Adaptive Path Blog

I attended MX for the first time this year and as I was chatting with many inspiring UX managers and designers, I noticed the following common challenge in many in-house UX teams: They lack UX quality check points for marketing, advertising, and branding to create a holistic experience. I had the same challenge while I was working within the UX team at Microsoft. For the UX team to build relationships with marketing, advertising and branding, one of the tasks I had was to be a brand liaison that maintained contact between all teams. The goal was to meet and speak early and often and be a part of the product UX review/decision cycle to create holistic integration across web, marketing, and branding experience. As a solution to create UX quality check points for all teams, consider creating a UX liaison. The UX liaison should be a creative designer who can define brand and user experience language for various product experiences.

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I found myself at a design conference listening to still another demand that clients give us designers that coveted place at that legendary table where all the big decisions are made. Sitting next to me was one of my favorite clients, someone I treasure for her levelheadedness and good humor. “I’ve spent hours at that table,” she whispered to me. “It’s not that great, you know.”
Michael Bierut, You’re So Intelligent

Adaptive Path’s MX Conference is about to kick off. Design managers and executives are descending up San Francisco to learn and talk about how to make their designs more effective, to speak to management better, how to innovate their organizations. Part of these discussions I’m sure will be the perennial talk of How to Get a Place at The Table. I’m here to offer an alternate view: our place as designers isn’t at The Table. It’s to smash The Table.

Perhaps the natural state of design—and thus designers—is to be outside the circle of power, and thus better able to tell the truth to power. At The Table, it is easy to have other concerns instead of just creating the best products possible: political concerns of gaining and retaining power, or financial concerns of running the company, or resource concerns about personnel, or the million other details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products. Yes, a seat at the table can guarantee that a product gets made, but it doesn’t guarantee it will be good. Witness: Foleo, which Jeff Hawkins was able to push through but was so roundly criticized, it was pulled before it was even sold.

And of course, yes, we want and deserve respect (we’re changing the world, dontchaknow??), but that respect should flow from the products we create, not the number of meetings we’re in with the CEO.

Designers work better outside, looking in, the wise fools at court. The view outside is clearer, more open to other influences, less susceptible to groupthink and myopic viewpoints. (This outside viewpoint is why so many companies hire consultants.) Being outside allows designers to be advocates: lobbyists for what is the right thing to do for the users, the integrity of product itself, and even in some cases for what is best for the business.

This idea of Designer as Outsider is nothing new. In the 1950s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss had brown suits made so that he would stand out from his corporate clients in their blue and grey suits.

As Dreyfuss knew, sometimes it benefits us to be more like artists than scientists. Design is, after all, a combination of science and art, and it is often art’s job to shine a light on what is uncomfortable or hard to do: the strange and unusual. The Truth with a capital T (which also means Trouble). We just need to draw on that legacy more often. Telling a CEO her vision of the product is the wrong one is not easy. It requires two things: courage and allies.

Rather than expend energy to get to The Table, it’s better to have allies there. People who know how to read the room, who can seem impartial but also lobby for you and help you make your case. The best clients, Tibor Kalman rightly said, are smarter than you. We need to cultivate these allies through the strength of our work and our ability to explain our work in terms of the value it brings to the users and to business. Only then will our voices be heard and respect given. We don’t need a seat at The Table for that. We just need allies there.

And here’s the most subversive thing: if we do our jobs right, The Table will change. It will get bigger, move, transform, and, yes, even get smashed. The best products change companies, markets, and, yes, possibly even the world. And when that happens, attention will be paid, respect given. You will be thanked for smashing The Table and giving them a new one.

And then you will go and do it again.

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Last weekend, the LA Times staff went on a retreat to map out their future. What was interesting to me is the output of that retreat.

This poster has all the hallmarks of a graphic recording exercise and is likely the result of a roomful of people and an intense discussion led or recorded by a graphic illustrator.

A few months ago, several of us had a chance to participate in a graphic facilitation workshop, put on by The Grove. I can barely draw a stick figure, so it was a great opportunity to broaden my horizons. Over the course of two days, a dozen of us learned a multitude of tricks for simple, evocative drawing. It was a remarkable experience to learn how to capture ideas with figures instead of just words.

