I’m on my way back to San Francisco from Savannah, Georgia where I was facilitating a workshop at EPIC 2012. I can’t help but still feel the excitement from this past weekend. The attendees brought diverse expertise, were continually engaged, and left me with new perspective.
EPIC Conference continues to promote ethnography and the study of human behavior applied to the business context. However, after almost a decade, the program has started to focus more in depth on the value of design research (shown by Savannah College of Art and Design hosting the conference this year). While integrating concepts of design research into a research conference makes sense, there were two major questions I wanted to explore with this audience: 1) how to translate research findings into actionable design and 2) how to introduce co-research to facilitate better co-creation. While these seem like mutually independent topics, both involve understanding the most effective tools and activities for a specific audience in order to capture, translate, and act upon findings.
“Some of the most exciting developments in the use and exploration language have been occurring this year on the front lines of technology.” — from The Economist
“Right now, the West prefers to talk up the merits of relatively cheap design than to do the dearer, riskier business of R&D.” — from spiked
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.
You're about halfway through your project. You've done everything right. The project plan is going swimmingly and you've entered the design phase. Fast forward a few weeks later and you are slowly losing interest. Creativity is ebbing. Your attention span starts to wane. The wind has left your sails—you've hit the project doldrums.
I've worked on some looooong projects, some with one- or two-year long cycles. Anyone who's worked on an operating system would probably put the smackdown on my definition of long, but you can hit the wall on any project, no matter how much time it spans. For me, there is always one surefire method for breaking through—Do more work. Yes, more. Just not on this project. Take on something totally new and unrelated.
In the past six months, I've been leading design teams of twenty, sometimes thirty people. Some of these people are designers, but the majority are managers, business strategists, front-line workers, and P&L owners. Most of my team members come from my client's organization. Together we have been solving big wonky strategy and design problems that matter deeply to how our client will continue to support and grow relationships with their customers in the future.
One thing I love about UX designers is our diversity of backgrounds. We tend to be refugees from other disciplines. At Adaptive Path we have former librarians, journalists, engineers, musicians, and literary theorists. We make good designers because of the breadth of skills we bring from these backgrounds. For this reason I’m disappointed to find that once we become UX designers we tend to focus mainly on screen experiences.
In an effort to get back to the roots of my interest in UX design I decided to talk to some of my former coworkers at SFMOMA. My work in…
After an appearance at last year’s UX Week, Cameron Gray, Vice President of Engineering at online training experts Mindflash will return to our stage at this year’s MX Conference with a talk about Agile and UX.
As a design process freak, I jumped at the chance to interview Cameron and ask him about the way he is integrating UX in Mindflash’s Agile development methodology.
[Peter Boersma] You (re)joined Mindflash almost 4 years ago, after a 4-year stint at another company, and run the development team. What have you changed to the way that team is managed? What…
Awhile back I wrote a post about how to run a workshop, in the general sense. I thought that I would write out the steps for a concepting workshop in particular. Concepting workshops are ones that we do a lot at Adaptive Path. They are great for when you need to generate a lot of ideas around an issue in a short amount of time. They can be done with large or small groups, with designers, developers, and managers.
1. Create the agenda for the day. Determine what it is you will be sketching and what your goal is for the…
