Adaptive Path Blog

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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Two of the best events we’ve hosted were last year’s MX and MXEast. MX (short for Managing Experiences) has repeatedly drawn a roster of very bright and inspiring speakers and an equally bright and engaged audience—people who lead UX teams, people who are responsible for shaping or managing a product or service’s experience, and leaders who’s job intersects with user experience.

At MX San Francisco on April 20-22, we’re looking to continue to push the conversation of what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. We’re assembling the strongest and most influential voices on the topics of organizational change, user experience strategy, and the leadership of creative teams so they can share with you ideas and practices that will impact your own effectiveness in delivering great experiences.

Here’s just a sampling of speakers sharing their best ideas and know-how:
* Peter Coughlan of IDEO—lead of IDEO’s business Transformation Practice.
* Chip Heath—Stanford University professor and the author of Made to Stick, a person who knows how to communicate great ideas in simple ways that can lead to real change
* Chip Conley—founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hotels, a widely successful California boutique hotel company focused on great guest experiences
* Cordell Ratzlaff—you may know him as the man behind Mac OS X, but he’s been championing an effort within Cisco to change product and service design from a requirements-driven system to a culture focused on customer experience.
* Ryan Armbruster—so loved at MX East, we had to bring Ryan back; at Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Lab and now Chief Experience Officer a radiation oncology practice, Ryan successfully integrates user emotion into the design and development of new healthcare experiences
* Scott Hirsh—founding principle at the Management Innovation Group, Scott’s experience in consulting executives on how and where to integrate UX into their business gives him unique insight into the opportunities and challenges for all of us.

We know the value of hands-on learning, so we’re very happy to have Adaptive Path’s Kim Lenox leading her popular Process Reboot as a pre-conference workshop on April 20. It’s for anyone ready to rethink and reinvigorate their UX processes to more regularly create innovative results.

And we also want to prepare you for what’s ahead, so the MX program will feature several short sessions on topics like mobile, social networks, and new forms of interaction design that may soon be impacting your career. We’re lining up great forward-thinkers like Adaptive Path’s own mobile expert Rachel Hinman and co-founder of the Dopplr social networking service Matt Jones to help shine a light on what’s next.

So this is a call out to all you creative leaders who want to add to the discussion and join us as we move ahead in getting great experiences out into the world. The early-bird pricing ends this Sunday, so be sure to sign up ASAP as save $300-400.

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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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We’ve just posted an hour-long conversation I had with Don Norman [MP3]. This is a prelude to the conversation we’ll be having on stage at UX Week 2008.

I really enjoyed this chat. If we did The Believer-style keywords for it, they would read:

adaptive cruise control, ubiquitous computing, human plus machine, “user experience,” “affordances,” asking the right questions, coupling design with operations, busting down silos, TiVo has never made any money, Palm, many reasons for the Newton’s failure, boss as an absolute dictator, Henry Dreyfuss and John Deere, design evolving from craft to profession, systems thinking, “T-shaped people,” observing the world, water bottle caps.

Sound interesting? Take a listen!

And, if you register for UX Week 2008 by December 31st, the price is only $1,695 (compared to the $2,495 full price). And use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off!

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Earlier this year I wrote a post titled, “21 Century Professions,” where I posited that experience design is a “miscellaneous” profession, because it’s so “synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain.”

Jesse recently pointed me to an article on Valve Software, the company behind the video game Half-Life (among others). Among heartening comments such as, “In the end we determined to stop thinking about it in terms of schedules and certification processes and start thinking from the point of view of a customer…” is rather lengthy explanation of Valve’s (lack of) organizational structure. An excerpt:

“We don’t really do job titles,” says Jeep Barnett, one of Valve’s more recent acquisitions, plucked from university along with the rest of the team behind Portal. Later, Episode Two’s Gautum Babbar dismisses the idea that there is any one person behind the direction of the series. It’s a recurring theme; responsibilities are shared and positions are rarely set in stone, employees expected to straddle roles and make themselves useful in any way they can.

“I think my personal view is that we’re in the business of inventing things that haven’t existed before,” says Newell. “A lot of times, solutions fall between the cracks of existing role definitions. Is this an art problem? Is this a tech problem? Is this a design problem? Often the answer is all of the above, and you need people who are really comfortable spanning multiple disciplines.”

This is exactly true about our work as experience designers. Organizations that don’t recognize this, and insist on placing people into narrow boxes, will never be able to fulfill their potential.

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Last week I attended Connecting 07, the ICSID/IDSA Congress. I’d never before engaged with IDSA, and I quite enjoyed it. What struck me was how the issues that industrial and product designers are facing are pretty much identical to what we’re seeing in the world of experience strategy and design.

My favorite talks/speakers:

Hans Rosling, Gapminder. Hans is a dynamic speaker who is able to make statistics and data visualization fun and provocative. If you haven’t seen his TED talk, you should.

Sabine Junginger, Lancaster University. Sabine spoke on “Design Change: A Paradox” about the role that design can play in change management. This may have been my favorite talk of the event, because it both supported and challenged conventional wisdom about the emerging role of design in business. As I wrote to my colleagues:

Sabine studied under Dick Buchanan at CMU, and has a Ph.D in…. DESIGN! But, she has her head screwed on tight. She pointed out that while design is often brought in to make change, it often serves to accommodate the status quo with band-aids.
Three things I liked:

she kind of dissed design thinking, saying you can’t separate thinking from making.

she pointed out how the current design+business craziness means that the different organizational silos (marketing, product dev, IT, etc.) each bring in design to make change, but end up using design only to bolster their silos

that successful change management with design *begins* with the product… i.e., it’s essential that you use the act of designing a product to produce change… you don’t change an organization in the abstract so that it can then produce better products
- visions and strategies (and organizations for that matter) must continue to evolve. (Okay, that was a fourth thing)

Sam Lucente, HP. Sam (written about in the latest Fast Company) is in charge of design across all of HP, and has an amazing story to tell about how design is evolving and succeeding at HP. He gave good slides, some of which I photographed. I think the most important lesson from Sam was that in order for the design practice to be seen as a valuable contributor at HP, work had to begin at the most basic level — consistency and simplicity throughout the entire product line — before design could be successfully used to differentiate and innovate.

