Adaptive Path

Adaptive Path’s SF Studio Library: A Social and Thinking Space

Maria Cordell — 2012-05-23T17:05+00:00

Adaptive Path's San Francisco studio library was originally set up by Chiara Ogan, and when she left last year, she entrusted it to me. Among Chiara's many talents, she's a trained and experienced librarian, and she set up a complete library system about which she blogged in December of 2010, when we were at our Brannan Street location.

I'm not a trained librarian, but I am a compulsive classifier and organizer*, so I jumped at the chance to run our library. In a nutshell, the SF library is a lending library with a traditional yet super simple self-checkout process that lets people borrow books pretty much indefinitely. We label and cover books just like real libraries do, and we use the Library of Congress system to organize the books on our shelves and in our electronic catalog. Want to check something out? Easy. Just write your name on the standard library card in the back of the book, add the date, and drop the card into the checkout box.

The AP Library in 2012

One thing that’s changed since we moved into our current studio along San Francisco’s waterfront is that we now enjoy a wonderfully open space for our library. Books line the built-in shelves, and a dedicated reading area provides a place to enjoy a book, flip through the pages of the latest periodicals, or pose for photographs.

The Adaptive Path SF studio library and its seating area are open to the rest of the office. We walk by it several times a day and often stop in to read or share ideas.

Ad Hoc Curation

It’s probably no surprise that we’re voracious and diverse readers here at Adaptive Path. In the past we haven’t had a specific curation approach, and a formal one hasn’t been needed. So far there’s sufficient variety of interests and enough boundary pushing to keep things interesting. The collection reflects who we are and helps fuels our thinking for the strategy and design work we love to do with our clients.

In the last year and a half we’ve added about 150 titles to our collection — many acquired through purchases and others through staff donations. I’m working on filling that in with various classics (e.g., Christopher Alexander’s Notes of the Synthesis of Form) and reference books, and new and interesting titles when they come out. Our ever-growing collection comprises a healthy mix of books across a range of categories, including business, strategy, culture, psychology, science (yay, physics!), art, and technology.

Many newer books are available in electronic form, or as print books that include electronic versions, such as those we’ve purchased directly from publishers like Rosenfeld Media. Putting the book on the shelf is easy, of course, but we’re still trying to find the right approach to lending the digital versions.

Recent Acquisitions

When books come in, I enter them into our electronic catalog and send an email to staff to let them know what’s available. I include the call number, a link to the book site, and the description of the book, and then put the books on display.

Newly added titles are on display in the library for a few weeks so that they’re easy to spot. The display is ever changing as new titles arrive and others are checked out.

And speaking of recent arrivals, I asked a few of our newest colleagues to share thoughts on what they’ve read from our latest batch of library additions. Here’s what they had to say about the books they picked.

Chris Wronski checked out Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job:

Probably the most surprising thing about Design is a Job is the fact that it didn't already exist. It's one of those essential awareness books that help guide you around the inevitable perils that you would have experienced if you just winged it, namely all the activities you have to deal with to do design work that aren't actually design work. If you've already experienced those perils, the book helps reinforce what already took you years to figure out, but with the addition of enjoyable banter from Mr. Monteiro.

All in all, the premise of the book is simple: honest advice about how to approach designing as a job and how to maintain more fulfillment with less bullshit from someone that's been there in the trenches learning it the hard way.

It's especially relevant for those working in smaller shops or even solo, but Design is a Job should be helpful for anyone juggling a variety of roles at a design firm or anyone just curious to learn more about the inner workings of a design business that works.

Patrick Quattlebaum read Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati:

We've needed a book worthy of sitting side by side with Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (a.k.a., the "Polar Bear Book") for quite some time, and I'm happy to report Pervasive Information Architecture has taken that place (at least in own my library). Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati do a fine job of charting the evolution from multi-channel to cross-channel user experience, and laying out a compelling manifesto for "designing artifacts from a structural, informational point of view as the complex open systems that they are becoming." Yes, this isn't Kansas anymore, Toto, and there's no going back. Crafting pervasive information architectures, as the authors see it, requires new skills, new concepts, new tools, and (most importantly) a new perspective that designers must embrace complexity and enable organizations and users to "play." Shifting one's focus from the internal consistency of one channel to the "connected possibilities" across channels and touch points is the new game. This is heady stuff at times, but stick with it.

