Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space.
But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago. However, I believe their importance exceeds their prevalence.
I’ve written about the tension between truth and fiction in personas before. In that tension is the power of personas as a design tool but it is also their greatest potential weakness. Too much fiction leads to misguided design. Too little fiction leads to uninspired design. The magic stuff that gives us that proper amount and kind of fiction is intuition. It is the leaven in the bread; the spark of real live human that we put into the data analysis.
“It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.”
Design work isn’t always glorious. Recently I had the good fortune of being tossed into the middle of a project that had been going on for quite some time. Much of the “designerly” work was finished, and the team had already switched into production mode. They handed me a stack of wireframes and asked me to expand them in some modest directions.
“Great! Can do!” I said.
And then I stared at them, paralyzed, for an hour.
“I do this all the time!” I kept thinking. “Why can’t I figure out what to do with this?”
All practices of design have had a history of incorporating a human-centered perspective. That’s the realization Mark Baskinger, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, shared his recent article in UX Magazine. But unlike industrial design, he argues that UX doesn’t have a concreate tangible artifact, which puts it at risk as a practice:
As UX and UXD migrate toward the strategic center of design practice, UX practitioners run the risk of becoming marginalized as specialists equipped to handle only the front end of the design development process. What is currently missing in much of UX…
It’s been said that the two hardest parts of a project are the beginning and the end. In the middle, it’s often perfectly clear what should have gone differently at the start. But when you’re kicking off a project, you’re often so preoccupied trying to establish cordial working relationships and understand the nature of the project that some of the trivial but essential details get neglected. That’s too bad, because it’s often the trivial essentials that build trust.
Below, I share my list of things to do at the beginning of each project. Most…
By our talented summer associate, Chris A. Wronski
Firstly, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design shooting for the first degree in the United States in a service design program. This summer I had the extraordinary opportunity to work alongside the Adaptive Path staff in San Francisco and gain priceless insights into practices and approaches that, unfortunately, are hard to find elsewhere.
One of the topics that has been on my mind for the past few months, continues to come up in conversation, and seems to consistently…
I was introduced to Zack Rosen, CEO of Mission Bicycle a few months ago at an evening event at the Adaptive Path offices. A mutual acquaintance had suggested we talk given our interests in bicycles and user experience. I had already heard about Mission Bicycle’s innovative model of selling fixed gear bikes online and was intrigued to hear about the company’s next step: opening up a retail shop that would challenge pretty much every convention in bicycle retail. What Zack wanted to do was exactly in line with a few ideas that I had with some friends while…
While Dan is busy coding away at the iPhone App, I wanted take this time to share about our first project with smart.fm, a project to reimagine the smart.fm web experience!
What’s in a name? What we call something can have a profound impact on the way we think about it. And changing the way we think about something can have powerful implications on what we design and how we evaluate it. For smart.fm, the ah-ha moment came when we realized that it’s about Goals, not Lists.
...
Tuesday’s event with Dan Roam was a lot of fun. He joined us at Adaptive Path to speak about his book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Dan is a warm, funny speaker with a wealth of stories about using pictures to solve complex problems ranging from business strategy to product design. You can see some of the photos from the event on Flickr.
I sketchnoted Dan’s talk to capture many of the ideas that he talked about. There was a lot of great info, but the phrase that stuck with me…
Design and innovation have become the hot topics and drivers of internal change within companies. Everyone is asking “How do I innovate?” and in return some designers have cheered “Methods!”. With methods on the forefront of everyone’s innovation list, many consultancies have begun to publish and sell their methods.
Method tools come in many shapes and sizes, here are a few to check out:
Cards:
IDEO published their set of 51 method cards in 2003 using the framework of “Learn, Look, Ask, Try”.
Nform developed a set of trading cards they have passed out during conferences that cover the areas of ...
