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.”

-Henri…

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Many years ago, I did a little research on the term “user experience,” and shared my findings on my personal site. Don Norman claimed to have invented the term back at Apple around 1993. Even earlier, in the seminal tome “User Centered Systems Design,” (published 1986) there’s a phrase about “the user’s experience can be enhanced…” I would argue, though, that’s more of happenstance joining of “user” and “experience.”

A month or so ago, Google released the Ngram Viewer for it’s books, which allows you to find out the popularity of certain terms in certain years. An Ngram…

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Two months ago I spoke at The Economist’s Ideas Economy conference on Human Potential. Having only 6 minutes, I decided to focus my talk on one big theme: Trust. I even used this blog to try out some of my ideas.

Anyway, the video of my talk has been posted. It’s brief, so I hope you’re willing to give it a watch:

Because the video often misses my slides, you can browse them here:

The importance of trust in customer experienceView more presentations from Adaptive Path.

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Quick note: I will be working out of our Amsterdam office next week, 1-5 November. While I’m there, I’d love to visit with local UX types, whether in-house, at agencies, or over drinks after work. If you’re interested in connecting, please email me directly at peterme [AT] adaptivepath [DOT] com.

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I think that meetings get a bad rap. The problem with meetings aren’t that they’re meetings, but that meetings are typically run poorly. My professional life involves lots of meetings, and most of them I enjoy, because it gives me a chance to engage, challenge, and otherwise collaborate with my brilliant colleagues and our savvy clients.

I’m reading Steven Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and he refers to research by Kevin Dunbar on how molecular biology laboratories work and how they develop their best ideas. In that research, the primary place of innovation…

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Browsing the internet, I haven’t noticed much basic guidance for visual designers new to the UX world. A few get a start here, but many matriculate from traditional backgrounds like branding and print, or areas with semi-similar processes like interactive ad agencies and in-house web departments. Often these are positions designing for singular needs. Move product. Maintain presence. Communicate. These objectives tend to explode when making the transition to a UX process, which can be unsettling. If you are getting started in the field, these are some habits that might be helpful.

1. Develop an eye for patterns.

Reoccurring themes…

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There’s a habit among some design firms to publish Week Notes, a diary of what’s going on around their offices. Here’s our first attempt, over nine years in. It won’t be exhaustive—there’s too much going on to provide complete detail.

The week started on Sunday with the first day of our UX Intensive San Francisco workshop. A good crowd showed up—we’d sold out of our original room, and had to be bumped up to a larger space. The event ended on Wednesday, leaving us looking forward to UX Week in August, and…

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My blog died.

I tried in vain to save it. Friends kindly came to its rescue, and for a while, it seemed like my little blog just…might…make it. I watched fire slowly creep back back into its eyes and, oh, how I began to hope! But, alas, in the end, neither my friends, network, nor myself could save it. WhatMovesYou.tumblr.com just didn’t have the strength to survive on its own, and I had to accept the sad, sad truth:  some ideas really should die.

Painful as that reality was, I have Adaptive Path to thank…

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Thanks everyone who joined us on the AIGA studio crawl on Tuesday night! Looks like we found yet another good use of our monoliths .

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For a project I’m working on, we have the fortune of interviewing experts and thought leaders on the topic of the future of media. Among the subjects were Julian Bleecker, currently working with Nokia in their Design Strategic Projects Studio. We asked him about the future, and about design, and he said something I really enjoyed: “Designers already live in the future. Through our work, we’re pulling the present up to us.”

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