Adaptive Path Blog

At the IA Summit this year, I dove into one approach to design we cover in Subject to Change called The Long Wow. It’s a simple idea: If you want to have loyal customers, you can’t just assign them customer ID cards and hope they behave as you’d like. Instead, you need to thoughtfully design experiences to impress them repeatedly over the long haul.

Here’s the slidecast including audio, covering what the long wow is all about and how you can achieve it.

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Special thanks to Jeff Parks and the folks at Boxes & Arrows for sharing the audio!

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Join us to celebrate the release of our book, Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design. The party will be here at our offices:


363 Brannan St., San Francisco, CA
May 13th from 6-9pm


We’ll start off with some mingling, then the four authors will give a short talk followed by a book signing and more mingling. Adaptive Snacks will be providing light appetizers. Please join us! RSVP Here.


A little bit about the book:
To achieve success in today’s ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience.


It’s a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today’s environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations. Read more


Don Norman said he liked it:
“Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound.
I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful.”


Don Norman
Co-Founder Nielsen Norman group
Author of “Emotional Design” and “Design of Future Things”


Buy the book on Amazon.

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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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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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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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A client asked us for some advice on how to get the most out of working with Adaptive Path (or any design firm, for that matter). We polled the staff, and put our responses into an essay.

Enjoy!

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Last week I attended Connecting 07, the ICSID/IDSA Congress. I’d never before engaged with IDSA, and I quite enjoyed it. What struck me was how the issues that industrial and product designers are facing are pretty much identical to what we’re seeing in the world of experience strategy and design.

My favorite talks/speakers:

Hans Rosling, Gapminder. Hans is a dynamic speaker who is able to make statistics and data visualization fun and provocative. If you haven’t seen his TED talk, you should.

Sabine Junginger, Lancaster University. Sabine spoke on “Design Change: A Paradox” about the role that design can play in change management. This may have been my favorite talk of the event, because it both supported and challenged conventional wisdom about the emerging role of design in business. As I wrote to my colleagues:

Sabine studied under Dick Buchanan at CMU, and has a Ph.D in…. DESIGN! But, she has her head screwed on tight. She pointed out that while design is often brought in to make change, it often serves to accommodate the status quo with band-aids.
Three things I liked:

she kind of dissed design thinking, saying you can’t separate thinking from making.

she pointed out how the current design+business craziness means that the different organizational silos (marketing, product dev, IT, etc.) each bring in design to make change, but end up using design only to bolster their silos

that successful change management with design *begins* with the product… i.e., it’s essential that you use the act of designing a product to produce change… you don’t change an organization in the abstract so that it can then produce better products
- visions and strategies (and organizations for that matter) must continue to evolve. (Okay, that was a fourth thing)

Sam Lucente, HP. Sam (written about in the latest Fast Company) is in charge of design across all of HP, and has an amazing story to tell about how design is evolving and succeeding at HP. He gave good slides, some of which I photographed. I think the most important lesson from Sam was that in order for the design practice to be seen as a valuable contributor at HP, work had to begin at the most basic level — consistency and simplicity throughout the entire product line — before design could be successfully used to differentiate and innovate.

James J. Pirkl, The Generation Connection. This guy advocated a “transgenerational” approach to design. He objects to how older generations are conventionally perceived, and made the case that many suppositions about the elderly are just plain wrong. He doesn’t advocate design for elderly though… He advocates design that works for all. He showed his Transgenerational House, an embodiment of his design principles, which, honestly, looks pretty cool.

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I’m teaching a day-long workshop this year at DUX 2007 entitled Process Rebooting: Changing your Process to Create IxD-driven Innovations. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting the material together and crafting a day of hands-on activities and information to inspire design leaders to innovate their design processes.

I’ve had a look at the registered participants so far and am pleased to see a lot of creative directors, product and project managers from a variety of companies in web, software and device/product with a mix of strategists, designers and information architects as well. I can foresee a day full of lively discussion and sharing of ideas with this group!

With 3 weeks before the conference begins, the workshop is filling up fast! We have a few seats left, so if you’re attending DUX and have been pondering whether to attend this workshop, now is the time to sign up!

And if this topic isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, check out the other workshops scheduled on the same day given by Jeremy Alexis, Marc Rettig, John Zapolski, Kevin Brooks, Richard I. Anderson and Melody Roberts.

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Wharton business school’s recent article on Monster.com describes what decisions monster.com is making as it finds itself in ‘middle age,’ when the old competitors have made way for new ones (LinkedIn, Craigslist):

• Grow internationally — even though they face local competition in other markets like Europe, India, China, and Mexico
• Re-diversifying into more types of businesses and brands — they sold off other businesses in the late 90’s to focus on Monster, but recently diversified to now own Tickle.com, Military.com, FastWeb and others.

Wharton faculty suggest other decisions Monster will still need to make:

• how to protect itself from low-price, high-volume Craigslist who posts twice as many jobs at a much lower price
• how to “address the cyclical nature of recruiting” — web job seekers, “are more likely to change jobs and less likely to be unemployed than non-wired job-seekers”

Sadly, the approach recommended to address the latter bullet is, “create a social networking site,” a popular panacea that’s easy to list and hard to do right.

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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…)

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