Adaptive Path

Signposts for the Week Ending November 6, 2009

Adaptive Path — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:46:32 +0000

President Obama’s new Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, gave a talk on technology and innovation. The first thing he said that needs to be considered? Customer experience design. Listen to his address here (it’s good!)

The Litl is a sexy little webbook. Read what Pentagram said about its design. (And also read Pentagram’s involvement in the NY Riverways project.)

Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact.’

The Information Architecture of Behavior Change Websites.

Our friends at Flickr have released an App Garden.

This one has made the rounds: Cell Size and Scale. It’s a powers of 10 thing!

Hrm. This seems to be a taxonomy error.

Dieter Rams’ 10 design principles. Follow them and you, too, can make spare white objects.

DVR is TV’s new BFF. (In other words, the TV industry fighting DVR was as senseless as fighting VCRs, or music industry fighting cassette tape, or piano rolls, or… etc etc.)

I Want It That Way

Andrew Crow — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:58:22 +0000

Sometimes, we put down our whiteboard markers and engage with our true passion – boy bands.

Below is a little thing we made in response to another video on YouTube. It was planned in about 5 minutes and we really didn’t know the lyrics. But, it was a lot of fun. Check it out and let us know if we’ve missed our calling.

Open your mind for Design with Temple Grandin

Adaptive Path — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:34:36 +0000

Can you imagine an alternate reality? We talk about alternate reality games, but what if an alternate reality exists for others on a day to day basis. Take a second and imagine what it would be like if you couldn’t’ think in the abstract, but instead had a brain that thought by referencing tons of concrete images. Like if we said “think of a church steeple”, and you thought of lots of examples from around the world of church steeples — instead of just a general church steeple. At UX Week this year, Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University, talked about her experience having Autism and designing for the livestock industry. She shared how important her abnormal focus on detail, ability to think in pictures, both common to Autism, enable her design for livestock in a way that ‘normal’ people can’t. Professor Grandin’s talk opened our mind to how different peoples’ brains work differently and that this alternate reality is not so uncommon for people in the design industry.

Temple Grandin PART 1 of 2 | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Temple Grandin PART 2 of 2 | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Smart.fm: Developing a Great Experience

Dan Harrelson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:57:49 +0000

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story

Update: The app was just released. Download it from iTunes now.

When last we posted about the Smart.fm iPhone app the team had moved from design into development. In the few months since we have been hard at work bringing our ideas to life. The combined team, working across many time zones and many miles of ocean collaborated almost daily. We tackled issues on the server side. We tackled issues on the device. We tested scenarios and we tweaked the design when implementation revealed new ways to solve problems. During app development I’ve taken note of some themes that arose time and again. Here’s four that stood out.

A great experience is responsive

Software that looks good and works right will fail if it is not fast. With a mobile experience this is especially true. Mobile devices are inherently more resource constrained than PC’s. Users expect to dive into an app on their phone, complete a task and then get out. Seconds count. Heck, milliseconds count. In building the Smart.fm iPhone app the team likely spent more time on performance tuning than anything else. As an Internet connected service, the app is constantly downloading information over the network. We had to find techniques to download just what’s needed in the moment. API tuning improves download times and client-side caching reducing the amount of downloading needed. The final design for data synchronization results in the user seeing some shorts bursts of network activity while browsing around. Taking advantage of this pattern, the team came up with a clever “loading” animation. If we did our job well, the burden of waiting for a download will actually help to make the app feel even more fun!

A great experience is correct

The Smart.fm app is designed to work a lot like the iPod app. A user has numerous goals with many items. They select a goal and begin studying it with the learning game Alexa described earlier. If a user leaves the game, either by returning to browse goals or by quitting the app then their state needs to be saved and resumed at a later time. In addition, the user’s study progress needs to be synced back to the Smart.fm web site so that they can continue learning on a PC. And wait! What if the user studied that same goal, or another one in the mean time… download that progress and figure out the user’s total progress across all goals. And wait! Since goals are “alive” other users might have added new items, so download them too.

What seems like a pretty simple app design on it’s surface reveals quit a bit of complexity during implementation. I think we all know of applications that offer plenty of utility are are unusable due to bugs. It goes without saying that errors in software are not a good experience. During the development of this app we worked diligently to test and remove bugs…. and test and test and test. The hope is that our users get an error-free experience that lets the fun shine though.

