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I felt compelled to write a followup to Kim's blog post (you know, the one where everyone agreed with her) to disagree, slightly. Kim's post generated a lot of conversation within the San Francisco office about just how different the end goals of UX were to advertising. When it is all boiled down, businesses come to us for help with the same goal in mind, to make money. That point is undeniable, and it pokes large holes in the premise that UX is ... [read more]
Since starting at Adaptive Path I’ve discovered a few words that cause unexpected reactions in people from nervous tics to outright diatribes. Included on this list are “branding,” “advertising,” and “marketing.” This was a bit of a shock for me having come from the world of advertising and graphic design. From what I can tell, the reactions are based on the notion that advertising and marketing are manipulative. And the belief that UX designers ... [read more]
Signposts is back after a brief hiatus. We've got some good ones this week. Amazing video of Bach's Cantana 147 played in a forest, on a giant wooden xylophone, with gravity and a little wooden ball. Stone tables in Japan serve as warning of the risk of tsunamis across generations. Updates to iOS enable fascinating visuals and frightening implications. Our friends at Mule got recognized in the New Yorker for their 'Unsuck It' device. What The Te... [read more]
The release of the latest iPad has me once again thinking about its role in childrens' media consumption. (I wrote last year that my kids weren't getting one. Uhhhh, yeah. I'll just pretend that we haven't basically monopolized the Amsterdam studio iPad for the past three months.) Recently, Henning and I did a research project on an iPod Touch pilot program at the International School of The Hague, where my children attend. We were curious and wa... [read more]
This morning: "Ya Keynote, that blue leather textured, black outlined polygon is *exactly* what I wanted." @adamschwabe We've all seen it. We all hate it. And too few of us know we can do something about it. Here's how to change the default shape style in Keynote: 1. Select a master slide and draw a shape with the new default style you want. 2. Under the Format menu, you'll see Advanced. This is where the good stuff is. Select Define Shape for C... [read more]
Our annual MX conference helps managers working to deliver better experiences to the world. And that's right in line with Charles Warren's 10 minutes on how the three little words "How Might We" makes design deliver significantly better results. Start a project off with this, and I think you can expect significantly better solutions from your team. Charles leads Google's Social UX team, and before that, the Google Mobile UX team and before that, ... [read more]
Last week I attended and presented at the 2011 Polish IA Summit. The organizers (the Polish agency UseLab) and presenters did a good job at showing the state of IA in Poland and, by listening to each other, asking the right questions, and socializing, helped promote IA in Poland. My closing keynote, "UX: (still) the next step for IAs?" aimed at doing the same thing; it was a call to look around at others in the field, at nearby fields, and User ... [read more]
In 2008 and '09, we produced a handful of virutual seminars on various topics we were interested in at the time. When we launched the new adaptivepath.com, they didn't make the cut, but we wanted you to have access to them. There's still some good stuff here! So, for your edification, or background listening while you clean your desk, here are six of them, free of charge: Showing the Value of UX: Connecting User Experience and Business Value Desi... [read more]
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 ho... [read more]
Last week we moved our San Francisco studio to a new location, smack dab on the San Francisco Bay with sweeping views of the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island on one side, and Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower on the other. Photo by Maria Cordell The weather has been gorgeous the last few days, so needless to say we're all positively giddy in the head to be here. Photo by Maria Cordell The surrounding neighborhood is incredible, but the insides of ... [read more]
Khoi Vinh recently wrote an interesting post about what he called Multiple User Account Disorder. This is when you inadvertently create multiple user accounts, often with different email addresses, for the same service. Almost everyone I know has done this, particularly because of the prevalence of free primary email addresses and the continually increasing number of services that require user accounts and logins. Once upon a time I would just cl... [read more]
I am at Adaptive Path's new San Francisco office at Pier One, Bay Two. As I write this post, I am looking out on the bay, watching cars drive across the Bay Bridge and people loading onto the Marin ferry. I can see the "Port of San Francisco" sign and the Ferry Building watchtower. This new space is AWESOME! Friday was our last day at 363 Brannan Street. Although I am sad to leave South Park, our friends and all the local haunts, after seven year... [read more]
Andrew DeVigal, the multimedia editor at The New York Times, visited us at the Adaptive Path Amsterdam studio on March 22 and gave an interesting talk on interactive journalism. We had a full house, engaged group and lots of questions. I thought I'd share some of my takeaways from the evening from his talk and from talking to some of the attendees afterwards. "I'm a journalist". Andrew talked about his background, which is steeped in both journal... [read more]
The xkcd radiation dose chart sheds light on radiation levels in relation to the news surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant. MIT Media Lab has created an infinitely customisable logo. The flipbook (popular in Holland) hits the UK. Look out, Kindle. Robots that milk cows! Is your desktop art getting stale? Here's some fresh new wallpaper. Turn your handwriting into a personalised font. Check out this gorgeous, musical little timesuck.
