I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time. A lot of sketching advice tends to be too general (“You should sketch!”), too superficial (“You need to buy these pens!”), or too self-congratulatory (“Look at the sketches I made!”) to be useful for those of us who have already incorporated sketching into our everyday design practice. For me, sketching tends to be a surprisingly philosophical endeavor, and I'm curious to hear how other designers think about their own sketching.

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We're sure you're good at a lot of things. But can you be a better tweeter?

Starting up by failing.

Dan Roam's creative process for writing (good for visual folks trying to write, the good stuff starts at 2:00mins).

Adoption rates of various technologies (info porn!)

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UX Intensive, our popular, globe-trotting, four-day workshop series is all new this year! 

Designed as a skills builder for practitioners, UX Intensive delivers the best tools and learnings from our practice in a workshop setting. It's taught by senior Adaptive Path staff and offers the opportunity to learn new techniques, meet other practitioners and have a little fun in the evenings. The workshop is now in its fifth successful year and it's still going strong, with attendees coming from leading companies all over the world.

We have been working on a completely revamped UX Intensive course over the last few months. We've gone over the material with a fine tooth-comb, listened to attendee feedback and have developed a course focused on where the practice of user experience is headed. Each day's content has been completely overhauled, and we're particularly excited about the addition of a day on service design. We've been moving in that direction for a while now, with Jamin heavily involved in the Service Design Network and Brandon exploring what he calls the Service Anticipation Gap in a series of blog posts. We're super excited to bring you what we're doing and learning in this area, as well as the latest in strategy, research and interaction design.

We’re sticking to the four-day format, each day building on the next. Here’s how the days break down…

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Dear [Name Of Graduate Student]

We are writing to you because you are studying one of the following things: visual design, interaction design, service design, design research, design strategy, business, or some kind of crazy hybrid or intersection. You recently expressed interest in seeing how your skills could be wielded to design great products and services.

Do we ever have an opportunity for you! Adaptive Path is seeking graduate students with your unique combination of skills (and charm) for our internship program this summer!

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Tired of going with the design that will survive the organization's political gauntlet? What if we made decisions based on what actually worked for customers and produced results, not what snaggletoothed solution fit into every stakeholder's personal view of the world?

A quick story of how I got hooked

Five years ago I was working to redesign a major website when our team got stuck on just how to design landing pages for traffic coming through Google. Should we be satisfied with a Google searcher just viewing one page or should we put design effort into getting them to view more?

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Last week I posted about how businesses over-invest in advertising and under-invest in the improvement of the service experience, which creates what I call a Service Anticipation Gap, or SAG. Customers are falsely led to expect a service that's better than what it can be. The result is wasted ad spend and revenue losses from customer (dis)engagement.

The Challenge

Businesses have gotten used to confidently connecting spending on ads and seeing the returns in revenue. Or as @odannyboy overheard, “Advertising is a lazy man's monetization.”

And here's where the folks that plan and design services have stumbled. We haven't been able to make the same connections between investments and results that make an investment decision in good service design a no-duh. The efforts to improve services haven't historically met with the same financial success as ad spends, and therefore business lack the confidence to spend on it. Confidence is lost because coordinating systems and people with a vision of how the service really should be isn't as easy as pumping out ads via a partner agency.

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Let's be clear on this point: There would be no Adaptive Path without Peter Merholz. Certainly, after nearly 11 years in business, the company's culture, strategy, and creative direction has been influenced by a lot of folks. But Peter was the one who brought together the original founders to talk about ways we could work together, a conversation that turned into a company.

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Has a commercial ever brought you to tears? Images of families reconnecting in an airport or a child hugging their parent with delight because a service was able to bring together a magic moment? I think we've all seen some wet eyes resulting from a well crafted 30-second ad spot.

How about tears brought about from an actual service? Or someone jumping in the air with joy because of how great that check-in process was? Nada. It's a rare, rare bird.

But what if—WHAT IF—services were just as good as they were advertised to be? What if they were even close? Wouldn't that be a shocker? Or OMG, wouldn't that be an incredible business!

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