Adaptive Path Blog

We’re excited about the impending MX East event, taking place 21-23 October in Philadelphia.

Over the past couple months we’ve conducted a number of interviews with the presenters:
• Ryan Armbruster on patient-centered health care at the Mayo Clinic
• Mark Jones, director of Service Design at IDEO
• Josh Wesson, CEO of innovative wine retailer Best Cellars
• Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times
• Lou Carbone, experience marketing pioneer
• Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation
• Chris Conley on creative culture

I also wrote on Why We Need To Manage Experience.We’ve got amazing people speaking, and representatives of leading companies attending, looking forward to getting away from the noise and distraction of standard life and really focus on what it takes to deliver great experiences for our customers.

Use promotional code BLOG and you’ll receive 10% off the registration price.

Share This

Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. I had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about his role at the Times and the challenges facing design managers.

Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Khoi, hello and welcome. Let’s start with your role at the New York Times.

Khoi Vinh [KV]: My title is Design Director and I run the design group for NYTimes.com. A lot of people make the very understandable mistake of assuming that we are responsible for all of the interactive graphics that you see on the site — Flash graphics, interactive charts, and so forth. That’s actually not the case. What we’re responsible for is a bit higher level, and a little bit more invisible. We’re actually designing the platform of NYTimes.com much like a design studio or a consultant would. I have to design a site for editors to work with and for multimedia generalists to produce those graphics. We consult with the graphics folks, to help them with best practices in terms of how to make their graphics in keeping with the overall interaction models for NYTimes.com. We don’t get into the business of being generalists. That’s what they do and they do it better than anybody else. So we try and get out of their way as much as possible.

JJG: Is this a role that existed there before you started there?

KV: Yes, it did. It’s a fairly unique set of requirements. It’s a bit of a creative director role, it’s a bit information architect or usability authority role, it’s a bit of technical generalist. It requires some savvy about how journalism works and how the Times treats news. And it requires a lot of straddling the divide between journalism and business at the New York Times; trying to reconcile that stuff as the company heads towards a digital future.

JJG: This role is pretty unusual in most organizations. Most organizations have a design team on the ground on a day-to-day basis working alongside someone responsible for the content. The idea of someone in a strategic role interfacing between both of those groups is a relatively new idea. How did The New York Times recognize that that they needed someone in that position between those groups?

KV: The Times, throughout its history, has tried to do things in the best possible way with best practices. There is a long tradition of appreciation for really good design here in all its forms. Plus, the people who run the site — the assistant managing editors responsible for the editorial and integrity of the site — play a huge part in directing the evolution of the site. They are all something unique in my experience: They’re actual bona fide users of the Internet, something you don’t find at a lot of organizations. A lot of times responsibility for the online business falls to somebody with a lot of seniority but not necessarily a lot of experience. It’s something that passes into their portfolio as a reward for having brought in $X million of sales. These people are genuine, enthusiastic, passionate users of the Internet and they understood early on that they needed to bring aboard somebody who is actually a web designer and not just a graphic designer transitioning from print; somebody who understands this new medium.

Read the full interview. Sign up for MX East with promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price.

Share This

Chris Conley of Gravity Tank and the Institute of Design spends his time educating young designers as well as clients the finer points of design, business and the process of building a creative and sustainable culture. I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about what it takes to grow and sustain creative excellence within organizations. Here are some highlights:

There is a tacit assumption that making is a production activity rather than a critical, informative one. Anyone who has ever been a part of a productive R&D team realizes that trying things and doing experiments is the fastest way to break into new territory. By putting a priority on thinking and talking (through email, meetings, and PowerPoint) our work activities and environments have become sterile and devoid of the tangible aspects of what were in business to create! You can’t tell by going into the offices of most companies what business they are actually in! Consider how challenging that inherently makes it for new people in the organization to understand and contribute creatively….

The “new” way of working is to re-train the organization. I put scare quotes around it because it is exactly how we used to work. You remember photos from the 50s of all of our great companies like General Motors, Lockheed, IBM? The photos were of folks in rooms full of prototypes, drawings on the tables, and walls that were blackboards with sketches and drawings. They were building the businesses. That’s gone. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that tangible things don’t matter.

