Adaptive Path

What we talk about when we talk about sketching.

Dane Petersen — 2012-02-06T17:35+00:00

I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time. A lot of sketching advice tends to be too general ("You should sketch!"), too superficial ("You need to buy these pens!"), or too self-congratulatory ("Look at the sketches I made!") to be useful for those of us who have already incorporated sketching into our everyday design practice. For me, sketching tends to be a surprisingly philosophical endeavor, and I'm curious to hear how other designers think about their own sketching.

Of explorations and free associations. One mind's descent.

A few years ago my approach to sketching coalesced around a technique that helps me explore a problem space by using a combination of words and sketches to flesh out my understanding of potential ideas, concepts or solutions. It's sketchnoting, in the purest sense of the term, but instead of sketching notes from a talk or presentation, I'm capturing ideas as they spill out of my head. It's like attending my own personal TED conference, but there's only one speaker, and he's kind of nuts, and he just chained the doors shut and now there's a fire and we're never going to get out of here alive.

The sketching is highly generative, best done in a focused session under the influence of caffeine and noise-canceling headphones. My brain has a tendency to free associate and sometimes these sessions spiral out of control, but they are useful activities to conduct at the beginning of a project, as I begin identifying (and blowing past) the tacit boundaries of a space.

As it turns out, this technique is a great personal activity that gives me a huge jumpstart when it comes to exploration. The act of externalizing an idea, whether I'm writing it down or sketching it out, frees up valuable mental space that can be occupied by the next idea; the next free association. Indeed, as design is more an act of choosing from alternatives than it is an act of spontaneous genius, I find that the more options (especially outlandish ones) my brain can get out in front of itself, the better.

This is something that's better shown than described. Here's a video from a project at Adaptive Path that I worked on a few years ago, where I talk about my process for coming up with the in-game experience for a mobile learning application:

Outside In: A case study in explorination through sketchination.

During my graduate program I pursued a project that looked into how one can bring a sense of the outdoors into an indoor space. Through sketching I started by exploring the miscellaneous techniques people use to stay connected with the world around them:

I then sketched potential concepts that would address this challenge, ranging from digital windows to Lifescapes albums, Harry Potter enchanted ceilings to office squirrels, real-time snow globes to chainsaws:

Some of my explorations were light on sketching, but heavy on notes. Again, my goal is to externalize ideas in whatever form my brain deems necessary, be it visual or written:

As I honed in on trying to represent the outdoors in the workplace, I explored the various artifacts of that environment as opportunities for intervention:

And as I studied light as a medium for design, I brainstormed various ways to prototype in it:

On the topics of color and reflection (a type of color).

Color plays a huge role when I sketch like this, and while the aesthetic results can be delightful, I have discovered there are deeper implications in how the act of coloring changes how I think about my sketches.

When I'm laying down ink (typically with a Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, not that I'm particular or anything) my brain is in a purely generative mode, and my hand is simply doing everything it can to keep up with the stream of consciousness. In a productive session I will typically fill a few pages of my sketchbook with ink (a steady supply of 9" x 12" spiral-bound Strathmore drawing pads keep me well-fed and hydrated) before actually switching over to colored pencils.

Laying down ink is a generative act, but going back over my work and coloring it in allows me an opportunity to reflect on the ideas I've already created. As I choose colors and fill in shapes I begin thinking more deeply about my concepts; their volume, the materials they're comprised of, how they could be improved, etc. Laying in color, then, triggers ideas that drive the next round of inking, which I in turn color, triggering more ideas.

Physically going over my sketches in color and reembodying their forms forces me to engage with them, consider the connections between them, at a depth that is impossible to achieve by simply looking them over.

Getting out of my head.

At Adaptive Path we work on small, tightly collaborative teams of 3-5 designers. A common activity in our project work involves concept generation, where all the designers of the team come together and sketch potential approaches to the product or service we're designing. In response to a prompt each designer sketches as many ideas as possible, fueling inspiration within the team by sharing out concepts as we go along. In a typical project we often come up with hundreds of concepts, which we then cluster, prioritize and re-concept as we hone in on the best solution to carry forward.

