- Early Bird Registration Ends Today for UX Intensive & UX Week
- MX San Francisco 2008 is a Wrap
- Brandon Talks with Scott Hirsch About UX Design & Business Strategy
- You’re Invited to Our “Subject to Change” Book Launch Party
Early Bird Registration Ends Today for UX Intensive & UX Week
April 30 is your last day to catch early bird registration on UX Intensive Minneapolis and UX Week. UX Intensive Minneapolis — June 16-19 — is our popular workshop series that examines the four key elements that contribute to a successful interactive experience: Design Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design, and Information Architecture.
UX Week — San Francisco, August 12-15 — is our flagship user experience conference where we’ll consider what it takes to create great products and services in an uncertain world. Don’t miss out on our early registration discounts.
MX San Francisco 2008 is a Wrap
We’ve wrapped on a very successful MX San Francisco 2007 — a big thanks to everyone who attended. If you couldn’t make it, check out Sebastian’s Flickr photo stream of our graphic recordings — visual renderings of our presenter’s talks. We’ll be sharing some great conference artifacts in upcoming newsletters including videos of the presentations on our new podcast page.
Brandon Talks with Scott Hirsch About UX Design & Business Strategy
Scott Hirsch, principle of the Management Innovation Group and MX San Francisco speaker, recently sat down to talk with Brandon Schauer about using UX and design sensibilities to solve the problems of business strategy. In this podcast, Scott shares his experiences on where UX outperforms and compliments typical business functions and how UX can tackle problems differently. Below is an excerpt.
Brandon Schauer [BS]: How is design more successful, or are there situations where design processes and sensibilities are more appropriate than brute force analytics?
Scott Hirsch [SH]: If analytics didn’t work, there would be no McKinsey, there would be no Boston Consulting Group…so they do work, I am not saying that anybody who hires a traditional strategy firm is doing the wrong thing, because that is not true. There are certain situations where the weakness of the analytic process will get you in a lot of trouble, particularly if you are in an industry that is facing a lot of change. Let’s pretend it is 2001 and Brandon and I are financial analysts and we work at a firm that specializes in tech companies. Our boss tells us there’s this new search company called Google, I want you to throw some wildcard numbers out there on how you would value that firm and where you think they will be in 2008. I don’t think, that even with my and Brandon’s knowledge of the Internet and how a company like Google with the assets that it had, and the different skill sets and different approaches to the search problem, I don’t think we could even predict that they could come up with an advertising network. I don’t think we would have dreamt the revenue that they would have had last year. That’s just an example of how the analytical approach does not always work.
I think that because Brandon and I have a design background that we might have tackled the problem in a different way. We might have sat down and said, “How is the Internet evolving?” and we could have predicted in 2001 — it wasn’t that early to predict — that there will be tons and tons of user-generated content. We might have been able to say, “If there is user-generated content, then there has to be some mechanism for people to be able to monetize user-generated content…
You’re Invited to Our “Subject to Change” Book Launch Party
Save the date for Adaptive Path’s book launch party, Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, on May 13 at our San Francisco office. Party starts at 6 PM sharp with the reception, followed by a panel discussion, open Q&A with the authors, and book signing. RSVP to ensure your spot.
Subscribe to the Newsletter
Sign up to receive essays, appearance dates, and other news from Adaptive Path.