Check out the entire interview here. Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.

Share This

MX East, taking place 21-23 October in Philadelphia, fast approaches. This is the only event focused on what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. Along with our stellar line up of speakers (from such companies a Google, The New York Times, IDEO, the Mayo Clinic, Whirlpool, and more), I thought it was interesting to see what companies are represented in those who have registered. Come to MX East, and you’ll meet design managers and creative leaders from:

Share This

Many UX people find themselves in organizations that are dominated by other schools of thought: business management, engineering, etc. That’s just one of the things that I find so inspirational about talking to Ryan Armbruster about the Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Program. The program integrates research and design methods into the culture of medicine and science at Mayo Clinic to repeatedly generate meaningful changes that improve the lives of patients and the effectiveness of the medical system supporting them.

Ryan spoke to the ability to connect design to the core values of the clinic in our recent interview:

“Mayo Clinic is open to the design-centered program because its values are rooted in patient needs. This value of patient coming first is in the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization.

Having a design program to articulate what those needs are and informing better solutions is a logical addition. That’s why design has been applied in the organization to play an important role in informing how our services are created and delivered.”

Ryan will be speaking on the transformational power of designing for emotions at Adaptive Path’s upcoming MX East conference. (When registering for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG to receive 10% off your final price.) During our discussion, I got a chance to understand more of how emotions applied to his work at the Mayo Clinic:

“What’s interesting in healthcare — as well as any service industry — is how to deal most effectively with the uncertainty of human emotions and human behavior. Emotion is complex. It’s not a rational system. As much as you want to try to design a service or a system that’s reliable and consistent, it won’t be effective if it doesn’t adapt to the many different situations that are present in the complexity of human emotions. But when you successfully design for emotion, it can dramatically influence the outcomes, such as a patients’ health.”

Check out the whole interview.

Share This

I had the fortune of interviewing Mark Jones, who heads up IDEO’s service innovation group. Mark will be speaking at MX East (Oct 21-23, Philadelphia). Read the full interview here. (Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off).

Rachel Hinman [RH]: Welcome, Mark. Tell us a little about the work you are doing over at IDEO.

Mark Jones [MJ]: Thank you, Rachel. I lead the service innovation group at IDEO Chicago and right now there’s a lot of attention on service design and service innovation.

RH: That was something I was curious about: People have been doing [service design] for a long time but it’s getting more attention. Are people coming to you guys and asking for specifically for service design? Or is it something you have to explain?

MJ: People are definitely coming to us. I think that many service companies are finding that their services have been commoditized and are realizing they have to differentiate themselves. Companies are realizing that they actually have to pay attention to what their customers want. Expectations are higher and the competitive landscape is much tighter than it used to be. Companies have to innovate. And so they are coming to us.

Again, read the full interview here.

Share This

I had the fortune of interviewing Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars. Joshua Wesson will be speaking at MX East, and even leading a wine tasting! Here are some highlights, and you read the full interview here. (Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off).

“It was a grape stand epiphany after many years of suffering under the cruel heel of Manishevitz Concord, my first wine. I worked in restaurants for a number of years as a wine steward, thinking about putting wine and food together and helping people — all sorts of people, people who had broad knowledge of wine and people who had no knowledge of wine — connect to food in delicious ways.

The idea was to take a complex subject, wine, and make it instantly accessible, because when you think about it, ordering wine in a restaurant, you may spend three or four minutes, if that, thinking about what wine you want to drink and how it may or may not connect to the food.”

“I really wanted to make the experience so intuitive and simple that the store became your wine expert and it was your best friend, your reliable insider who would give you information that would connect your palette preference to a specific bottle.”

“It was kind of like Apollo 13, on the ground they threw all the things that they had up in the capsule on a table, and tried to figure out how they could jury rig a device that would allow the astronauts to get enough oxygen to come back to earth. We looked at all the different things that constituted a traditional wine shop experience and we basically threw away anything that was an obstacle and what was left on the table became the basis of Best Cellars. We took away the bad stuff, kept the good stuff, and added our own stuff and that’s how Best Cellars came to be.”

“We really believed that the way people learned and reacted to systems of classification, especially when it came to something as complex as wine, needed to have the option of going with their strongest suit.