A great experience is choreographed

Brandon Schauer always talks about the cupcake. In fact, I find it hard to get him not to talk about it. And to be honest, I love the metaphor; it’s infectious. The concept is this: a cupcake, a birthday cake and a wedding cake are each perfect in their own scale. A cupcake may be smaller than a wedding cake, but it is no less delicious. You take a bite and are completely satisfied. The cake, the icing and the decoration on that cupcake is just right. Perhaps you’d like a second helping, but you don’t wish you were eating a slice of birthday cake. The cupcake is small, but complete.

During the development of this iPhone app the team had to cut some features due to time and resources. In deciding what to remove, and how deeply to cut, we need to ensure that the app was still tasty and satisfying. A Smart.fm app that didn’t allow a user to study would be incomplete for sure. But what about some of the social network aspects of the service? Could those be removed from the first version without it feeling lacking? What about multiple types of quiz games… do we need those too? What’s the cupcake of a Smart.fm iPhone app?

A great experience ships!

I’m happy to say that the iPhone app has been submitted to Apple and is very close to being in your hands. There is always a time at which a developer must decide that their work is refined enough for customers to use. The hope of course is that this time is not dictated such that the application is incomplete or full of bugs. Our team was able to work towards a ship date that allowed both the freedom to “do it right” and “just get it done”. Screenshots of the app are available at http://smart.fm/iphone. Early in November we anticipate seeing a smiling Smart.fm owl sitting in the iTunes app store. Thanks for all of your interest and patience!

On a personal note, I want to say that it has been a joy working with the Smart.fm team. Not only does the service live up to it’s name, but the folks who work behind the scenes are some of the brightest I’ve met

Desire lines – the metaphor that keeps on giving

peterme — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:46:11 +0000

Five years ago I wrote about the burgeoning phenomenon of “tagging” content, and in it, I used the metaphor of the desire line — trails worn into a landscape that demonstrate the paths people want to take, not those that were laid down by the designer.

Last week I attended an industry smarty party in the form of Giga Om’s “What Comes Next For The Web” bunker session, where a bunch of leading thinkers and makers talk about where the Web is heading. The discussion lead by Adaptive Path founder and Typekit CEO Jeffrey Veen dealt with (surprise!) user experience, and the conversation lead toward the evolution of design practice in a Web 2.0 world. For instance, Doug Bowman, Creative Director of Twitter, talked about how he’s embracing the challenge of figuring out what design means for a service that is essentially little more than a platform for 140-character messages.

As I was listening the conversation, I realized that desire lines were pertinent.

Designers come from a tradition of figuring out the whole system, and putting it out there. But the success of Twitter has emerged from an approach that’s nearly 180 degrees from that. Twitter began simply as a way to post 140-character messages, and allowed remarkable freedom in following. Almost no structure was placed on the system. It’s through the paths that users have worn in the system (e.g., @ replies, retweets, hashtags, followfridays) that Twitter has grown to realize the value of the service, and they’ve made initial steps to “pave” those most popular paths (most notably replies, though Doug mentioned that they are considering how to more formally support retweeting as well).

A chellenge for many organizations is to have the nimbleness of design and development to take advantage of this type of evolution. At this stage in the game, if you’re company is not able to quickly iterate, and are required to produce laborious specs and have staged releases months, quarters, or even farther apart, well, as the internet is famous for saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”

A couple other thoughts from the GigaOm event:

As I tweeted at the event, the participant mix was about 95% male. This is pathetic. It was also overwhelmingly white and Asian. It is only from a diversity of perspectives that we’ll hit upon the great ideas that will carry us forward.
It intrigued me that though this event was about the “next web”, it felt very much to be about figuring out the current Web. Considering how many blowhards have dismissed the Web as a solved problem, the conversation among these very smart people suggested it is anything but.

UX Week 2009 Videos: Continuous Customer Experience Improvement

peterme — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:34:47 +0000

When I think of leading web applications, Mint.com and Google Maps come to mind. I was thrilled that representatives from both agreed to speak at UX Week 2009 a few weeks ago, to share some insight as to how they innovate. Though they have different development processes, they do share an approach dedicated to continuous improvement, relentlessly upgrading their customer experience through ongoing experimentation.