I quickly found that I needed to adapt my sketching style to work more effectively within these fast-paced group contexts. My inking/coloring, generating/reflecting cycle is extremely effective at facilitating an internal conversation (or a reflective conversation between me and my sketching materials, if you want to get all Donald Schön and reflective practice about it) but it doesn't produce outputs that play well with others. While noisy pages and colorful sketches may attract comments on Flickr and retweets on Twitter, it's a radically different context when I need to quickly connect with clients and teammates whose work depends on me being able to clearly articulate my ideas. In this case, my sketches need to be as much a communication tool as they are a generation tool.

The CMYK sea change.

And so, over the last few months I've worked to adapt my sketching technique to better fit the contexts in which I'm sketching. Since most of my work is super-duper top secret, here are some example sketches depicting concepts around... bees. Because really, bees are pretty darn amazing, and I don't think they're the target of nearly enough design work.

While I still use my sketchbook for meeting notes, personal reflections and other creative endeavors, I now favor half-sheets of copy paper for project work. I've ditched the pens and colored pencils for sharpies and highlighters, and have limited my color palette to blue, pink, yellow and black (or CMYK, as I prefer to call it). I'm now conducting my work with materials that are readily available, and I can quickly produce concepts that are readily disposable.

Clear. Bold. Atomic. Disposable.

Each concept is described by a sketch, a short description, and a name. Over time I've established my own color-coding system to lend a kind of visual hierarchy to these elements. Since I'm not barfing everything onto the page at once, as I do with my personal sketching explorations, each concept takes a bit more planning as to how I want to communicate it. That said, if I've spent more than a few minutes on a sketch, I've probably spent too long on it. Best crumple it up and start over.

Working in sharpie keeps me from getting too absorbed into the details, and the limited color palette keeps me focused on highlighting key areas, not producing works of art. Each concept is clear, bold, and can generally be recognized from across the project room.

Since a concept sketch is, essentially, the atomic unit of design, and this approach produces only one concept per half-sheet of paper, it makes them pretty easy for other people to grok at the atomic level. Plus, armed with a roll of drafting dots it's easy to post concepts on the wall and begin clustering them... combining them into little design molecules, if you will.

Finally, when it comes time to package our work, the half-sheets feed nicely into a document scanner. Or a shredder. Depending on the filing system we've chosen.

Yes! And...

This has been my personal journey in sketching, shifting from a highly personal, highly specialized technique that helps my mind break open and explore new ideas, to a technique that is more adapted for collaboration on a small design team. That said, concept generation is just one small part of the design process that can benefit from a thoughtful approach to sketching. And sketching on paper is just one form of sketching.

To that end, I'd be curious to know in comments how you have evolved your own sketching practice over time, or how you find yourself adapting it to be more effective in different contexts.

Thanks, and happy sketching!

Signposts for the Week Ending February 3

Pam Daghlian — 2012-02-03T22:34+00:00

We're sure you're good at a lot of things. But can you be a better tweeter?

Starting up by failing.

Dan Roam's creative process for writing (good for visual folks trying to write, the good stuff starts at 2:00mins).

Adoption rates of various technologies (info porn!)

Can brainstorming stifle creativity? Apparently.

First, fire all the managers—one of five HBR articles on risk and globalization free for download right now.

Neil Young's website has a kick ass landing page. And what Björk is doing lately is really cool (collaboration! iPad app! songs about science-y things!)

It's been making the rounds, but we share it anyway—one five year old's impressions of well known logos.

UX Intensive All New for 2012

Henning Fischer — 2012-01-31T18:15+00:00

UX Intensive, our popular, globe-trotting, four-day workshop series is all new this year!   Designed as a skills builder for practitioners, UX Intensive delivers the best tools and learnings from our practice in a workshop setting. It's taught by senior Adaptive Path staff and offers the opportunity to learn new techniques, meet other practitioners and have a little fun in the evenings. The workshop is now in its fifth successful year and it's still going strong, with attendees coming from leading companies all over the world.