And we were creating new categories, these taste-based categories, so it was absolutely critical that all these elements come together to present a common idea: the reinvention of the way that wine was merchandized by taste rather than by anything else.”

“We have become a little bit smarter in the way that we tune the music to the time of day. We actually have day parts and evening parts and the music that we play is markedly different: mellower during the day, a little bit faster at night. We also don’t play Christmas music. We’re very proud of that. In fact, we have signs that go in our windows at Christmas usually with a picture of Bing Crosby with a circle and a slash.”

Again, read the full interview here.

Share This

For the longest time, not that many people working in experience design had heard of Irene Au. Which was surprising, considering her background — she began at Netscape when it was going strong, then spent 8 years at Yahoo, building one of the sharpest UX teams in Silicon Valley, and is now Director of User Experience at Google.

In the last year or so, Irene has become much more public. She spoke at our first MX Event (in an interview with Jeffrey Veen), and appeared on a panel at SXSW (which you can listen to here.) Irene’s insights into what it takes to build a successful experience design practice within large, fast-paced (and mostly technology-driven) organizations are definitely resonant, as this blog post demonstrates.

We’re excited that Irene is once again joining us at MX East, where she’ll be speaking solo on what it takes to elevate the practice of design within organizations so that they can deliver great experiences to the world. As always, use promotional code BLOG to get 10% off the registration price.

Share This

Photo from here

I believe I first came across wine retailer Best Cellars in 1998 or so, visiting Manhattan. The store had, for that time, a distinct approach, catering to people who might like wine, but are uncomfortable with the price and arcane language. This meant things like no bottles of wine cost over $10 (I think… maybe $15), and that the store staff were friendly and approachable.

But for my information-geek-brain, the thing that most appealed was how Best Cellars totally reclassified wine. Typical wine categories are “region,” “varietal,” “vintage,” utterly meaningless to the bulk of the populace. Best Cellars’ reclassified wines across a spectrum from fizzy and fresh to smooth and big.

I was so struck by how a company’s core brand promise was demonstrated through information classification that I wrote about it… nearly 6 years ago. It was an example of a truly user-centered classification scheme, one that took words that normal people use and developing a system from that.

Best Cellars’ CEO Joshua Wesson explained his classification scheme in an article for Wine & Spirits magazine. I love the genesis of their terms:

You’ve got eight categories set up. In red wine, for example, there are “juicy,” “smooth,” “big,” each modified by several adjectives. Why those adjectives? Why those categories for that matter?

First we started looking at all the adjectives commonly used for wine. We blocked out maybe two hundred and fifty of them on cards, and then aligned the cards in broad sweeps based on attributes we thought would tie to different colors of wine. Then we started to turn over cards that needed a glossary for the average person to comprehend, the words that were understandable only by someone with a substantial knowledge of wine. Then if they were so broad that they were essentially meaningless we got rid of them. In the end we had about thirty words that seemed to work.

In a later interview with BusinessWeek, Wesson explains the retail experience he strives for:

Q: Aesthetics are important to your business model. Why?

A: Wine is a lifestyle-enhancing beverage. It’s only consumed for one reason: To make your life better than it was before and to make the people around you funnier than they were before. And because of that, because it’s so directly associated with pleasure, it seemed ill advised to create a store where the shopping experience was any less pleasurable than the experience [surrounding] the product’s [consumption].

And that means creating an environment that’s fun to shop in, where the information is conveyed as directly and enjoyably as possible. In fact, we look at the stores as exploratoriums, where you can learn a lot about wine just by reading each shelf. It’s no coincidence that the stores have a museum-like quality to them. But the best museums are interactive and engage you. And we try to engage people to think about what they’re reading, tasting, and looking at so they walk out better consumers, smarter consumers, happier consumers.

So everything in the store, from the color palette to the fixture display, to the way that our sales people are dressed, to the music that’s playing — all of those things are thought about in very careful ways to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

For all these reasons, I’m thrilled that Joshua Wesson is speaking at MX East (October 21-23, Philadephia, PA). He’s been able to build a brand, and business, taking a truly experiential approach to shopping for wine, opening a series of successful stores from Boston to Washington, D.C. He’ll share his story of success with our audience, and even lead a wine tasting heading into lunch!

