Adaptive Path Blog

Like, well, every year, a gaggle of Adaptive Pathers are headed to SXSW Interactive. Find us at the parties, BBQ joints, and our sessions:

Friday:

Todd Wilkens reads from Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change from 4:00-5:00.

Ryan Freitas and AP Founder Lane Becker dole out the punishment in Battle Decks II from 5:00-6:00.

Monday:

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson offer up 10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment from 3:30-4:30.

I’ll be Feeding the Creativity Beast in a core conversation from 5:00-6:00.

Tuesday:

Ryan Freitas provokes a core conversation by asking Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done? from 5:00-6:00.

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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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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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For those of you still on the fence about attending UX Intensive later this month, now is a good time to choose sides because seats are going fast.

Single day registration for Design Strategy with Brandon Schauer has sold out. There are 22 seats left and they are available only when you register for all four days of UX Intensive. If you’re only interested in Design Research, Interaction Design, or Information Architecture, good news — single day registration is still open for those days.

Use code BLOG for 10% off registration.

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A couple weeks ago, I spoke with car-sharing service Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith. Scott is presenting at UX Week 2008 in August. You can listen to our conversation (40 minute MP3), or read excerpts.

Zipcar is definitely a services firm whose star is ascending, and a key element to their success is the experience design of their service. It’s right there in their mission statement: “Our user experience strives to elegantly combine the promise of the Internet with wireless communication and online communities.”

What most interested me in talking to Scott was how a CEO considers user experience in relationship to other concerns. Scott mentions that Zipcar is the first services firm that he’s aware of that follows kaizen engineering principles, which were originally developed to ensure quality management and continuous improvement for Toyota in their car manufacturing. We also discussed the balance between user experience and his primary business metric, utilization, and the importance of cars not being utilized more than 40% of the time, or it would upset customers, who wouldn’t be able to find a car.

I’d also love to *see* the customer lifecycle diagram that he talks about, where they’ve mapped a customer’s entire experience with Zipcar, from awareness of the service, through joining, to leaving (which, on average, happens at about 5 years).

I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I had having it, and please use the comments section here for any further thoughts or ideas you’d like to see Scott raise at UX Week 2008. (And register using the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!)

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Adaptive Path emeritus Lane Becker has been very busy building his newest endeavor, Satisfaction, the “people-powered customer service” application. He and his team have organized a one-day conference here in San Francisco called (appropriately enough) Customer Service is the New Marketing. The event takes place on February 4th, and is focused on imparting some important ideas about “how smart organizations are turning customer service from just a cost center into an engine for building culture and creating evangelists.”

The speaker list looks great; in particular, I’m looking forward to listening to Alex Frankel (who’s book, Punching In, I’ve been greatly enjoying) and Michael Murphy, head of customer service for Virgin (APers are HUGE fans of Virgin America’s airline experience). As a favor to readers of the Adaptive Path blog, Satisfaction is offering a 25% discount code for registration; just type in PATH when you get prompted.

Brandon Schauer, myself, and a few additional members of the AP team will be in attendance. We hope to see you there.

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UX Week 2008 keynote speaker Don Norman appeared last night on a 60 Minutes segment titled, “Get Me The Geeks!”, about the rise in tech support services as technology gets more complicated.

In other events news, we’ve extended our early registration deadline by one week. You can continue to save big through January 4.

Updates on our upcoming San Francisco events (not all reflected on their specific pages yet):

UX Intensive, February 19-22. Perhaps the most common feedback we’ve received from prior UX Intensive workshops is for the Interaction Design day to be even more advanced, and with more activities. Dan has heeded the call, and has revamped the entire day, structured around a series of 5 hands-on design exercises. Organizations represented by delegates attending UX Intensive include Google (22 attendees!), Stanford University, Humana, Wells Fargo, Oracle, St. David’s Healthcare, Target, Scripps Network, eBay, and Caterpillar.

MX San Francisco, April 21-22. The web page for the event needs an overhaul, but I can tell you that we’ve begun lining up some great speakers, including Peter Coughlan, the head of the transformation practice for IDEO; Chip Conley, CEO of boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre Hospitality and author of the recently published book PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.

UX Week 2008, August 12-15. Over time, UX Week evolved from a hands-on workshop to a conference of ideas. Delegates missed the skills-building, so this year we’ve decided to fuse the two — mornings will feature brief presentations on crucial experience design concepts, and afternoons will offer a range of longer presentations and workshops to provide concrete takeaways. We will have to limit numbers in these afternoon sessions to ensure a quality experience, so we’re going to be offering priority placement to those who sign up earliest. Sign ups will begin once all the afternoon sessions have been decided. Organizations attending UX Week include eBay, Cooper, McKinsey and Company, Wells Fargo, Continental Airlines, Walgreens Health Services, Humana, and the New York Public Library.

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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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Adaptive Path believes that no training dollar should be left unspent, and so we’re featuring a promotion across next year’s three San Francisco events that can take advantage of your remaining 2007 training budgets.

As I wrote about earlier, UX Intensive takes place February 19-22, offering four days of learning and hands-on activities for intermediate-to-advanced UX practitioners. Register by December 31 and pay only $1,695 for all four days (compared to the $2,495 full price).

We’ve just announced dates for MX San Francisco 2008, April 21-22, taking place in the gorgeous Mark Hopkins hotel atop Nob Hill. Speakers at prior MX events included Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO), Irene Au (Director of User Experience at Google), Khoi Vinh (Design Director at The New York Times), and Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation). Register by December 31 for only $995 — a full 33% off the $1,495 full price.

And last but definitely not least, UX Week 2008 (August 12-15) will be our biggest and boldest conference yet. We’ve already lined up Don Norman, Scott Griffith (CEO of Zipcar), and Adaptive Path founders Jeffrey Veen and Mike Kuniavsky. (And we’ll be announcing a whole bunch more soon.) Register by December 31 and pay only $1,695 ($2,495 full price).

We’re excited to be “coming home” with our events next year, and we look forward to seeing you there!

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The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).

We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!

Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.

Some of my favorite pics:

Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…

There was lots of writing on walls…

Though some groups preferred the floor…

And lots, and lots of stickies…

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