Adaptive Path Blog

I was pleased to be asked to contribute an article to Ambidextrous Magazine (from Stanford’s d.school) in their upcoming “Food” issue (available soon). What’d I write about? Well, it’s been a number of years since I stopped cooking professionally, but I have been struck by what I think some interaction designers could learn from watching how a restaurant kitchen operates. My original pitch sounded like this:

Chefs organize their cooks and their space with a few key principles in mind: maximizing consistency of product, ensuring creative freedom to experiment, and encouraging effective problem solving under incredibly stressful conditions… For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance these principles effectively.

If you’d like to read the article, it’s available here as a three page PDF. If you take the opportunity to read it, please let me know what you think. Huge thanks to Amanda Willoughby and Evany Thomas for their careful editing work, and to Lora Oehlberg and Mike Pihulic from Ambidextrous for making it a pleasure to contribute to the magazine.

In the discussions around experience design, there tend to be two points of focus — either around the methods and practices of experience design (research! prototyping! tons and tons of Post-It Notes!), or around the importance of Design Thinking to inform business strategy. While both are valuable, neither are sufficient for accomplishing what is probably the single hardest part of experience design: getting great experiences out into the world.

The unsung heroes are those folks who shepherd projects through an organization, demonstrating the value of an experience design approach, ensuring that their product maintains quality in the face of competing priorities. Such shepherding is hard, but is necessary for design to succeed.

This is why we created the MX Conference. MX stands for Managing Experience. It exists to fill the void between the practical discussions craft, and the hand-wavey discussions of The Power Of Design. The event is focused on helping people understand what it takes to get great experiences out into the world, in the process building a community of folks addressing similar challenges.

MX-San Francisco, which took place last February, was a remarkable success for us. It sold out, received some of our best evaluation scores, and established a community of peers. The podcasts from that event are some of the most listened-to and highest-rated on IT Conversations, demonstrating the power of these ideas.

We’ve recently launched the page for MX East, taking place October 22-23 just outside Philadelphia. We’ve brought back the top speakers from the first MX, and added a slew of new presenters, including Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars, Khoi Vinh, design manager at The New York Times, Kim Goodwin, VP of Design at Cooper, and many more.

We’re changing things up a bit by locating the event in a retreat atmosphere, at Normandy Farm. Only 35 minutes from Philadelphia International Airport, it’s a world away from the hassle and distractions of your working life, and will allow you to really connect with your peers facing similar challenges. To encourage sticking around, we’re offering a complete turnkey package — pay one price, and your hotel, meals, and event are all included.

The conference is produced by Procreation Design Works, who put on a little event you may have heard of called TED. We’re excited to have them join our team to deliver a conference experience that goes above and beyond the norm.

Registration is open. Use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off. The first event sold out, and seating is limited this time as well.

Today’s New York Times feature on Prince belongs not in the Music section, but the Business section.

Given the themes that we address here at Adaptive Path and on the blog, what impressed me was how Prince was handling his “multi-channel experience.” He has a habit of giving away his recordings, which conventional wisdom would assume means he’s giving away his money. But in the same way that Apple controls iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes music store, Prince has achieved control over his recordings, his touring, his online presence, and the like. And in the same way Apple doesn’t make money on the iTunes Music Store but rakes it in with iPod, Prince seems to have an innate understanding of how his coordinated effort to get his music out in the world can produce far greater revenues than reliance on any one channel.

The power of Prince’s approach is summed up in this passage from the piece: “Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. ‘Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,’ his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD.” Driven by that desire, he’s done everything he can to make that a reality, and has reaped the reward of not only significant cash, but total creative freedom.

How can your organization learn from Prince?

We are in for a treat tonight—Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, will be stopping by to share insights and ideas from his new book The Myths of Innovation. Scott gave a great talk at MX this year and we are really looking forward to having him here.

When: Tonight, Wednesday, May 16; 6pm social hour, 7pm talk

Where: 363 Brannan St, upstairs (look for the signs)

Adaptive Path will be providing soft drinks and snacks. Feel free to bring your own beverages.

Full details are available at upcoming.org.

I realized something recently, spurred by a mailing list discussion of David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, which is about how the digitization of information is breaking down our old orders.

Here’s a paraphrase of what I wrote to the mailing list (edited so you don’t need the context):

We have to recognize that the practice of experience design is miscellaneous.

Unfortunately, standard thought around design work is rooted in a typical, and, I would argue, retrograde, notion of what a practice and/or discipline is. Most organizations are stuck in classic mid-19th to 20th century thinking, borne of a manufacturing economy, where optimization arose when people were as interchangeable as the parts of the machines they built.

21st century work is going to have to be much more synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain, largely because of the forces that Weinberger points to in his book.

I think it’s a key reason why experience designers have had such a hard time defining their work. It escapes definition.

And you know what, that’s a good sign.

As Bruce Sterling said on his blog (in response to an conversation I had with (gasp!) GK VanPatter): “this is the enterprise of the future: if you can explain what you are doing with any conventional terminology, you’ve already been outsourced to India.”

(I find this also follows on Todd’s earlier post on job titles.)

(Oh, and Andrew Hinton’s talk at the IA Summit, which, happily, he’ll be sharing [in some form] at our UX Week in August.)