Register with the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the price.

Share This

Before our first MX event, I spoke with Scott Berkun on what was then his upcoming book, The Myths of Innovation. We didn’t publish the interview before the conference, so it didn’t make the impact it should have. Well, Scott’s speaking at MX East (Oct 21-23, Philadelphia), the book is published (and excellent), and the interview is as relevant as ever, so we’re sharing it here.

Sarah Nelson: I have Scott Berkun here with me today, and we’re going to talk about his upcoming book. But first: Scott, could you give us a little bit of a background and tell us about yourself?

Scott Berkun: Sure. So, my background’s in computer science and design. I went to Carnegie Mellon University. I was a computer science major there, but I also learned very quickly that I was not going to be a great programmer, so I studied user interface design before I left. I got hired at Microsoft in ‘94, and I worked as a usability engineer and as a program manager on Internet Explorer. I did that for maybe five or six years. I did all kinds of management stuff: Led software development, wrote specs, made decisions, treated all its bugs. I left Microsoft in about 2003 to write books, and my first book was called The Art of Project Management, which was published by O’Reilly in 2005. That book did really well, so well that they were willing to let me write another book, called The Myths of Innovation, which is what I’m talking to you about today.

SN: So, what would you say is the biggest myth about innovation?

SB: Well, there are so many to choose from. The first chapter of the book is all about one of the biggest ones: The myth of epiphany, which is the idea that when all the great thinkers and all the great creative minds get new ideas, they just come from beyond with no explanation as to why that happens or who it’s going to happen to. If I had to pick the biggest of the innovation myths, that’d be it: The myth of epiphany.

SN: So, why do you think that this myth is so pervasive?

SB: It’s nice to think that we can just say, “Maybe I’ll be creative today and maybe I won’t; it just depends on what the gods decide. And I’ll be okay if I’m not creative, but if it happens, it’s not in my control.” I think that’s a big part of many of the myths, that they distance us from having to take responsibility for whether we are creative or not.

SN: Creativity and the processes of business sometimes seem like strange bedfellows. Creativity often involves a lot of risk and ambiguity, whereas business seems to value efficiency and guarantees. In your experience, how can you bridge the gap between those two different approaches?

SB: Well, even if you are doing something that you’ve done before, something that you think is super predictable and reliable, it’s still not guaranteed. There are always uncertainties that factor into any decisions you make or any processes you put in place. So it’s an illusion that managers have complete control over their businesses, or complete control over how things are done. Someone has to stand up and say, “We don’t have that much control over the simple things. There’s always uncertainty. There’s always some kind of risk. There’s always some kind of chaos.” And once you get people to acknowledge that they don’t have as much control as they think they do, then the conversation starts to be about how do you introduce new ideas? How do you have processes that support change? How do you have processes that allow us to see what the process is missing? All those questions start to come up, and then you can reach a point where people recognize, “Okay, in order for us to grow as much as we want to grow, we have to change, and change demands risk, so we have to be okay with taking a risk on this project.” I think it always starts with someone having the guts to reflect back on the illusion of control. We always think we have control over everything, yet if you look at what’s really going on, we don’t.

SN: One of the things I’ve been wondering about is the idea of “source of innovation” within a company. Do you think it’s actually possible to create an environment in which innovation occurs?

SB: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think that you can create an environment, and it’s very simple. I think that whoever has power over a budget, and whoever has power over what features are included in a product or go up on the website, they enable innovation by saying “yes.” That’s really the fundamental thing that they have to be willing to do. When someone shows up with an idea — “Hey, why don’t we change the navigation system from this older design to this new design I’ve been thinking of? Can I get some money to go and prototype this?”— all that has to happen is the person with power says, “Yes, I will give you a week to go and prototype that and we will review it when you have the prototype, and then we’ll consider actually making those changes.” And once everyone witnesses the person in power saying “yes” to a new idea, then they’ll be comfortable bringing another idea, or a third idea. And then all of a sudden, you have an environment that is very receptive to new ideas and innovations, as opposed to the more common complaints about environments, where new ideas are like wanted men: They’re shot down pretty quickly.
(more…)

Share This