We have been working on a completely revamped UX Intensive course over the last few months. We've gone over the material with a fine tooth-comb, listened to attendee feedback and have developed a course focused on where the practice of user experience is headed. Each day's content has been completely overhauled, and we're particularly excited about the addition of a day on service design. We've been moving in that direction for a while now, with Jamin heavily involved in the Service Design Network and Brandon exploring what he calls the Service Anticipation Gap in a series of blog posts. We're super excited to bring you what we're doing and learning in this area, as well as the latest in strategy, research and interaction design.

We’re sticking to the four-day format, each day building on the next. Here’s how the days break down...

Day One | Design Strategy is clustered around five themes—business alignment, defining customer value, core experience definition, core experience evolution and delivering strategic guidance—to help you move quickly and confidently through ambiguous strategic questions toward concrete action.

Day Two | Design Research is structured to provide a framework for conducting effective user research and covers the research structure, data collection, data analysis, research findings, and giving design direction. Although we cover the execution of field research, the workshop emphasizes the hard work and value that comes before and after data collection.

Day Three | Interaction Design starts with a foundational outline of the practice of Interaction Design. From there, we quickly move into looking at the development of research driven concepts, the prototyping and validation of those concepts, and finally the refinement and presentation of the concept proposal.

Day Four | Service Design will focus on various ways of modeling and describing a service experience. These perspectives include modeling of the service system, describing the customer journey and designing a blueprint to support the organization providing the service. Finally, we will discuss ways of determining the success of the service offering.

Our first UX Intensive of 2012 will be held at De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on April 23-26. The venue is pretty special—a former hidden church, located in a beautiful historic building in the heart of Amsterdam. Register by Friday, February 3, to get the early bird price. And if you use the promo code BLOG, we'll take an additional 10% off. REGISTER HERE. We suggest people take all four days, but if you prefer individual days you will still get a lot out of it. And if you've already attended UXI in the past, this is all new content, so you're welcome to return.

Finally, if you had any doubt about how nice Amsterdam can be in April, check out this video, made by one of our attendees last year.

Amsterdam loves bicycles. from PROG21 on Vimeo.

Looking for a Few Good Interns

Jamin Hegeman — 2012-01-23T21:52+00:00

Dear [Name Of Graduate Student]

We are writing to you because you are studying one of the following things: visual design, interaction design, service design, design research, design strategy, business, or some kind of crazy hybrid or intersection. You recently expressed interest in seeing how your skills could be wielded to design great products and services.

Do we ever have an opportunity for you! Adaptive Path is seeking graduate students with your unique combination of skills (and charm) for our internship program this summer!

You’ll be part of our team, treated like a professional, write on this here blog, and get to have some amazing experiences. Last year’s interns got to work on a project for UN Global Pulse and design the first version of a new iPad service that launched last year. Our interns are even big in Korea! (ask us)

We have opportunities for interns in both our Austin and San Francisco studios. If you’re interested, please review the complete description and requirements and apply.

Also, check our events page (scroll down) to see where we will be over the next two months. It could be a good opportunity to snag one of us and talk about what it’s like to work here.

Thank you, [Name Of Graduate Student], for your time and consideration. We’re really excited to hear back from you soon!

Regards,

Jamin Hegeman
Design Director
Internship Program Coordinator

Data Trumps Opinion: 4 Smart Services that Deploy and Learn

Brandon Schauer — 2012-01-18T19:01+00:00

Tired of going with the design that will survive the organization's political gauntlet? What if we made decisions based on what actually worked for customers and produced results, not what snaggletoothed solution fit into every stakeholder's personal view of the world?

A quick story of how I got hooked

Five years ago I was working to redesign a major website when our team got stuck on just how to design landing pages for traffic coming through Google. Should we be satisfied with a Google searcher just viewing one page or should we put design effort into getting them to view more?

The developer on our team said "let's find out" and put an A/B test on the site that very night, adding a link to some pages that helped Google searchers go find more pages like that one. The next day, we had our answer. No guessing. Enough people clicked on the link to warrant design time. It wouldn't be a waste. And no one debated the results.

