Adaptive Path Blog

I recently sat down to talk with Scott Hirsch, principal of the Management Innovation Group and MX conference speaker, to talk about using UX and design sensibilities to solve the problems of business strategy. Scott shares his experiences on where UX outperforms and compliments typical business functions like financial analysis, and how UX can be used to tackle problems differently—from how much is Google worth to how telecoms respond to the iPhone.

Download the MP3 of our conversation, and come join Scott at the MX conference next week to learn more about “what’s wrong with strategy!”

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Earlier today I had a delightful chat with Julie Peters, Brand Manager at Virgin USA, and speaker at our upcoming MX San Francisco 2008 conference. You can listen to our conversation (45 minutes, MP3), which addresses topics as varied as: the Virgin Brand; the importance of hiring the right people; how Virgin incubates and spins out businesses; what “innovation” means for Virgin; the challenge of delivering the Virgin experience; and plans for traveling on Virgin Galactic. She provided fascinating insight into how Virgin operates, and I hope you appreciate it.

And don’t forget, one lucky person who registers for MX San Francisco by Friday March 14, 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time will be chosen at random to receive their choice of either one round-trip ticket wherever Virgin America flies (in honor of Julie), or a spa/massage package at the conference hotel, the Mark Hopkins.

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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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A podcast from our own Todd Wilkens from the 2007 Emergence Conference at Carnegie Mellon, discussing the end of products. Listen and enjoy!

P.S. Lots of other great podcasts there too, including the closing keynote from Dick Buchanan.

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Brandon, Sarah and I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Parks and the I.A. Consultants podcast after our mini-workshop at the VizThink conference. In our discussion, we discuss five elements which “illustrate” why pictures are a powerful way to communicate with multi-disciplinary teams, including:

1. Disambiguation
2. Efficiency
3. Emotion
4. Telling a Story
5. Leadership

Check it out on the web here. It’s also available via iTunes.

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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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Our very own Dan Saffer was recently interviewed for a podcast on Read/WriteWeb. As Experience Design Director, Dan has recently been seeing a lot of traction, like this interview, from his recent “Call to Arms” post on the Adaptive Path blog. If you are an interaction designer or even just interested in recent developments with device interfaces, please check out and contribute to Dan’s Interactive Gestures wiki.

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I took part in a conversation on the topic of user experience with Andy Budd and Hammad Khan for the UK’s leading web design magazine, .net. Skip ahead to about 12:30 in the show to hear the discussion.

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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…

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Founder Indi Young was interviewed by IA Voice, an IA Podcast channel in Europe about her mental modeling process. The postcast of the interview is available on the IA Voice site. Indi describes it as “kind of like a whole course compressed into a few minutes.”

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