Adaptive Path Blog

Although UX Week is coming up, it doesn’t mean things are all quiet for our other events. We have a slew of new speaker videos from this spring’s MX Conference up for you this week. These aren’t just excerpts, these are their full presentations.

Ryan Armbruster, Chief Experience Officer for OnCURE Medical Corp.: How Emotion Transforms Experience

By the way, Ryan is hiring service designers.

Björn Hartmann, Stanford University & Microsoft Research: New Interactions: Enlightened Trial and Error

Stephen Anderson, VP of Design, Viewzi: Leading the Rebellion: Turning Ideas into Reality

At the end of the conference, Brandon challenged everyone to take one idea that they had heard and to try it out in practice. Inspired partially by Brian Cronin’s talk about Earth Day, the Designer’s Accord and going green, Thomas Obrey and our friends at PixelMEDIA in Portsmouth, NH are taking steps, both internally and with clients, to make a difference.

You can already register for next year’s MX Conference, March 1-3, 2009. It will be held in San Francisco. Use the code BLOG and get 10% off.

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We’re excited to announce Charmr as a finalist in the IDEA awards! Charmr is a design concept we created that shows the vision for a combined glucose pump and monitor for Type 1 Diabetics. This started in response to a challenge. Amy Tenderich, a well-known diabetes advocate, wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs on her blog. In her post she asked Jobs to apply his design expertise to “the little devices that keep us alive, the people with chronic conditions.” As part of our R&D work, we took on the challenge and created a revolutionary diabetes management system concept that has triggered an overwhelming response from the diabetes, medical device, design and now the design award communities!

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Recently a thread went around the Adaptive Path email lists about consultant-speak and how to battle the incessant plague of bad jargon and meaningless phrases. This was yet another reminder that clear, human communications has become the exception, not the norm, of everyday business life.

This makes me both angry and sad. In an attempt to be clear and concise, we instead fall into the trap of formal, jargony words, and empty, distant language. People that talk this way don’t sound human, they sound canned. Canned conversation lacks all the things that make communication fun: engaging language, fluid changes in topic, personal experience, and human messiness.

It’s a seductive trap, and I know I’ve fallen into it more than once. In my quest to battle the bulge and reclaim brevity, I’ve found 4 tools that help trim the fluff.

Take it to the Max(ims)

Grice’s Maxims, that is. Grice’s Maxims are the work of philosopher Paul Grice. His work focused on the relationship between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning. He studied how we say what we mean, and how much people get what we mean by what we say. He proposed 4 maxims that are the foundations of clear communications. Although these were created to govern both written and spoken communications, they come in incredibly handy when writing for business.

It doesn’t matter to whom you are writing, about what you are writing, nor to what end. Grice’s maxims will keep you on track.

• Maxim of Quality : Truth
  * Do not say what you believe to be false.
  * Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Maxim of Quantity : Information
  * Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
  * Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• Maxim of Relation : Relevance
  * Be relevant.
• Maxim of Manner : Clarity
  * Avoid obscurity of expression.
  * Avoid ambiguity.
  * Be brief.
  * Be orderly.

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.

A great way to gut-check your writing is to visualize it. Seeing quantity can improve quality…do the words you’re using roll up into the point you’re trying to make?

Wordle is the fastest, most fun way I’ve found to literally see the message and identify themes and trends in your piece. Using simple word counts, Wordle clouds make it easy to know what words you’re using most so that you can adapt your writing to bring home the concepts that matter most.

For example, here’s what this post looks like in Wordle:

Become a Meaning Matador by fighting the bull

I recently finished reading A Bullfighter’s Guide : Why business people speak like idiots and it was like a breath of fresh air. The authors outline four traps that are at the root of crappy, slangish writing:

• the Obscurity trap
• the Anonymity trap
• the Hard-sell
• the Tedium trap

Because they consider the bullfighting work to be part of a movement, not simply a book, they have multiple ways to help folks learn and keep good habits.

