Adaptive Path Blog

“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

Just before the holiday break, I was driving on the 24 freeway right at the Caldecott tunnel when I saw that someone had put up one strand of Christmas lights in the dirty window of the little office that sits at the base of the tunnel. When I thought about it, I realized that someone did that intentionally to create a little holiday spirit in an otherwise bleak location.

When we talk about experience design, we discuss it in terms of intentional efforts to create an experience for a product or service. There are meetings, decisions, consultants, plans and well-made executions – all of this with an eye towards producing a purposeful, desired experience for an individual or group of people.

But, the person that put those Christmas lights did all those things, too. Maybe not in a conscious or thought-out manner, but there was an intention to create an experience.

So, my question is, do human beings always intentionally design experiences – even unknowningly?

Outside of acts of God or nature (things that we cannot control), we create experiences for ourselves every day. We organize our closets in a certain way to make dressing in the morning efficient, we walk certain streets because we find them pleasant, we cook our food for taste, we decorate at holidays to create a mood and tradition.

What causes us to do this? Do we simply like it? Or is there a deeper need?

As experience designers, are there ways to build upon this trait? Can we somehow expand on this assumed, basic human behavior? Are there ways to recognize these natural tendencies and leverage them when we design experiences?

As the year comes to a close, the web becomes filled with lists – Top 10-this, Top 100-that. I love these lists and wanted to throw one into the mix. Below is a list of software and web services that we use here at Adaptive Path. If you haven’t made use of these, take a peek:

Software

Adobe InDesign – All our proposals, project narratives and a good chunk of our deliverables are done in InDesign. It’s an amazing page layout tool that allows you to assemble all your models, charts, visual designs and wireframes into consistently designed deliverables for your clients.

Adobe Illustrator – Many of us use Illustrator for drawing models, graphs, wireframes and design comps.

Adobe Photoshop – We honestly don’t use Photoshop to any large degree. But for tweaking images, cropping, minor editing, etc., you can’t find a better tool.

Adobe Acrobat Professional – PDFs are our deliverable blood. So, making the most of Acrobat is important. Often, we’ll use the sticky note features to provide feedback on designs or ideas. We’ll convert our presentations to PDF for release to the public after events as well.

Adobe Flash – We use Flash for creating prototypes of interfaces and applications. Thermo looks promising for this, but we’ll have to wait.

Keynote – One of our most favorite applications. Keynote is not only used for our presentations for events, but also for deliverables to clients. When you absolutely need a fast, powerful and simple application to convey your ideas, Keynote is the one.

OmniGraffle – Graffle is a great tool for creating wireframes and other diagrams. It’s faster to get started in Graffle than Illustrator sometimes and it’s made for wireframes. Many of us use this on every project.

OmniOutliner – Another fine tool, especially for taking notes that later need to be translated into a presentation, narration or deliverable.

Coda – This is a great little app for code editing and FTP services. The guys at Panic make awesome software.

SubEthaEdit – We use this during client meetings and sales calls. The Bonjour enabled document editing makes it so easy for all of us to take notes on one page. This saves time combining notes later and allows us to make corrections on the fly.

Microsoft Office – We use this a lot less than we did a year ago. We’ve stopped using Word for our proposals and communication. But we still use Excel for accounting purposes.

OS X – Of course, we’re a Mac house, so OS X is our most favorite “app” of all!

Web Services

Twitter – Twitter is great service that allow us to maintain connections with each other and with the community. Not only do most of us have our own accounts, Adaptive Path has an account where people could follow our office antics.

AIM – Instant messaging is still king for instant fast communication. Since we’ve grown to use two floors in our building, we rely on AIM for quick intra-office check-ins.

Harvest – Rather than doing traditional punch-in timecards, or submitting our project hours via email, we’ve switched to Harvest. It’s a great online service that makes it easy for the practitioners and the project managers.

Basecamp – Couldn’t run projects as effectively without it. Though it’s basic in many respects, it does 80% of what we need and our clients love the ability to communicate with us in such a simple and direct manner.

Wordpress – Our blog is powered by Wordpress and we’re happy with it’s ease of use, configurability and industrial strength.

MediaWiki – Instead of an intranet, we maintain a wiki. All the office and personnel stuff goes here. Everyone can edit it and we use it daily.

We’ve also experimented with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets with clients. We’ve tried countless online file storage delivery services. Most of us are on LinkedIn and Flickr.

Software and web services are crucial to doing our jobs, but face-to-face interaction and clear communication skills are the best tools you can have in your arsenal.

During my two years in college, my friends and I would occasionally flip through our class year’s face book.

No, not facebook.com, but the actual physical soft cover booklet called the Class Album: new students face book. Each page had nine black and white photographs, and each photograph had a name under it. We would flip through it, muttering things to ourselves like, “Oh, I know that person”, “Who’s that?”, “Wow I nearly didn’t recognize him” and the inevitable, “Dude, she’s hot.”

Then came facebook.com (or thefacebook.com as it was first called).

Instead of skimming page upon page of old high school photographs, trying to decide whether he/she was someone I’d want to meet, I could access entire profiles of information. And I could see if someone was Single, In a Relationship, In an Open Relationship, Engaged, Married, or Complicated.

We could now scurry home, open our laptops, and check out That Stranger From Class. What was her major? Who did we know in common? What kinds of movies did she like? And, is she single? This replaced the Hot Or Not aspect of the old physical face book, and people flocked to register. Back then, registering a Facebook account was relatively simple: there were no applications, no news feeds, no events, and not even a wall.

Facebook announced recently that profiles would soon be searchable from Google. As it opens itself up to the world, will it become a face book for the world? Or will the idea of a face book crumble once it is taken out of college campuses?

Credits to Frank Yu for pointing out the face book to Facebook design metaphor.

The first in a new occasional series. These are questions that have arisen on Adaptive Path’s internal mailing lists that have sparked debate, discussion, and some head-scratching. Take your best shot at answering them!

Is service design just another name for experience design?

What is the difference between user experience design and experience design?

Are Facebook/MySpace widgets the new banner ads? (Banner Ads 2.0?)

Is consistent navigation a crutch?

How do we deliberately add more emotional qualities into the products we design?