardson, manager of Tellme’s Mobile User Experience group – will share his expertise designing voice-driven systems and interfaces.

He’ll be joined by the following all-star lineup:

I hope you can join us. If you can, please head over to Upcoming and let us know. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics you’d like covered, comment here or twitter with #btdpanel

A podcast of Jesse James Garrett’s impassioned closing plenary from this year’s IA Summit is now available online via Boxes and Arrows.

Jesse’s assertion that we are all experience designers has stirred controversy within the community, and justifiably so. Professional identity is a slippery slope. However, I can’t help but feel Jesse’s important message is getting lost in these discussion threads. Arguing over the definitions of our roles and judging the value of the contributions of each does little good if it becomes divisive within our community. Instead, it distracts us from working together towards the more important common goal: to elevate the understanding of the user experience field to the world at large.

Regardless of your position on this issue, I hope you will give this podcast a listen. It is packed with inspiring messages and ideas. My hope is that it will inspire you to generate a discussion about how we can work together to pursue the ideas – not discussions about our roles, or our processes – but ideas about how we can improve broken experiences in the world, and the big problems our industry can help solve.