Adaptive Path Blog

A few days ago, Mike Madaio pointed out something the Adaptive Path team just brought up on our internal mailing list: the new Vehix.com television advertisement that actually has an actor saying the lines, “How do we improve the user experience?”

I saw this the other night and you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Not because it was odd to hear those words on national television, but because I could not for the life of me remember ever having heard “user experience” utilized as an explicit selling point in that medium. Leaving aside the overall veracity of the ad (is Vehix.com a superior experience to its competitors?), we are continuing to see variations on this kind of language (”easy to use” being the most common) creep into mainstream marketing of services, sites and products.

It’s nice to see that even traditional marketers have started to understand some of the value of user experience, for both ensuring customer satisfaction and as a differentiating from the competition.

The new book The Wages of Wins would seem, on the surface, to be about sports. But as Malcolm Gladwell makes clear in his review of the book for The New Yorker, it’s really about the importance of success metrics. This quote from the book, which Gladwell uses to close his review, sounds exactly like what we’ve been saying about user behavior metrics for years: “One can play basketball. One can watch basketball. One can both play and watch basketball for a thousand years. If you do not systematically track what the players do, and then uncover the statistical relationship between these actions and wins, you will never know why teams win and why they lose.”

If you read our blog, you’re likely interested in the intersection of design and business. You’ll want to check out the blog from The Overlap conference.

Speaking of the Overlap conference, Luke Wroblewski took some great notes about Richard Farson’s talk there.

Jared explains how Apple and Netflix achieved success through innovation powered by experience design, “the fabric of new insight.”

As designers, we’re always talking about “desirability.” Business Week looks at The Science of Desire.

Mike Kuniavsky looks at Gartner’s predictions for non-GUI user interfaces.