The way to design with integrity is to make sure it works for the people using it. The way to make sure it works, is to find whatever way you can to present the important ideas early and frequently to the intended user. This is true for digital products, but it's equally true for services and can help overcome what I've started calling the Service Anticipation Gap.

And the named real-world cases?

Yeah, that last story was purposefully obfuscated to protect the client. So how can you believe that teams can really work this way? I have four real-world examples. Here we go:

1. Nordstrom's Sunglass iPad App
This has made the rounds a couple times, but it's a stellar example. Nordstrom's Innovation Lab set up in a Nordstrom's store for their research, design, and development.

Need to observe shopping? Turn around. Need to test an idea? Ask a customer to step aside for a minute.

By co-locating real customers and the design process side-by-side, the time lag between think, make, and learn has been reduced from weeks to minutes. There's a massive acceleration in the speed of learning. So there's more learning. So there's extremely high confidence in the viability of the solution.

2. Intuit's SnapTax
Referenced in The Lean Startup, this is another example of a large organization engaging in more nimble behaviors to get to great solutions.

At last year's MX Conference Kaaren Hansen, the lead of Design Innovation at Intuit, detailed how a small team at Intuit identified a customer group, a need, and the best way to address it—tax payers with simple situations need an equally simple approach to filing their taxes on their smart phones.

Next, the team quickly prototyped their way to a simple but compelling new service that they rolled out to California and then to the whole U.S. tax market. Listen to Kaaren and you'll hear how going frequently into the field and seeing the solution in context—for example trying to take photos of an employer's W2 in in the low-light of a Starbucks—led to a significantly better solution without trying to pack every possible solution in the app.

Some would call this a minimal viable product. I'd call it a cupcake.

SnapTax appears at 16:45 into the video.

3. HomePlus Virtual Stores
This is one of my favorite new examples to share in presentations. Why? Because they framed their problem really well and found a solution that could fail—or at least fail forward into the solution that would work.

In short, HomePlus, a Korean grocery store, wanted to grown sales without investing in additional new stores. The solution is a virtual storefront which requires minimal new investment and could easily be prototyped, validated in the real world with customers, tweaked, and scaled.

4. San Francisco Recreation & Parks
I've blogged in detail about this powerful example of escaping political bureaucracy by trying out and validating what works in the real world. San Francisco Rec & Parks wanted to put a park in a controversial location. Many constituencies resisted.

So Rec & Parks took 72-hours to roll out a "reversible trial" park, using paint, temporary fixtures, and chairs off of Craigslist. Measurements showed that the worries of constituencies where unfounded—the park was well used, improved foot traffic at local businesses, and didn't drive up car traffic on nearby residential streets.

Since the initial rollout, the city has continued to invest steadily in the park, changing the surfacing, adding permanent fixtures, and hosting food vendors.

Is this 'lean'?

By now someone's reading this and saying, "he's just talking about 'Lean Startup' and 'Lean UX.' Yeah, you got me. Learning by shipping is one of the core ideas of the lean approach.

But I've found that when I talk to UX practitioners about LeanUX at conferences and events, the first thing I hear about is "zero documentation." I think that concept is a red herring. Sure it'd be great to be rid of documentation, and zero documentation might be the hallmark of a good lean design process. But zero documentation isn't the goal; the goal is to figure out how quickly you can learn what works and what doesn't work so you don't waste your time designing, developing, politicking, and—yes—documenting screen #6 when the user never cared enough to get off screen #1.

My advice if you're thinking of practicing lean—don't focus on the dogma of zero documentation, focus on the results of that rapid learning about how customers really see, engage with, and adopt your ideas.

Overcoming Serious Service Sag

Brandon Schauer — 2012-01-10T23:11+00:00

Last week I posted about how businesses over-invest in advertising and under-invest in the improvement of the service experience, which creates what I call a Service Anticipation Gap, or SAG. Customers are falsely led to expect a service that's better than what it can be. The result is wasted ad spend and revenue losses from customer (dis)engagement.

The Challenge

Businesses have gotten used to confidently connecting spending on ads and seeing the returns in revenue. Or as @odannyboy overheard, "Advertising is a lazy man's monetization."

