Adaptive Path Blog

In honor of our nation’s founding, and recognizing that, hey, this economy sucks for many people, we’re offering special promotional pricing for UX Week 2009. Register between now and July 4th, and pay only $1,776. Use the promotional code BLOG, and get an additional 10% off.

Main stage talks include:

• Matias Duarte, Senior Director of Human Interface and UX at Palm
• Sarah Jones, Tony Award winning playwright and performer
• Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics
• Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Director of the User Experience Group, Intel Digital Home Group
• Temple Grandin, Designer of livestock handling facilities and best-selling author (Animals Make Us Human, Thinking in Pictures)
• Jesse James Garrett, Co-Founder and President of Adaptive Path
• David Merrill, one of the creators of Siftables
• Erin McKean, Independent lexicographer and dictionary evangelist
• Martyn Ware, Sonic ID (and founder of the 80’s band, The Human League!)
• Elizabeth Windram, Senior UX Designer & Bernhard Seefeld, Product Manager for Google Maps

3 days of workshops include:

• Good Design Faster (sketching & sketchboards) with Rachel Glaves and Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path
• Noel Franus, Manager of the global identity practice for Sonic ID
• Strategy Team of One with Henning Fischer of Adaptive Path
• Content Strategy with Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
• Facilitation & Collaboration with Julia Houck-Whitaker of Adaptive Path and Sarah B. Nelson
• Designing for Mobile with Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path
• Multitouch with Nathan Moody & Darren David of Stimulant
• Michal Migurski & Tom Carden of Stamen
• Making Things with Jared Cole of Adaptive Path
• Tangible Thinking with Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path

It’s that time of year again…a celebration of design and specifically, design in San Francisco. This year AIGA SF has kicked off the San Francisco Design Week with lots of interesting events, tours and talks.

We’re hosting an open house and studio tour on Thursday, June 18th from 5:30-9pm. C’mon over and take a walk-through of the AP space, see what UX Design looks like (the stories! The results!) and share your enthusiasm and passion for making the world better through design.

Details and rsvp info here: details on upcoming.org

Stop on over and have a beer with us!

Screening June 7th, 3pm at the Victoria Theater in SF, CA, USA
(As part of the Scary Cow Film Festival)

I’m thrilled to announce that some of the strange and interesting little pictures I have had dancing around in my head are now fully realized in a short film. Thanks to a great crew (via local film co-op Scary Cow), we have a really beautiful work of art to share. It’s an artsy piece — 3 vinettes that each capture a moment, environment or emotion. That’s all I’ll tell you for now. Come to the screening to see for yourself! And if you do…please vote for us! The winning film(s) get money to make more…

Sunday, June 7th, 2009
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94101
Tickets: $7.50 in advance or $10 at the door.
Doors open at 2:45pm with the screening starting at 3pm sharp.

The Big (D)esign Conference in Dallas on May 30th promises to be a terrific experience, packed with interesting sessions in User Experience, Strategy, Social Media and Code Development. For one day and $50, it’s a great way to refresh your networking skills, learn some great stuff and hang in Dallas when the weather is good.

While you’re there, don’t miss our own Teresa Brazen, who will be speaking in the Strategy track, sharing her experiences with exploring the UX Landscape.

Teresa is the founder and host of Tea with Teresa, a podcast blog dedicated to dispelling mystery and learning more about the world together through candid conversation, jargon-free dialog and tea. Here’s a snapshot of what she’ll cover in her Big (D)esign talk:

Tools and Methods to Learn, Navigate, & Make A Name for Yourself in the UX Landscape.

Coming from outside the user experience (UX) industry and landing smack in the belly of the beast, Teresa knows how fresh eyes can be an asset. In her talk, she will present three creative approaches to understanding and navigating the sea of methods and concepts that make up the User Experience practice, while embedding yourself as a key player in the UX industry. She comes from the perspective that ‘It’s okay not to know everything about User Experience yet’ (most people don’t know what it is, anyway!) and reveals some simple, creative ways to learn about the interesting processes, methods and practices that make up the field.

Tools & Methods include:

1] Maps of Knowledge: Diagrams that allow you to visually see what you know about the industry, what you don’t know, and areas where you can supplement what you already know (if you’re already a UX professional) or what you learned in school (if you’re a soon-to-be UX professional).

2] Get to Know the Pros: Building your network is as simple as taking advantage of resources around you. Teresa will share how her podcast, TeaWithTeresa.com, allows her to learn about UX methods and practice from the people that created the field or made huge waves in the industry. She will also share key things you can do to build your own network within the field.

3] Building A Personal Brand: A personal brand means you’re known for something and helps you stand out in a crowd. Whether you’re a student or an experienced UX professional, growing your personal brand will make a difference for your career. Teresa will provide you with tools to help you uncover what you have to offer, create a mantra (What do you care about?) and will share videos from others who have created strong personal brands within the UX community.

On the Experience Design track, you’ll be able to catch AP’s Design Researcher and Manager of the Austin Office Todd Wilkens as he shares his Case Study for Redesigning MySpace.

So hop on over to Dallas at the end of May to say “Hi!”

Planning for UX Week 2009 continues at a torrid pace, and we’ll have many things to share in the coming few weeks.

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., author (Animals Make Us Human, Thinking In Pictures) will be our keynote speaker for Day 2, with a talk titled “Animals, Autism, and Design.” Dr. Grandin has written and spoken about her autism gives her special insight into animal behavior, and I thought it would be great to have her talk about her work designing animal facilities, as she takes a kind of animal-centered design approach, going into the pens where they are held and figuring out what it’s like for them.

