Adaptive Path Blog

In our forthcoming book, Subject to Change, we close with a chapter titled “An Uncertain World,” about how the approaches we suggest will help businesses manage no matter what comes at them. In it, there’s this passage:

One key opportunity driven by this uncertainty is how the old categories will break down. David Weinberger discusses these trends and their implications in his excellent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Though the book is ostensibly about the nature of information in a digital world, the forces underlying that miscellany pervade all aspects of society. Google and Yahoo!, once technology companies, are now media players, and their advertising-based business models mean they compete more with Los Angeles and New York than their Silicon Valley brethren. Apple began as a computer company, but has morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV) and the third largest music retailer in the United States, which means its competitors are not only HP, Dell, and Toshiba, but also Sony, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.

Oh, the perils of book publishing! Word is coming out that Apple is now the premier music retailer in the country, having surpassed Wal-mart and Best Buy.

What industry are you in, again? Who are your competitors, really?

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I recently had the pleasure of chatting via email with Nathan Shedroff, experience strategist, author, and the Program Chair and founder of the brand new MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. Nathan will be speaking on Future Topics in Managing User Experience at our upcoming MX San Francisco conference on April 20-22.

MBA programs with a focus on design are cropping up in leading business schools. What’s behind this trend and what do these programs teach? In this conversation, Nathan lifts the curtain of the newest program to blend design and business.

But don’t just read the essay…come hear Nathan up close and in person at MX: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership in San Francisco, April 20-22. Early bird pricing ends March 31st, so sign up today!

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“Every time he fired up his Netscape Web browser since mid-February, John Uribe was greeted with a message urging him to switch to one of Netscape’s two successors, Firefox or Flock. Mr. Uribe, a 56-year-old real estate agent in Waldorf, Md., ignored every message. ‘It’s kind of irrational,’ Mr. Uribe said as that deadline approached. ‘It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some reason to totally abandon it, I won’t.’” -NYTimes, “Tech’s Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True”

I appreciated this article, because I strongly believe there is always something important to be learned from “how the other half lives.” At the same time, I can’t help but feel a mild sense of annoyance when it comes to late adopters. Late adopters can be a thorn in the flesh for designers and developers. It sucks building backwards-compatibility into everything, or being unable to add, change or discontinue features because a small-but-vocal angry mob might revolt (see Facebook News Feed, the end of Tagworld).

So what are we to do with the people who live by the principle of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Here’s a breakdown of possible strategies for handling late adopters…

• Ignore them (assuming they’re not hurting you in any way, it’s their loss, not yours).
• Scare them (security fears are what finally compelled the man in the NYTimes article to give up Netscape).
• Shun them (eventually their Word docs will become incompatible with everyone else’s; then they’ll have to upgrade).
• Tantalize them (create desire/need by showing them what they’re missing or getting their friends to show them up).
• Accommodate them (with “classic” versions, “low-tech” versions, or lowest-common-denominator design).
• Serve them (simply avoid making changes at all, because it would displease “the users”).
• Learn from them (their fear of the unknown and desire for simplicity are valid — how can we learn from this and, in doing so, improve the experiences of all?).

That’s all for now. Eudora’s “new mail” jingle is calling.

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I’ve been invited to speak at the Live Web event today here in San Francisco. People like Om Malik, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, others and me. Ought to be interesting. Hopefully they will be recording it for podcast release.

Among the topics the roundtable will be talking about are:

• As asynchronous social networks experience tremendous growth, what can we expect from synchronous applications?
• Will synchronous applications and the Live Web require different standards for advertising display and measurement?
• How can synchronous applications companies stimulate third-party developer innovation on our platforms?

I’ll be approaching any conversation from the perspective of designing for the user and the overall experience. Some of the blind assumptions I’m bringing to the table are:

Does asynchronous behavior create a richer environment for people to live in online?
Is context the most important thing to be aware of when advertising in an asynchronous environment?

Discuss.

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There were lots of poster sessions at Ubicomp – but I have to give props to my friend, Mirjana Spasojevic of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto for presenting my favorite demo/poster.

Nokia has developed an image recognition technology called Point and Find. Using the camera functionality on a mobile phone, Point and Find identifies objects through image recognition and provides users with associated information.

Similar in functionality to QR codes, Point and Find is a technology I believe has a lot of promise in unlocking the potential of the mobile web. It epitomizes the “Uniquely Mobile” design principle – it’s quick, easy, and can provide internet information without the hassle of text entry through the keypad and maneuvering internet content based on the PC search interaction model.

As with any emerging technology, Point and Find is a little buggy and identifying and enabling the actions people want to take after they identify and image will be essential in refining this technology. Nonetheless – it’s exciting stuff!

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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.

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I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between its current state and Bill’s vision for its future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.

The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement, but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.

The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those three iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.

Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in its current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.

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Social Networks are like nightclubs. When I worked at Bolt Peters, Nate Bolt and I use to discuss this a lot: They’re cool to hang out at for a little while, but eventually, they’re dull, there’s nobody new and people stop going. I was reminded of this with the slew of Facebook friend requests I received this week from friends, colleagues, UX Week attendees, and speakers. It seems like not long ago I was receiving MySpace invites from family, high school, and college friends — but these days, I get fewer and fewer. Perhaps I’m just not as popular as I thought I was, or perhaps the new nightclub is enjoying the equivalent of the line around the block, and the old one is losing its crowd.

I recently talked to a few people about this, and most of them said they couldn’t decide if they should join Facebook or Linked-in. My question to all the social networks is: Why can we only *be* at one place at a time on the internet? After all, the internet isn’t really like a nightclub. Wired has recently written about the need for social networks to open up. Why hasn’t someone created a social network aggregator where I can see, and be logged into all my social networks at once?

Right now it seems like Facebook is the new place to be. And right now I’m asking myself, “Why would I want to go anywhere else? This place is great!” My bet is that Facebook too, like any trendy nightclub, will fade out and there will be yet another cool online nightclub equivalent to join. Which begs the question, should social networks just do what nightclubs do every two years and just shut down and start over?

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Today’s New York Times feature on Prince belongs not in the Music section, but the Business section.

Given the themes that we address here at Adaptive Path and on the blog, what impressed me was how Prince was handling his “multi-channel experience.” He has a habit of giving away his recordings, which conventional wisdom would assume means he’s giving away his money. But in the same way that Apple controls iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes music store, Prince has achieved control over his recordings, his touring, his online presence, and the like. And in the same way Apple doesn’t make money on the iTunes Music Store but rakes it in with iPod, Prince seems to have an innate understanding of how his coordinated effort to get his music out in the world can produce far greater revenues than reliance on any one channel.

The power of Prince’s approach is summed up in this passage from the piece: “Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. ‘Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,’ his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD.” Driven by that desire, he’s done everything he can to make that a reality, and has reaped the reward of not only significant cash, but total creative freedom.

How can your organization learn from Prince?

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The New York Times on Experience Design Usability:

Sometimes there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries.

Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology.

This isn’t an article from 1997. It’s from July 8, 2007. Another groaner from the article, which I am hoping is just a typo:

Harvinder Singh, president of Bestica, which is based in San Antonio, says that there is a shortage of people to fill usability jobs.

“We’re working with companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and having a lot of trouble finding user-experienced people,” he said.

Sigh. Has the design profession really made such little progress?

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