And here's where the folks that plan and design services have stumbled. We haven't been able to make the same connections between investments and results that make an investment decision in good service design a no-duh. The efforts to improve services haven't historically met with the same financial success as ad spends, and therefore business lack the confidence to spend on it. Confidence is lost because coordinating systems and people with a vision of how the service really should be isn't as easy as pumping out ads via a partner agency.

The Fix

The ability to confidently invest in improved services is changing, and it's something we want to be a part of making happen.

We believe good service is something human and decent and good, and a hell of a good business investment. We also believe it's something that doesn't have to be fraught with risk, costing gazillions of dollars and millions of lives.

Here's what's changing:

Service design and delivery know-how — service design has been a long time coming but it's reaching a tipping point. There's a growing number of designers, engineers, marketers, and mangers that know how to focus on the interaction of customers with businesses—across both the technology touchpoints and more high-touch interactions—and use that focus to move the organization towards delivering superior experiences for customers and superior economics for businesses. With moderate investment and skill-building, organizations are going to find they have the ability to regularly and routinely make smart investments in improving service experiences.

Digital services — I often break down business-customer touchpoints into high-touch/low-volume touchpoints and low-touch/high-volume touchpoints. You might think technology only has a role in the latter, but it's actually becoming a big part of both. Digital ensures a standard of service in both cases, and an ability to regularly push out and prove out the right improvements to a service. Digital channels produce analytics that prove out customer engagement and can be frequently deployed and iterated to better and better performing solutions.

Lean service management — What improvements to services are going to have the desired impact on customer choices and behavior? You don't know. Let me say that again: You don't know. You don't, because businesses and customers are terrible predictors of their future behaviors. (There's a lot of gym equipment sitting in people's basements and closets that prove me right!) But once you admit this, there is something you can do. You can build reasonable hypotheses and find the best and smartest way to pilot and test your theories, maximizing speed of learning and therefore the speed of reaching the right solution. Learning from the real world trumps pitching and bitching over PowerPoint—every day of the week.

So stay tuned. I think the way businesses will be conceiving of and delivering services is going to undergo some big and better changes.

Peterme Moves On

Jesse James Garrett — 2012-01-09T18:52+00:00

Let's be clear on this point: There would be no Adaptive Path without Peter Merholz. Certainly, after nearly 11 years in business, the company's culture, strategy, and creative direction has been influenced by a lot of folks. But Peter was the one who brought together the original founders to talk about ways we could work together, a conversation that turned into a company.

So it was a momentous day here when Peter let us know he was leaving the company. But in some ways it wasn't a total surprise. As Peter points out in his blog post, the ideas that have most energized him for the last few years are ones that are hard to pursue in the context of design consulting. And when Peter gets energized about an idea, well, it's hard to keep him away from it.

And that's why Peter's departure is bittersweet for us here at Adaptive Path. As much as we will miss his energy, leadership, and sheer chutzpah, we also know that the whole UX community will benefit from the insights that will inevitably come from the next stage of his career. For myself, I will always feel both pride and gratitude that when Peter considered people he might want to work with 11 years ago, my name was on that list. Thank you, Peter, and best of luck.

[photo by Leisa Reichelt, http://www.flickr.com/photos/_leisa/435103046/]

Serious Service Sag

Brandon Schauer — 2012-01-05T21:50+00:00

Has a commercial ever brought you to tears? Images of families reconnecting in an airport or a child hugging their parent with delight because a service was able to bring together a magic moment? I think we've all seen some wet eyes resulting from a well crafted 30-second ad spot.

How about tears brought about from an actual service? Or someone jumping in the air with joy because of how great that check-in process was? Nada. It's a rare, rare bird.

But what if—WHAT IF—services were just as good as they were advertised to be? What if they were even close? Wouldn't that be a shocker? Or OMG, wouldn't that be an incredible business!

The Imbalance

I've been looking at the economics and design of services, because frankly it's something clients have been asking Adaptive Path to work on. Not the design of a single app, but the design of the series of touchpoints that make a service.

