Adaptive Path Blog

In our forthcoming book, Subject to Change, we close with a chapter titled “An Uncertain World,” about how the approaches we suggest will help businesses manage no matter what comes at them. In it, there’s this passage:

One key opportunity driven by this uncertainty is how the old categories will break down. David Weinberger discusses these trends and their implications in his excellent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Though the book is ostensibly about the nature of information in a digital world, the forces underlying that miscellany pervade all aspects of society. Google and Yahoo!, once technology companies, are now media players, and their advertising-based business models mean they compete more with Los Angeles and New York than their Silicon Valley brethren. Apple began as a computer company, but has morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV) and the third largest music retailer in the United States, which means its competitors are not only HP, Dell, and Toshiba, but also Sony, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.

Oh, the perils of book publishing! Word is coming out that Apple is now the premier music retailer in the country, having surpassed Wal-mart and Best Buy.

What industry are you in, again? Who are your competitors, really?

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The LA Times story on topless meetings, featuring commentary from Todd and Dan, spurred a number of television news crews to our offices yesterday. The one that gives us the most play came from local NBC affiliate channel 11:

CBS affiliate channel 5 was the most sensationalist:

It even made it to ABC Nightly News with Charles Gibson, who were wise to include our friends at Dogster, because, hey, dogs make for great video!

Congrats to Dan on his coinage (even if it doesn’t have only 4 letters.)

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One of the biggest issues I (and many folks I know) have with advertising is that it is so disconnected from the actual experience of using the product or service. It’s either putting lipstick on a pig, or it tries to suggest modes of use that just don’t make any sense.

Recently, I was speaking to someone who once worked as an account planner for ad agency Wieden and Kennedy, and who saw my talk at d.construct on The Experience is the Product. (Slidecast) The talk begins with a discussion of the original Kodak camera, and it’s famous tag line, “You press the button, we do the rest.”

What he identified as the genius of that tag line, which was prominently used in the advertising, is that it introduced people to the experience of using the camera. It primed people to accept and appreciate a product innovation, and so it served kind of as the very first instruction for people engaging in the experience.

That made me think about the genius of iPhone’s advertising, particularly before launch. All it features is someone using the phone. But through their carpet-bombing advertising, by the phone came out, everyone knew how to use it, particularly the strange new interaction models around multitouch, shifting the phone’s orientation, and the like. That advertising was an important first step to engaging with the experience of using an iPhone.

It’s common for experience designers to dismiss advertising as meaningless marketing, or bait-and-switching, but when utilized well, it successfully extends people’s experience with it.

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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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Dan noticed that on the Nov 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jerry Seinfeld brought the term “blog” to task.

“Is that the worst new word of the culture, blog? It’s so unattractive. It’s like something that you spit up and its, it has like, it congeals, and is, you know, and you kick dirt on it.”
- Jerry Seinfeld

Peter, who coined the term back in 1998 agrees with Jerry:

“I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”
- Peter Merholz, August 30, 1999, email to Keith Dawson

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Two years after it launched, the New York Times pulls the plug on TimesSelect. Their rationale?

“Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism.”

I’m happy to see the Times reconsider its poor decision making. It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.

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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.

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Last Friday saw the launch of arguably the most hyped interaction-design driven (and marketed!) product ever: the iPhone. And yet…where were Apple’s interaction designers? Those animations, the way the keyboard works, how the touch screen interacts, etc…all that stuff didn’t design itself.

When the iPod launched, Apple certainly trotted Jonathan Ive, CBE out to discuss and promote it. Where is Apple’s VP of Interaction Design? Is there even one? Why do we only know the names of industrial designers at Apple, but the PR machine keeps the interaction designers hidden behind the curtain?

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At the workshop I spoke at today, “Web 2.0: The Human Web,” I was asked what I thought were the major trends I’ve seen in the last few years. My response wasn’t exhaustive (a lot has been going on), but these three things were the first ones that came to mind, and I thought worth sharing:

1. The web is moving away from big “sites” with lots of “pages,” and towards applications with interfaces.
This might be an artifact of the kind of work we’re doing, but we at Adaptive Path have been increasingly working on projects that don’t resemble web sites of old. The closest we get is our work with media (where the page metaphor makes sense), but even those are getting more dynamic and application-y.

2. Speaking of media, media websites are scared.
We’ve had a lot of work with media companies over the last couple of years, and much of it is driven by the fear that media has in grappling with what some call Web 2.0. The decentralized, emergent, user-generated reality of the current web frightens media companies used to controlling what was published, and used to being the source of information for the public. Watching this space evolve has been fascinating.

3. Web user experience broadens to incorporate a whole customer experience.
I’ve gone on a lot about this on this blog, and we’re starting to see companies approach it directly. Those companies that lead the way with Web customer experience are now realizing that it is multi-channel… and that their web teams are ideally suited to evolve there.

Those were the ones that came to immediate mind. Thinking about it a little more, I would add not user-generated content (we’ve had that since we’ve had the Web), but the utility of social networks in bringing people together online (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, even what we’re seeing with Twitter). People are increasingly comfortable participating online.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but I thought it was interesting what came to mind immediately.

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