Over the past year, I’ve been working through some models of creative organizations, and themes and patterns have emerged that I’m pretty excited about sharing. I’ll be talking about them this Wednesday evening (5:30pm) at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Come join us! RSVP and get your tickets ($20 - a bargain!) https://tickets.commonwealthclub.org/open.asp?show=2106 See you there! ——————————— Description: Blueprint for a Creative C... [read more]
We're trying something new at Adaptive Path. Internally we call it a "pop-up event". These are: assembled quickly; held in our offices, and registration is set at a low price. Our first pop-up is Designing Experiences: Financial Services in a Connected Age. It takes place October 8 in San Francisco (yes, that's less than a month away!). Why financial services? Because at Adaptive Path, we have not seen any industry invest as much in user experien... [read more]
Here is the smörgåsbord of news that struck us last week: We bring you (old) fashion, architecture, hardware, software, conscious shopping, typography, our youngest fan, and not-so-cute pets. We designers may wear black turtlenecks all the time, but that doesn't mean we don't keep track of what others are wearing. Here's "what to wear" for the last 100 years in 100 seconds. I know I saw some of my wardrobe flash by. One of the world's best desi... [read more]
Are you ready to turn your city into a monopoly? Check out Design Week in Copenhagen Amazon or Apple, which one will win out in the tablet competition? Speaking of tablets, what extreme measures would you take to get an iPad? Did you get your 8 hours of sleep last night? Your employer sure hopes you did. Collaborative consumption is a rapidly emerging crowd-sourcing service trend. But crowd-sourced restrooms? We're not so sure. Big... [read more]
For all intents and purposes, the cloud has been an overwhelming hit. For most people with readily available high speed internet, it has taken a lot of the pain and cost away from the storage and management of digital content. Adoption of cloud services have hit the point where many people now integrate them into their daily habits. Under normal circumstances, I would consider this to be a good thing, but as things stand, I feel as though this tr... [read more]
Netflix's stock took a big hit yesterday, after they provided guidance that they would have 24, not 25, million subscribers by the end of this month. This is in direct response to their new pricing scheme, which changed the "basic" Netflix service (1 DVD + Streaming) from $9.99 to $15.98. What's interesting, though, is where they're losing subscribers. Look at the Venn diagrams on this article from GigaOm. What's surprising is that the bundled ... [read more]
"All our words from loose using have lost their edge." - Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon As this year is the fiftieth anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's death, I've been thinking about his writing and what I could learn from it. I’m not Hemingway. I don’t consider myself a good writer, although I work with quite a few good writers at Adaptive Path. However, like many of you reading this, I need to write for a living. Designers write prop... [read more]
At Adaptive Path we have a tradition of resourcing practitioners to only one project at a time. Sometimes that means there are breaks in between projects that can last up to a few weeks. It's up to each practitioner to decide how best to use that time. Usually, folks go out and attend conferences, work on their own talks, or help the client relations team craft new projects. During some recent down-time between projects, Trina Hancock and I desig... [read more]
As we get prepared for UX Week next week here in San Francisco (and hope you’ll be joining us), here are a few of the things that we’ve stumbled upon this week that we’ve found interesting: What an iPad Looked Like in 1994 Dance like nobody’s watching…or with the hope that everyone’s watching. Page Trawler is a content audit tool for people who make websites - user experience designers, content strategists, marketers, information arch... [read more]
If you design services or want to learn more about how design is being applied to the design of services, do not miss your opportunity to grab an early bird ticket to the Service Design Network conference in San Francisco this October. As co-chair of this event, I've been helping to put together some great content around the theme of business and design, or From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet. The conference will explore what happens when service ... [read more]
For the last year and a half, I have worked on three major projects (apart from the birth of my daughter) and for each of them user authentication and identity management was crucial: Digital video. With media moving to the cloud, you need to authenticate on each device in order to have access to your stuff. And for households with shared media devices (what you might call a "television"), there are opportunities for profiles-based interfaces to ... [read more]
This week we're posting this while on a break from the last session on the last day of UX Week. We're sad. It's been a great week. If you haven't been following #uxweek on twitter, check out all the good stuff flying around. If tweets aren't your thing, UX Week attendee Mark Congiusta's awesome sketchnotes (so far) of the conference lend a more visual representation of the talks and workshops. Exude enthusiasm. Absorb all influcenes. And other de... [read more]
Jesse James Garrett for example http://vimeo.com/6952223, love his comment “the user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure”. It's so true.
A UX firm attempts to redesign a printed newspaper. It was a beautiful failure. Neave Strobe will mess with your eyes. Looking to do some mobile storyboarding? There’s an app for that. We love Sriberia’s graphic facilitation! Dan Roam and Dr. Tony Jones explain health care reform. Sand artist Kseniya Simonova won Ukraine’s Got Talent competition with her sand [...]
I've heard different presenters talk about putting slides up on crowdvine. Currently I can't find any slides, or information on when, where, how to get slides, and the recordings of the main sessions that Peter talked about. What have I missed? Rick
Hi! As we receive the slides and resource materials from the workshop leaders we will post them here: http://www.uxweek2009.crowdvine.com/talk/presentations Thanks! Chelsa
Adaptive Path returns to Washington, D.C. (after being away for more than 2 years), with our UX Intensive workshop November 2-5. This is our last event in 2009, and our only event on the East Coast this year. UX Intensive provides hands-on, activities-based training in key disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research, Information Architecture, [...]