What I've found, based on some rough top-down estimates, is that mid-to-large-sized U.S. businesses spend, in aggregate, somewhere between 1 and 5 billion dollars annually¹ on the planning and design of services. That's a big freakin' pile of cash.

But when you consider that services make up roughly 80% of the U.S. economy,² it's no wonder. In fact, services are the bright spot of the U.S. economy. While the U.S. has an overall trade deficit with the rest of the world, we run a $144 billion dollar trade surplus in services!³

But back to that $1 to 5 billion of annual spending on the planning and design of services. That seems like a mighty big number, but now let's compare it to the funds spent on advertising those services—the money spent attracting us to services by telling us how awesome those services really are. Here we go:

U.S. Business will spend an estimated $40 billion for ad spends in 2011⁴ in just the top 5 categories of local services, financial services, telecom, restaurants, and travel and tourism. Based on my rough and early calculations, that is at least a 20 to 1 ratio between buying ads to attract customers versus spending to improve the services they receive.

So for every dollar U.S. businesses spend improving a service, I'm estimating that they spend somewhere between 8 and 50 dollars advertising it. OMG.

The SAG

This is a big gap where businesses choose to invest in their services. They spend a lot of money to tell you how great the service is, and then, all too often, the service doesn't live up to the hype. Brands become hypocrites thanks to their own investments.

For customers, this spending gap becomes what I call the Service Anticipation Gap, or conveniently, SAG. You set their expectations high for what you can do for them, maybe even connect to some deep emotional need, and then dash their hopes when they experience the reality of your service. Customers anticipate our best—because we told them to!—and then even our best often doesn't live up.

For businesses, the Service Anticipation Gap has economic consequences. It's the loss of all future potential revenues and the wasted ad spend when a service doesn’t meet or exceed the expectations set with the customer.

There are certainly bright stars out there; businesses that actually spend much less on advertising than their competitors and win customers through delivering a great service experience—think Amazon. But with the 20-to-1 spending imbalance, there are plenty of saggy businesses and you've probably been disenchanted with many of them.

Let me be clear here. I'm not arguing that advertising is bad. Building awareness and customer interest is key for a business. Peter Morville wrote in Ambient Findability that "findability trumps usability. If you can't find it, you can't use it." Well, this applies to services too. If you don't know about it, you can't engage with it.

But the service does have to meet expectations when the advertised-to customer does arrive, and that's where this disproportionate spending doesn't make sense. Businesses are spending on a gorgeous house facade, leaving the interior unfinished and messy, then wondering why nobody wants to buy the house for its curb appeal. A more sensible balance seems in order.

The Rebalance

So here's what I'd like to propose: Service businesses, look at your ad spending. Is it disproportionately larger than your spending to improve the actual service? Then look at your overall conversion funnel for turning non-customers or inactive-customers into engaged and long-term customers.

You're probably spending a lot on the front end of that funnel, getting a LOT of potential customers up to the point of considering your service. Then there's probably a big drop off somewhere between the front end and when good and profitable revenue actually starts hitting your books.

Now estimate this: Is every additional ad dollar you spend on the front end of the funnel having as big an impact on moving people towards loyal customers as an additional dollar spent further down that funnel, where customers are beginning to experience the actually service? Or do your funnel and your business sag where you no longer live up to customer anticipation?

Do the math. I'm thinking in many cases there's a much better business case for investing a dollar in the service, a dollar that's going to keep working for the business for quite a while because an improvement to a service doesn't fade over time like an ad spend. A dollar spent on improving the service has long-term impact, is more measurable, and can therefore have a higher correlation to and often direct causation of a customer's decision to spend and stay with the brand.

So I implore you! Step back, take a look, and consider if you need to stop the SAG.

About the numbers

A little more detail on where the numbers come from:

¹"Mid-to-large-sized U.S. businesses spend roughly $2 billion dollars annually"—Based on the annual economic output of service industries, removing the portion estimated to be contributed by small business, and then estimating the cost of delivering those services and the portion of that cost made up of a typical ratio of R&D spending. You can see more math here.