That said, Pervasive Information Architecture isn’t a purely theoretical book. Its core is built around exploring five heuristics for pervasive architectures: place-making, consistency, correlation, resilience, and reduction. These provide useful concepts for our everyday work in cross-channel and service design. In addition, there are some valuable tools shared, as well as welcomed guest contributions from Peter Morville, Cennydd Bowles, Samantha Starmer, Andrew Hinton, and many others. The concepts and tools presented are crucial to understand and reflect upon for any designer moving from the flatland of interface design to the complex, three-dimensional world of service design.

Steve Kirsh (whose bio page will be up soon!) is reading Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business by Thor Muller and Adaptive Path co-founder Lane Becker:

Serendipity has been on my mind these days having recently cracked open the new book, Get Lucky, co-authored by Thor Muller and Lane Becker. (Full disclosure: Thor has been a dear friend, colleague, and mentor since we met back in 1998, and I’ve met Lane a few times.) The book is an extremely relevant page turner on a variety of levels. Thor and Lane explore the confluence of trusting that little voice inside (what Malcolm Gladwell so eloquently refers to as the “Blink” moment), doing your homework, and being prepared so when that when you find that four-leaf clover you’re able to use it with purpose while staying true to your passion and beliefs — whether you’re trying to validate a new business model or developing a fresh take on making a better burger. One thing I’ve learned is to always know your history and by exploring direct, tangential or even unrelated models, data, what’s worked and what’s failed, serendipitous discoveries are always waiting to be mined.

So there you have it: An updated peek into our SF studio library and how we use it. I’d love to hear from others who’ve started or run their own office libraries (big or small) on how having a library is working for your team or organization.

See It for Yourself!

If you're in the San Francisco area, you can see our library — and the rest of Adaptive Path’s SF studio — for yourself by attending the Open Studio Tours planned for the annual San Francisco Design Week celebration taking place June 11-17. Adaptive Path is participating on Tuesday, June 12, starting at 7 p.m. Check the SF Design Week Events page for the schedule, a map, and details on all of the great things happening that week.

* More about this particular affliction and its overlap with Information Architecture in a future post.

Better Revenue Through UX

Brandon Schauer — 2012-05-21T17:06+00:00

Smart UX managers deliver better experiences and better revenue. That's their job.

At the heart of this year's MX Conference was a talk by Hotwire Group's head of mobile, Melissa Matross. Her story starts with her hatred of display ads and how they took away from the quality of the Hotwire experience as a "necessary evil."

Knowing her frustration with the ads, her boss challenged Melissa saying, "If you want to get rid of the ads, find a way to replace the revenue." This was the opening that Melissa says changed her career.

Before her story's done, you hear how she found revenue, dramatically improved the experience and Hotwire's brand impression, and ignited her career:

Melissa Matross | Better Revenue through UX: Bringing Down the Banners the Hotwire Way

UX managers are in a rare position where they can see both the business needs and user needs, and can find where they align to produce revenues from positive relationships, not from goading, entrapment, or annoyances.

The missing piece for UX managers is often the open mind to see the bigger business picture and the desire to dig through the data to prove out the case they know to be true. As Melissa says in her talk, "understanding the data changed my career."

Signposts for Week Ending May 18

Patrick Quattlebaum — 2012-05-18T23:11+00:00

Think you know how to use a paper towel? Think again.

It's all about the jaw!

Not all of Britain is preparing for the Olympics. Check out the UK Government's shiny new design principles.

Why line up for a grand opening when you could use Twitter, or maybe taskrabbit.

We have no idea what this means for interaction design, but we're sure someone will write an O'Reilly book on how to design for 'levitated interaction'.

We've be marveling this week at the cityscape made with metal type.

Low on motivation? Do something about it!

Yahoo! + Flickr = FAIL. Here's how it all went bad.

Social brain candy and the envelope of sensation.

And a shameless plug: Feast your eyes and ears on videos from MX 2012!

MX: Managing Experience 2012 Videos Ready for Your Viewing Pleasure

Jamieson Chandler — 2012-05-14T17:30+00:00

Every March for the past six years, our MX: Managing Experience conference has brought together a growing community of managers, directors, and VPs of experience design teams (and their bosses) to discuss the unique challenges they face.

This year's sold out conference featured speakers from GE, eBay, Intel, Flickr, Salesforce.com, Sony, and Forrester Research, representing an excellent mix of examples of the role experience design is playing in the world's largest companies. This year's talks explored a range of topics from the journey to becoming a UX leader, to how design is used in tandem with user experience to drive revenue, and to what challenges and opportunities lie in the years ahead.