On Day 4, we’ll have David Merrill, one of the creators of Siftables. Read his response in my Single Question Interview, or view his demonstration of Siftables at TED.com.

We’ve begin hammering out an explicit schedule, so it’s easier to see just what will happen when. The schedule is not yet complete (we’re over 5 months out), but we’re working to fill it up soon!

As always, register with promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price!

Tomorrow kicks off the IA Summit 2009…a gathering of souls with a passion and vocation for information, design and making things findable (oh, and so much more!) It promises to be an energetic and spirited conversation, filled with workshops, talks, hallway synchronicity, new perspectives and new directions.

I’m really excited about attending two of the pre-conference workshops: Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times with Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Matt Milan and Joe Lamantia; and The Architecture of Social Websites with Christina Wodtke, Bryce Glass, Christian Crumlish, and Joshua Porter. There’s a whole host of interesting ideas bubbling around the IAsphere this year. The week promises to be a true high point of the season.

Adaptive Path folks will be out and about, so track us down…

• You can find Leah at the pre-conference workshop Sketchboards and Prototyping — Methods for Rapid Iterative Design (co-taught with Todd Zaki Warfel.)
• On Friday, Chiara’s telling us all about The Semantic Web: What IAs Need To Know About Web 3.0
• On Sunday, I’ll share my adoration for my favorite lifeform (and the lessons it holds for us) in Lessons from Slime Mold: How to Survive and Thrive in Ever-Changing Organizational Environments
• And stay for the rousing end with Jesse James Garrett, who sends us back into the world inspired and invigorated with his closing keynote.

We’re seeking a good place to have a round of drinks on Adaptive Path on Saturday evening. So if you’re at the Summit, watch twitter or grab one of us to find the place.

See ya in Memphis!

Here at Adaptive Path, I manage our Research and Development work which includes projects like Charmr, Aurora, the new event we just hosted, Managing Design Projects, and another project we’re excited to share with you soon. Separate from my work here, I’ve been pulling together an event called It’s Your Money. The event, which will be held on March 14th at the Westin Market St in San Francisco, is for recent and soon to be college graduates to come learn how to manage their finances and investments. Here’s why:

When I graduated college in 2003 and got my first job, I planned to save lots of money. But In fact, my paychecks were quickly spent on clothes, trips and many other “must haves”.

I thought I was doing a good job of managing my money by checking my bank statement every week or so. I was tracking my money, but I wasn’t managing it.

I made a New Year’s resolution in 2008 to manage my expenses. I started interacting with my purchases twice: once when I made them and a again when I categorized each expense.

I realized my car was costing me nearly $600 per month. I decided to sell it, reduced major expenses like eating out, and started to really save. After a year, I tripled my savings.

Recently, instead of being upset about the current economy, I’ve created this event to help recent and soon to be college graduates learn what I learned the hard way. At It’s Your Money, participants learn how to build a personal financial safety net, and manage their own investments.

This evening, I’ll be talking about the event on CNBC’s On The Money where I’ll be sharing my story, and what inspired this project.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Sara Beckman, a member of the faculty at the Haas School of Business. Sara will be speaking on Communicating the Value of Design at our upcoming MX 2009 conference.

Embracing your inner “quant” changes the game for many design leaders. How do you move from the often subjective language of design to speaking a new dialect of business impact measured in numbers? In this conversation, Sara talks about approaches to assessing overall value, how having empirical data can unlock key strategic conversations, and tips for focusing efforts on the measurements that matter most.

You can read the full essay here.

But the essay is just one step in this very important conversation…hear more from Sara and other design leaders (and hobnob with the folks at the vanguard of leading experiences) at MX 2009 in San Francisco, March 1-3.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

We’re continually updating the UX Week 2009 website with new speakers and content. We’ve recently added Martyn Ware and Noel Franus from Sonic ID, who will be presenting and teaching about how to incorporate audio into experience design, and Kristina Halvorson, who will teach a workshop on content strategy and user experience.

Last year, Nathan Moody and Darren David from Stimulant spoke on the main stage about large-scale multitouch interfaces, and this year they’ll teach a workshop on how to design for them. Additionally, we’re happy to have Michal Migurski and Tom Carden from Stamen Design return with the highly-rated workshop Live, Vast and Deep: Web-native Information Visualization.

TED.com recently published a presentation by UX Week 2009 speaker Scott McCloud that he gave at TED in 2005. It’s an excellent presentation, and should give you a taste of what to expect from him:

Sign up by January 31st to take advantage of our extremely discounted early bird registration price!

Last October, I taught at UIE’s UI13 Conference. All teachers are invited to give an additional 90-minute presentation. In early September, I had my first child (my son, Jules), and that experience encouraged me to focus on what was truly important. I considered what was the most important presentation I could give, what could actually make an impact on the lives of the people there, and it lead me to my talk, “16 (Mostly) Difficult Steps To Becoming A Customer Experience-Driven Organization.” I am presenting this on February 11 (10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 1700 GMT) as part of our virtual seminar series.

The talk is drawn from, well, nearly 15 years doing user experience work. It’s culled from a variety of sources, including our report “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience,” our book Subject to Change, our interactions with clients and colleagues, and lots of reading.

I’ll admit it — the presentation is a little daunting. Covering 16 steps is a lot. But I felt I needed to do that to be responsible to the subject. Changing an organization is arduous. If you follow the steps in this talk, it could take 2, 3, even 5 years. But, and I think this is the most important element to remember — it can be done. It can work. And, perhaps even more importantly — it must be done, if we want the organizations we work for to be humane and respectful.

I hope you find the time to attend this virtual seminar, and I look forward to encouraging a dialogue on this subject. Register with the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off!