²"...services make up roughly 80% of the U.S. economy"—from 'The Role of Services In the Modern U.S. Economy' Office of Service Industries, U.S. Department of Commerce.

³The U.S. has "a $144.1 billion dollar trade surplus in services"—from U.S. Department of Commerce fact sheet. While the U.S. is running an overall trade deficit, it has a trade surplus in services. “U.S. services exports totaled $551.6 billion in 2008, up $54.4 billion (or 10.9 percent) from 2007. This rise in exports helped the U.S. to have a record trade surplus in services at $144.1 billion, up $24.9 billion (or 20.9 percent) from 2007.

⁴"U.S. Business will spend an estimated $40 billion for ad spends in 2011" —based on extrapolating the Q2 and Q3 data for the top 5 service categories outlined by Kantar Media in: Local Services, Financial Services, Retail, Telecom, Restaurants, Travel & Tourism.

UX Week 2012 - Meet Our First Three Keynote Speakers

Peter Merholz — 2011-12-14T18:49+00:00

We realize that our blog is turning into something of an events platform, but, really, we cannot contain ourselves. We are programming UX Week 2012 (which will be our 10th!), taking place August 21-24 in San Francisco, and we're excited to announce three keynote speakers: Stefan Sagmeister, danah boyd, and Jensen Harris.

Stefan Sagmeister is the principal of Sagmeister, Inc., a renowned design firm, perhaps best known for his album cover work, but, really he's applied his craft in a variety of forms and media. We're particularly inspired by his commitment to taking time off -- every seven years he shuts down his studio for a yearlong sabbatical.

We had scheduled danah boyd to speak last year, but an unfortunate circumstance prevented her from coming. We're thrilled that she's agreed to come this year. danah is perhaps the leading public intellectual on the subject of social media and teenagers, reliably providing heartfelt and thoughtful explanations of just what those kids are up to these days.

In 2008, Jensen Harris spoke at UX Week on The Story of The Ribbon, about how he lead a team to redesign the Microsoft Office user interface. We're thrilled to have him back in 2012 to give us the inside scoop on the development of Windows 8, the first operating system designed for consistent use across phone, tablet, and desktop (and who knows, maybe even teevee!).

As in prior years, UX Week 2012 will be an unparalleled mix of inspiring and informative presentations, and hands-on skills-building workshops. If you're thinking of coming, you should try to sign up now -- we sold out last year, and you're not going to get a better price. And you can use our RNSB (for Register Now Save Big) discount code to get an additional 15% off the already discounted early registration price.

Signposts for the Week Ending December 9

John Lally — 2011-12-09T22:50+00:00

Freaky, the Scary Snowman.

Increasing game immersion by reducing the UI in Skyrim.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis recently launched a new website that’s a model for other museums to use as a means to extend the experience beyond their walls.

Stop competing to be the best.

“Address is Approximate”. A brilliant stop motion video from Tom Jenkins.

Ice Cube celebrates the Eames.

When you take the friction away from sharing, you also remove the value.

During this season of office holiday parties, here are a couple of guides to get you through yours and remain among the ranks of the employed.

The Computer History Museum launched an online exhibit about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs earlier this week. It features photos and descriptions of objects from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as vintage Steve Jobs video footage.

Spinlister offers yet another example of a collaborative consumption service with a peer-to-peer rental platform that lets bicycle owners rent out their ride for a little extra money.

Support St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital by creating/updating your About.me page.

Jim Ross offers some career advice for user researchers.

Two spaces after a period. Why you should never do it.

The gaming industry is growing faster than any other form of media.

Jake Coolidge's imaginary BART Map offers a glimpse into what it might look like if it actually served the entire San Francisco Bay Area, instead of just 4 out of 9 Bay Area counties. It is based in part on the original 1957 plan for BART.

We're obviously big fans of Brandon Schauer's Cupcake Model regarding product and service design. Someone who has taken that model literally and with a lot of success is Kara's Cupcakes.

Not only is the business of journalism changing, so is the journalism.

Why a market for social innovations is needed now more than ever.