I met Sarah B. Nelson in Spring 2006, as she was figuring out where she wanted a summer internship while she was getting her masters from the Institute of Design in Chicago. When she shared her student work, one thing stood out among the rest—a paper she had written on the creative process of the Neo-Futurists (PDF), a remarkable avant-garde theater troupe. Having seen them perform, I loved Sarah's deconstruction of how they work, and I knew that I wanted to work with anyone who thought like that.

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Our annual MX Conference tackles the challenges of people who deliver new and better experiences everyday.

So it feels appropriate to kick off sharing videos from this year's MX event with a 15-minute story of a very real challenge from Typekit CEO Jeff Veen—Designing for Disaster.

Jeff's team at Typekit faced their biggest challenge and opportunity when the Typekit system faced the significant traffic brought on by a successful customer. Here how he cleared a path for the right people to bring together a great solution. It all started one morning when…

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In a follow-up to last year’s MX presentation The Holistic Customer: Beyond The Website Experience, Samantha Starmer will be speaking to our audience about Designing Cross-Channel Experiences at this year’s MX on March 6th. Knowing that Starmer has worked on the front lines of customer service as well as in her current role as a Senior Manager at REI, we asked her a few questions about how she thinks about and approaches cross-channel experiences.

[Christian Palino] Lots of people these days get mixed up in the difference between the design for cross-channel experiences and services. Could you tell…

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Are you a designer? Architecture fan? Interactive maven? Web junkie? Information epicure? Do you love mixing up history and current events to find something interesting and new?

Join us at Adaptive Path for a scintillating talk by Web-guru and architecture expert Molly Wright Steenson as she shares her latest ideas and research on information, architecture, interfaces and the rich history that has evolved into the information spaces of today (and tomorrow.)

Molly’s ability to take historical nuggets and dice & slice their meaning, frame them up in interesting ways and wrap them in “what’s next in the world”...

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Over on the UX Leadership Journal, Will Evans recently shared a really nice model for career growth in the UX field. [UPDATE: Will’s model builds on one originally developed by David Sherwin and Justin Maguire of frog design.] It looks sort of like this. (I added a few details.)

(Slightly larger version here. [Note that model has been updated to include attribution to David Sherwin and Justin Maguire.)

Increasingly, our clients are asking us for tips on how to setup a UX practice in an organization. Historically, the UX field has treated this as an education problem, but it&#8217…

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Steve Gundrum | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

It’s becoming that season. You know, the season where food seems to take center stage. As the weather gets colder, comfort food, hot drinks and celebratory feasts appear on the horizon.

When I think of food, I think of things like: yummy, fragrant, spicy, hearty. Or, fruits & veggies, meat & potatoes, Mom’s amazing spaghetti.

Then I heard Steve Gundrum, CEO of Mattson speak at UX Week 2009 on “The Secret Ingredient” for Designing New Foods and Beverages. He told the insider tale about how the food…

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Matt Webb | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

This past UX Week brought some great speakers, including Matt Webb from BERG. We’re happy to share is fantastic talk about developing products and learning from mistakes. Matt shares the lessons that his company grappled with during the design and production of their first major product.

Matt talks about how smart products bring their own design challenges. Internet-connected devices and plastic filled with electronics behave in unexpected ways: what does it means for a physical thing to side-load its behavior, or for a toy to have its own…

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What is it like to use a mobile phone if you’ve never used any technology like a computer, an ATM, or a remote control? How can you make a call on a mobile phone if you don’t know how to read or write? How can mobile phones improve people’s lives in areas where traditional infrastructure is scarce? We went to rural India to learn how people in these areas use mobile phones and how mobile infrastructure is impacting their lives. Based on our research, we have developed design principles and mobile phone interface concepts for emerging markets.
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Superman is known for his strength and superpowers. He does all the work. He can save people all by himself without the help of anyone else. Why shouldn’t he do all that? After all he’s, “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Some people may die when Superman does his work, but he is a superhero and will save the world from bad things.

Leaders on the other hand empower others. Leaders don’t do all the work on their own, but instead inspire other…

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Perhaps the biggest news at CES 2009 was the unveiling of the Palm Pre. On stage, Matias Duarte, Director of Human Interface and User Experience at Palm, showed off the Pre’s User Interface. And he’s now committed to be our Keynote Speaker for Day 1 of UX Week 2009, giving us a peek at just went into the user experience design and development of what could be a game-changing device.

Register for UX Week 2009 by June 1 to lock in the early bird price, and you get 4 days chock full of inspiration and hands-on training. And use the promotional code BLOG and…

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