One of the useful things about graphically facilitating - or recording - a discussion is that the creation of a poster during the discussion serves a few purposes. First, people remember things better if they can tie an idea to a picture. Second, in some cases it is very useful to have an instant artifact showing the outcome of a discussion, whether it’s the brainstorm or a roadmap.

Some of my co-workers who are much handier with a marker than I will be graphically recording some of the talks at MX next week, so those of you attending will get a chance to see the process up close.

Even more about graphic facilitation: The Center for Graphic Facilitation

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I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Coughlan, the head of IDEO’s Transformation by Design Practice and MX San Francisco speaker about the ways in which organizations can fundamentally rethink their approach to things from a design-oriented perspective. Some highlights:

On making change tangible:

 One of my favorite examples comes from a hospital that wanted to help reduce their patients’ worry levels while they were waiting for (chemo) treatment. A very simple idea they had was to just go up to patients and ask them if they had any worries, any questions that they could address. It turned out that doing that — going up to patients and asking them questions — was very awkward and difficult to do. So they created an artifact to help them get over that awkwardness — a set of question cards that they shared with patients to help break the ice and provide something to talk about. It turned out to be a wonderful way to prompt new behavior on the part of patients and providers.

On the designer-client relationship:

I would say that the most important shift in the design profession will be for designers to get comfortable with the notion that it’s more important for a client to have a great idea than for the designer to have the idea. If the client organization has played a role in coming up with the idea, it’s way more likely to see the light of day.

Read the complete interview here.

You can still register for MX San Francisco, April 20-22 here. Enter the code FOHF for a 15% discount.

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I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Nathan Shedroff, experience strategist, author, and the Program Chair and founder of the brand new MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. Nathan will be speaking on Future Topics in Managing User Experience at our upcoming MX San Francisco conference on April 20-22.

MBA programs with a focus on design are cropping up in leading business schools. What’s behind this trend and what do these programs teach? In this conversation, Nathan lifts the curtain of the newest program to blend design and business.

But don’t just read the essay…come hear Nathan up close and in person at MX: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership in San Francisco, April 20-22. Early bird pricing ends March 31st, so sign up today!

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Stephen P. Anderson, formerly Principal User Experience Architect for Sabre and currently Vice President of Design at Viewzi, will be speaking at MX San Francisco on how to get visionary ideas made into realities. He uses George Lucas’ work on Star Wars as inspiration and a practical example. We had a conversation over e-mail about changing organizational culture, managing design teams, and doing things that have never been done before.

Todd Wilkens [TW]: Well, Stephen, even though your talk is all about visionary ideas, let’s get the ball rolling with a practical question: What got you so interested in how visionary ideas get pushed through an organization? Why and how has this been relevant to you? What made this an itch you needed to scratch?

Stephen Anderson [SA]: As a consultant, you see a lot of really great ideas that, for whatever reason, never get implemented. Or when they do, there is little resemblance between what actually gets produced and the original concepts. In 2006, I moved from the world of consulting to become a UX director at a large, enterprise company. Needless to say, it was a real eye-opener. I think I went in with a rather naive faith in the power of prototypes and ‘leading with an inspiring product vision’. While I still value this approach, I quickly learned that there is much more to pushing visionary ideas through an organization.

For starters, if you want to bring a great product/service experience to market, you have to first change the company culture. This is basic — and critical. So many other forces are at play inside large organizations — competition, politics, procedure, history. It’s about much more than creating business value. In fact, the biggest shock for me was discovering how internal business units compete with each other in ways that hurt the larger organization…

Read the full interview.

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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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I’m excited to be presenting my Process Reboot workshop as a pre-con activity on Sunday April 20th for Adaptive Path’s MX San Francisco conference. I first taught the workshop to a sold-out crowd in November at DUX 2007. So if you were at DUX 2007 and were turned away at the door, now is your chance to experience this hands-on workshop! Sign up if you want to hear about different ways to approach your design process and/or if you’re in need of recharging and rethinking your team’s approach. Check out the details on what I’ll be covering in the workshop.

The speaker line up for MX San Francisco is quite enticing as well. The final schedule will be posted in a few weeks so check back here soon!

Register on or before February 3rd for a hefty discount too!

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