As usual, we're sharing the talks and hope you enjoy them.

Dane Howard, eBay | What is a VizKitchen? How ‘preViz’ Is Helping Shape Billion Dollar Businesses

If you prefer to watch the MX 2012 talks on the free Adaptive Path iPad app, they'll be available as soon as the update is approved. In the meantime, you can download the app and watch talks from MX 2011 and UX Week 2011.

Signposts for the Week Ending May 11

Pam Daghlian — 2012-05-11T18:24+00:00

The UK has come up with design principles for their government services. Progress is afoot.

DIY kits to build web-connected things.

Neato: responsive wireframes.

A tool to pump out models digitally.

Information is food.

Welcome to the era of design.

Fun cross-platform interaction, the concept. And the real deal.

Can continuous improvement be hazardous to your organization's health?

Cue sad trombone. A sad lesson in collaborative innovation.

User experience is strategy, not design, says Peterme. What do you think?

UX Intensive Amsterdam 2012: Service Design Day Snapshot

Chris Risdon — 2012-05-03T18:34+00:00

Last Thursday, April 5th, we capped off our four day UX Intensive training with the Service Design day. Jamin Hegemen lead the activity-packed day, introducing principles and methods designed to help organizations orchestrate cohesive cross-channel experiences for products and services. Just a couple of the highlights included developing service blueprints and mapping customer journeys. Much fun was had in the service prototyping portion, as participants used acting as a means of prototyping service experiences.

Jamin lead the group through a full day that included introducing Service Design, understanding the flows of service systems, mapping customer journeys, prototyping services, and creating service blueprints.

Mapping the relationships between actors and touchpoints in a service system.

Students got down and dirty mapping customer journeys.

Human rights solidarity? No, prototyping service experiences through acting.

It wouldn't be a proper UXI day if it weren't capped off with a trip to the pub.

UX Intensive Amsterdam 2012: Interaction Design Day Snapshot

Patrick Quattlebaum — 2012-04-26T21:52+00:00

After two days of fast-paced learning and making at our UX Intensive in Amsterdam, our attendees jumped into the deep end of Interaction Design. Chris Risdon used every minute of the day to pack in valuable concepts and useful tools that we use at Adaptive Path to quickly identify a large number of ideas and then turn the best ones into successful products and services. Here's a few highlights from the day:

Chris takes a question from an attendee.

Attendees learned how to quickly generate design concepts and how to communicate them effectively.

Some tools of the trade. Running, however, was discouraged.

Part of the UX Intensive experience: getting to know the Adaptive Path team and receiving advice on challenges you are facing and where you want to go with your career.

Share outs of work happen each day at UX Intensive to get feedback from Adaptive Path practitioners and fellow attendees.

Exhausted but inspired, we enjoyed a well-earned happy hour to wrap up the day.

UX Intensive Amsterdam 2012: Research Day Snapshot

Jamieson Chandler — 2012-04-25T21:06+00:00

Continuing our coverage of UX Intensive Amsterdam, day two featured Design Research (see Day 1: Design Strategy here) taught by Paula Wellings.

Paula led the group from start to finish on defining research goals and objectives, methods to collect and analyze data, and how to effectively communicate findings to clients and stakeholders in order to move research toward design.

Exercises included field research using methods learned throughout the day. A wall full of stickies shows the findings.

The importance of organizing data into useful clusters.

Making sense of it all.

Participants gather around to share their findings from the day's research activities.

It's not spring in Amsterdam without tulips.

What a Broken Back Taught Me About UX in Healthcare

Toi Valentine — 2012-04-24T18:30+00:00

As the daughter of an Emergency Room doctor and nurse who wanted me to follow their lead into medicine, I had a somewhat unusual childhood. I experienced my first human dissection at age eleven and treated a simulated cerebral aneurysm before I could drive. While I was being molded into the future Dr. Valentine through every “doctor camp” offered in North America, I was taking mail-order art classes and attempting to sell my masterpieces in a local restaurant. I was expected to become a doctor, but my true passion lay in making things.

Medicine seemed like the ‘real’ career path and making things, a hobby on the side. I was all set to head off to the state university for pre-med studies, but as the time grew closer to graduation I realized I wouldn’t survive without a more creative degree, and found Parsons the School for Design. I boldly challenged the familial expectation to become a doctor, moving to New York City to become an interior designer and make things pretty.