James J. Pirkl, The Generation Connection. This guy advocated a “transgenerational” approach to design. He objects to how older generations are conventionally perceived, and made the case that many suppositions about the elderly are just plain wrong. He doesn’t advocate design for elderly though… He advocates design that works for all. He showed his Transgenerational House, an embodiment of his design principles, which, honestly, looks pretty cool.

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Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. I had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about his role at the Times and the challenges facing design managers.

Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Khoi, hello and welcome. Let’s start with your role at the New York Times.

Khoi Vinh [KV]: My title is Design Director and I run the design group for NYTimes.com. A lot of people make the very understandable mistake of assuming that we are responsible for all of the interactive graphics that you see on the site — Flash graphics, interactive charts, and so forth. That’s actually not the case. What we’re responsible for is a bit higher level, and a little bit more invisible. We’re actually designing the platform of NYTimes.com much like a design studio or a consultant would. I have to design a site for editors to work with and for multimedia generalists to produce those graphics. We consult with the graphics folks, to help them with best practices in terms of how to make their graphics in keeping with the overall interaction models for NYTimes.com. We don’t get into the business of being generalists. That’s what they do and they do it better than anybody else. So we try and get out of their way as much as possible.

JJG: Is this a role that existed there before you started there?

KV: Yes, it did. It’s a fairly unique set of requirements. It’s a bit of a creative director role, it’s a bit information architect or usability authority role, it’s a bit of technical generalist. It requires some savvy about how journalism works and how the Times treats news. And it requires a lot of straddling the divide between journalism and business at the New York Times; trying to reconcile that stuff as the company heads towards a digital future.

JJG: This role is pretty unusual in most organizations. Most organizations have a design team on the ground on a day-to-day basis working alongside someone responsible for the content. The idea of someone in a strategic role interfacing between both of those groups is a relatively new idea. How did The New York Times recognize that that they needed someone in that position between those groups?

KV: The Times, throughout its history, has tried to do things in the best possible way with best practices. There is a long tradition of appreciation for really good design here in all its forms. Plus, the people who run the site — the assistant managing editors responsible for the editorial and integrity of the site — play a huge part in directing the evolution of the site. They are all something unique in my experience: They’re actual bona fide users of the Internet, something you don’t find at a lot of organizations. A lot of times responsibility for the online business falls to somebody with a lot of seniority but not necessarily a lot of experience. It’s something that passes into their portfolio as a reward for having brought in $X million of sales. These people are genuine, enthusiastic, passionate users of the Internet and they understood early on that they needed to bring aboard somebody who is actually a web designer and not just a graphic designer transitioning from print; somebody who understands this new medium.

Read the full interview. Sign up for MX East with promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price.

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I’m teaching a day-long workshop this year at DUX 2007 entitled Process Rebooting: Changing your Process to Create IxD-driven Innovations. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting the material together and crafting a day of hands-on activities and information to inspire design leaders to innovate their design processes.

I’ve had a look at the registered participants so far and am pleased to see a lot of creative directors, product and project managers from a variety of companies in web, software and device/product with a mix of strategists, designers and information architects as well. I can foresee a day full of lively discussion and sharing of ideas with this group!

With 3 weeks before the conference begins, the workshop is filling up fast! We have a few seats left, so if you’re attending DUX and have been pondering whether to attend this workshop, now is the time to sign up!

And if this topic isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, check out the other workshops scheduled on the same day given by Jeremy Alexis, Marc Rettig, John Zapolski, Kevin Brooks, Richard I. Anderson and Melody Roberts.

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Chris Conley of Gravity Tank and the Institute of Design spends his time educating young designers as well as clients the finer points of design, business and the process of building a creative and sustainable culture. I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about what it takes to grow and sustain creative excellence within organizations. Here are some highlights:

There is a tacit assumption that making is a production activity rather than a critical, informative one. Anyone who has ever been a part of a productive R&D team realizes that trying things and doing experiments is the fastest way to break into new territory. By putting a priority on thinking and talking (through email, meetings, and PowerPoint) our work activities and environments have become sterile and devoid of the tangible aspects of what were in business to create! You can’t tell by going into the offices of most companies what business they are actually in! Consider how challenging that inherently makes it for new people in the organization to understand and contribute creatively….

The “new” way of working is to re-train the organization. I put scare quotes around it because it is exactly how we used to work. You remember photos from the 50s of all of our great companies like General Motors, Lockheed, IBM? The photos were of folks in rooms full of prototypes, drawings on the tables, and walls that were blackboards with sketches and drawings. They were building the businesses. That’s gone. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that tangible things don’t matter.

Check out the entire interview here. Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.

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MX East, taking place 21-23 October in Philadelphia, fast approaches. This is the only event focused on what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. Along with our stellar line up of speakers (from such companies a Google, The New York Times, IDEO, the Mayo Clinic, Whirlpool, and more), I thought it was interesting to see what companies are represented in those who have registered. Come to MX East, and you’ll meet design managers and creative leaders from:

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