Their stories reminded me of how, a few years ago, the blogosphere was abuzz about an article from Business 2.0 magazine about the evolution of the Netflix envelope. As the accompanying slideshow demonstrated, the mailer had gone through substantial revisions in a relatively short period of time. A short time later, an article appeared on UIE.com about Netflix’s web site design process, where it was revealed that the site was updated every 2 weeks, and it was understood that many of the changes would be considered “failures,” but it was better to get things out and see how they performed.

It turns out both Google Maps and Mint are successful in large part because:

They have deep-seated concern for customer experience

They have remarkably agile development methods that allow for rapid experimentation

Here are the videos of Aaron Forth (VP of Product at Mint.com) and Bernhard Seefeld and Elizabeth Windram (from Google Maps) sharing how they stay so far ahead of their competition.

Aaron Forth | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Bernhard Seefeld and Elizabeth Windram | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Good Design Faster Comes to the East Coast

Leah Buley — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:27:01 +0000

Every once in a while someone emails Adaptive Path to ask when we’ll be running Good Design Faster again. Aw, come on… you remember Good Design Faster… our new training that covers sketching, sketchboarding, and agile, iterative design. It looks something like this…

We’ve done the training on the West Coast a few times this year (most recently at UX Week), but up until now, the folks on the East Coast have been out of luck.

No longer!

We’ve partnered with some of our friends on the East Coast to bring a full-day workshop version to two upcoming events in November — one in Boston, and one in New York City. Check out the details below, and if you’re curious about the workshop (or just want to be hostly and meet up for a drink when I’m back East) drop me a line. Hope to see you there!

Boston / Sunday, November 1st
User Interface 14 Conference (Nov 1-3)
Register with the code BULEY to get $50 off per day. And if you register for all 3 days, you’ll get a set of Bose headphones, free.

New York City / Monday, November 16th
Web 2.0 Expo (Nov 16-19)
Register with the code webny09se30 to get 30% off the price of a conference pass.

I know! Good discounts. Better than the Gray’s Papaya Recession Special.

The State of User Experience

Brandon Schauer — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:19:51 +0000

One thing I love is when someone’s able to step back from the trees and see the forest. Few do that better than Jesse James Garrett. At our recent UXWeek event Jesse took appraisal of the State of User Experience, giving new perspective on what the intent and practice of user experience is all about, and what new challenges await us.

It’s important to take the time to watch this presentation because of the new footholds Jesse creates for UX. First and foremost, he takes on “mediumism” or the tendency for design to have to be about a medium rather than the medium-independent design of experiences. Then, he offers a practical definition of experience design that shows the strengths and missing of today’s UX practice in a new light:

“experience design: the design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.”

Watch the video, and Jesse will lay out the means by which we can tackle the challenge of human engagement head on. But be warned, “the user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure.”

Jesse James Garrett | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Signposts for the Week Ending 10/09/09

Adaptive Path — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:39:23 +0000

We’re checking out James Reynolds’ Far Foods and wondering about how this approach could mediate other product relationships

Now you can use that distracting object in your pocket to envision what New York City could have been like with the Museum of the Phantom City application

We’re fascinated by this musical clock of stars

Who knew hunting could look so good and informative, or education stats on your walls for that matter

This week saw NASA bomb the moon, and scientists are thinking it was a successful attack

We’re always excited when simple design ideas can be taken from science museums and put out in the world to spark behavioral change

What Matters serves up some thoughts on innovation: Nurturing the Innovation Reef and What’s your score?

We certainly can’t overlook the administration’s leading man winning the Nobel Peace Prize this week

Get your ideas on with one of Inc.’s 30 under 30

And finally, an Office Space kind of moment: Kill the Kindle

Signposts for the Week Ending 10/2/09

Adaptive Path — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:17:43 +0000

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 art interpretation of what Germany’s invasion during World War II did to her people.

We’ve been playing with Google Wave this week and still wonder what it is. Maybe this explanation will help.

From the tools-we-use-but-are-frustrated-with department, Jon Hicks summarizes some issues with Fireworks.

Despite our love for the web, many of us have roots in print. If you’re looking for some tutorials, look no further than this.

And, if you’re trying to spice up your designs, here are 50 resources to start from.

We ordered a case of these. They were fun, for about 5 minutes.

Have a great weekend. And, if you’re not following us on Twitter, you should be!