During the summers, I would work at a snowboard camp in Oregon, returning to school with lungs full of fresh air and a head full of fresh perspective. One summer ended abruptly and unexpectedly from a snowboarding accident. After landing on my spine on the edge of a snowboard rail, I landed myself in the local hospital.

My experience in that emergency room changed my perspective on design forever. Within the chaotic environment of the ER, it seemed all the players within this system had no idea what their roles were or how to interact with me—the patient. Processes were so broken that I almost ended up in the Operating Room for surgery instead of going to Radiology to get a basic x-ray. I could not understand how professionals who were there to save lives—and who worked in this environment every day—seemed utterly incompetent. That’s when I realized all the mistakes I was witnessing were not of human error, but of design flaw. Poor design of patient I.D. bracelets lead me to the O.R. Bad space design and planning caused treatment delays when staff had to run back and forth for supplies. On top of it all, before getting a valid diagnosis, I was placed on a temporary ventilator leaving me unable to communicate, completely helpless, and forced to put my life in their hands.

Going through that experience is how I ended up as a UX designer. I recognized that design had a greater purpose than making things pretty and that understanding user needs and behaviors was an integral part of design to not only fix broken systems but to create new and better experiences, in a lasting way.

I began my UX career working internally within the Design Strategy team, part of the Strategic Planning & Innovation group, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. MSKCC is a top specialized healthcare organization heavily focused on research, innovation, and leadership within cancer care. The team’s mission was clear and simple: improve the patient's experience, whether through direct services or large-scale initiatives that would have a profound impact on the whole institution. We explored how we could create better experiences through service, space, communication, and interaction design that would improve lives, increase survival rate, or decrease risk for error or patient harm.

While my work at MSKCC was exciting, challenging, and meaningful, I was eager to expand my outlook. I was looking for broader understanding on design, people, and different types of problems, which lead me to Adaptive Path. While I am here, I hope to gain a more extensive perspective on UX and service design in healthcare. I hope that more exposure to other industries will grant me deeper insight into designing better services and experiences for people, in and outside of healthcare.

Here are some UX-in-healthcare things I have been thinking about lately:

► Everyone is jumping on the “mobile and health IT” bandwagon, but it seems there is very little thought (and money) being put into an integrated cross-channel strategy and continuity for patients and care providers.

► Because consumers are becoming more empowered, the traditional delivery models of healthcare are changing. This is going to have major impact on our healthcare system—from cost to patient experience.

► A patient’s frame of mind can change on a daily basis based on how they feel that day, progression of their disease, what treatment they are on, or if they were given good or bad news—making UX an even more challenging feat in healthcare.

► I believe students could be the key to major healthcare change. This is purely from experience, but decision-making stakeholders do not fear “crazy innovative” ideas coming from students and may even feel inspired. Healthcare leaders are sometimes more willing to play in a workshop when it is lead by students.

► I believe UX and Industrial Engineering can be a power couple when married appropriately. In many instances I’ve seen that the streamlining of processes and more efficient thinking about utilization have resulted in better experiences for patients. An overwhelmed patient will immediately recognize discontinuity, repetition, and a broken flow in their experience.

► Adoption is difficult unless the doctors are on board. This does not apply to all UX and design in healthcare scenarios and I don’t know if I believe it 100%, but it was definitely something I was seeing a lot when working internally. Everyone else could believe in a concept, but if the doctor did not, he or she could easily persuade the patient otherwise. Patients put a lot of trust in their doctor being their main source of information in the healthcare space. If doctors are not endorsing the idea, the value may not be apparent. (Maybe big Pharmaceutical companies knew about this from the start?)

I'll be writing more about this topic and would love to hear your thoughts about UX in healthcare. Leave some comments!

UX Intensive Amsterdam 2012: Strategy Day Snapshot

Jamin Hegeman — 2012-04-24T07:10+00:00

On Monday, April 23, we kicked off our first UX Intensive event of 2012 at the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. UXI is four days of participatory workshops focused on different aspects of the work we do: Design Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design, and Service Design. Patrick Quattlebaum got us started by leading the Design Strategy day. Here's a glimpse of the experience.

Patrick shares the stage with a participant, who represents his team's work on business strategy sensing.

Getting your hands dirty, and getting down on your knees, is all part of the UXI experience.

So is being collaborative. These teams worked on prioritization and roadmaps.

Outside the UXI venue, when the day was done, the canals of Amsterdam were there for us.

As well as some well deserved beer!