IT Conversations has posted the first four podcasts of sessions from our inaugural MX Conference.

Caterina Fake on the development of Flickr, and how to bring innovation into large companies.

Adam Richardson on managing schizophrenic projects, where clients want both near-term and long-term solutions… simultaneously.

Lou Carbone talking about true customer loyalty and the power of the emotional connection.

And our very own Jesse James Garrett on Experience Strategies and why you should have them!

More are likely to come. And be on the lookout for news about upcoming MX events…

So I’ve started this new job. Same title more or less, but new people, new computer, new systems; getting to know personalities, motivations and how things get done here at Adaptive Path. Overall my first 3 months have been positive and wonderfully fulfilling. I’ve drank the Adaptive Path Kool-Aid and really love the founding principles and philosophy of the studio.

As with starting anything new, here’s my opportunity to make changes to my behaviors. Not so much bad habits, those I fondly refer to now as character. It’s more that, with starting something new, I have this opportunity and desire to create new systems for:

Managing personal and work schedules — At my previous job we used Entourage’s shared project calendar for work and I used my Sidekick II and iCal for personal appointments — an imperfect system to say the least. Adaptive Path uses iCal pretty heavily, so now I can have my personal calendar at home and work. However, I’ve had to break out my personal calendar into 2 — the office needs to know when I’m traveling or at the dentist, but doesn’t need to know when I’m attending a baby shower or going camping with friends. And, as Brandon’s mentioned, iCal has its points of frustration too.

Gathering research for multiple, concurrent projects — Do I finally breakdown and try out Backpack or stick with my 1/2 paper, 1/2 digital un-method? What do I do with the information that I find interesting, but have yet to know how or where I’ll use it, you know, the non-project-specific stuff? I don’t want ideas getting lost in my analog notebook or in the browser bookmark abyss.

Taking notes during various meetings — I used to have a paper notebook for general studio activities, meetings, etc. and used my computer when I knew I’d have to share more formal meeting minutes with team members. At Adaptive Path we have an internal wiki for office related stuff, digital group calendars, basecamp for projects and many mailing lists that seem to capture most everything needed for recall later.

Here’s the clincher: Since starting at AP in January, I’ve had this desire to go completely digital in my research, notes, writing, etc. simply for the ability to search by keywords. However, I am finding that I *need* the tactile nature of a pencil and paper. Not just for storyboarding and wireframing, but even reading articles so I can highlight key phrases with a marker or flag a page with a postit. I’m realizing that what it comes down to is this: I’m of the generation where computers in college were in a classroom and only owned by computer science majors. I have managed to ride the digital wave fairly well and can thank my high school’s vice principal for purchasing the first school computer for the journalism class. But since personal computers arrived while in college and the internet didn’t become mainstream until well after graduating college, I’ve realized that there are certain things in my behaviors that are innate and visceral, these things are so deeply embedded in who I am that I cannot make the leap. So for now, I will stick with my imperfect system of bridging the analog and digital worlds because going 100% digital would feel like I’m abandoning a part of me.

What systems do you use? And what’s your ratio of digital to analog?

I took part in a panel at the IA Summit, and in response to a question from the audience, found myself passionately responding about how practitioners should be on no more than one interactive project at a time. I explained myself more fully on an internal Adaptive Path mailing list:

I firmly believe practitioners should be on only one interaction design project at any time. An interaction design project takes over your brain. If a practitioner is on more than one, they will doubtless favor only one, and any other project will not get the attention it deserves. Only one of those projects will be the one they think about as they wake up or are in the shower. Only one will be the one their mind wanders to as they commute home, etc.

Now, Adaptive Path folks are on more than one project at a time, but only on one interaction design project. They might also be preparing for an event or training, or working on something internal, but are on just one client interaction design project.

There are two reasons I was emphatic about this: 1) because I have come to believe it; 2) because the person whom I was addressing comes from a doing-interaction-design-at-a-graphic-design-agency background, and the culture of graphic design agencies is for designers to be on more than one project. And for many graphic design projects, that’s acceptable — they’re simply not as complex (there are exceptions, of course). But when graphic designers started taking on interactive work, they thought they could treat it like graphic design work, and the quality of the work, and the esteem of the interaction designer, suffers.

I think this is particularly true for those of us in a services position, where we cannot play favorites with client work. In-house folks are in a different situation — they might have multiple projects, but many of those projects don’t really require them to deliver their best… the projects just need to be executed.

I’m pleased to be conducting Adaptive Path’s first online seminar on April 5th: ‘Showing the Value of UX‘. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work.

Elaine Cohen, Director of IA at Ruder Finn, just wrote me to ask, “Is your seminar focused on how to sell UX to your company?” Rather than selling UX, the seminar focuses more on how to integrate it with your company. The material we’ll go over touches on this in a couple of ways: [1] I’ll share some models of how UX can be integrated into business processes to improve the UX-team’s perception, accountability, and role in the project selection process. [2] We’ll walk through design methods that create better dialog between you and your business parters, resulting in better experiences that also create greater economic value.

I find that when a UX team is able to see the connections between their work and business value, the selling becomes much less challenging because both you and the rest of the business are working towards the same ends.

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Here’s where you can register »

We wrote about it last week, and today the Los Angeles Times offers a thoughtful opinion on “Starbucks’ ‘venti’ problem”.