1. 1. The book, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (A Bullfighter’s Guide). You can get it from Amazon.
2. Bullfighter software, a Microsoft Word plug-in that catches you in the act of writing meaningless blather. Caveat: It only works on the Windows platform, not the Mac or Linux or anything else. (Go ahead…make the jokes. Feel better? Great.)
3. My favorite is The Mystery Matador service on their website, where you can drop in a chunk of writing (no less than 500 characters) and get an instant assessment of the readability and the bullshit quotient. For example, running the Mystery Matador on this post yields this summary:

Explore the Flesch-pots of Readability

Is there a way to measure good writing? Overall, writing is subjective, but readability…well, Mr. Flesch worked pretty hard to make it measurable. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability test vetts for ease of reading for contemporary academic English. How does it work? Like this.

Hmmmm. Not helpful? Thanks to the nice folks over at Bullfighter, you can get a quick take of the test on your writing sample. If you use the Mystery Matador, they toss in the Flesch test for free.

These four tools have made me take a good hard look at my writing, tone it up, tighten the points and focus on writing to communicate…not to impress.

Do you have other tips and tricks? Share them in the comments section!

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Light Sensor Triggers LEDs

Originally uploaded by odannyboy

While working my way through the Making Things Talk book, I hit a wall when it started to get into electronics. I had to stop and read Physical Computing and go through some basic Arduino tutorials just so I could understand what in the heck was going on. I had no idea what a basic circuit was, or how a switch worked, and especially not how to read an electronics schematic. A bunch of reading and some experimenting later, I have a much better handle on that stuff. Enough to be dangerous, probably, but at least enough to continue.

The next thing I wanted to do was hook up a sensor to the Arduino board and just see what it did. I had a light sensor laying around, so I plugged that in and found a simple piece of code that basically just reads and reports the data coming in from the sensor. I put that into the Arduino programming environment and ran it.

What I got back was a simple, rapid string of numbers ranging from 520 (when the sensor was covered by my hand and thus in the dark) to 600 (when the sensor was in the full light). What these numbers mean, I have no idea, nor does it really matter very much, I suppose. At least not for playing around.

I wanted to then have the sensor do something other than tell me the data, so I added a little bit of code (from an earlier program I’d done based on a tutorial), that made two LED lights light up based on the sensor reading. Red for dim light, blue for bright light. Any number below 530 made the red LED turn on, anything about 560 makes the blue light turn on. And, voila, I had a sensor that controlled some lights. Definitely not brain surgery, but fun, and it is, I think, as simple as it is, a great step towards a bigger world for me.

Next up: a more complicated response to sensor data…

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In many organizations, the people responsible for the user experience strive to show the value of their work. We may instinctively know the value of our work, but it’s so much more powerful when we can explain it terms that matter to others in our organizations.

This is why I’m really happy to be presenting Showing the Value of UX as a virtual seminar on August 6th. The seminar is geared towards people who are entering a point in their careers where they need to understand and communicate about both sides of the equation: UX and business value.

The seminar starts with a deep exploration on the connections between UX and business value, then progresses to a series of principles and tools that you can use to connect User Experience to real business impact.

‘Showing the Value of UX’ is similar to material that I’ve presented and honed at prior conferences on design, business, and management, and so it’s exciting to be able to share these approaches and methods with you directly at your place of work. This will be the second running of the seminar, based on the positive feedback we received from the first session, including comments like this from Sam Felder of the University of Southern California:

“Your presentation had our team discussing your ideas through lunch and gems that we’re going to try to use with clients.”

I look forward to taking this material online, and talking with many of you during the extended Q&A sessions both during and after the presentation. Use the promotional code BLOG and get a 10% discount! Here’s where you can register »

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The folks at Nokia Design have put together an interesting project: What can you buy for five dollars?

“The global spread of low cost personal communication will have a profound impact on the world around us. It will change our perception of distance and time and affect our notions of community, authority and trust. In some communities lower costs will introduce services such as personal banking for the very first time, whilst in other communities the phone will become an object that is bought and disposed of on a whim. These changes challenge ideas for the future as to what and how we manufacture, and place a greater emphasis on sustainability.

Fivedollarcomparison.org is a small step to broaden the discussion and explore how the impact might vary across cultures and contexts by asking a simple question:
What can you buy for five dollars?”

Here’s how you can participate.

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This weekend I attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. There was lots of talk about traffic to blogs, and what you can do to increase readership, and generally promote your blog. Most of advice made sense, but there was one thing mentioned that got my blood boiling.

I was in a session on DIY Content Syndication and Promotion, and one of the audience members asked how you could use tags to help with promotion. One of the speakers, I don’t remember which one, advised that the best way to use tags is think of the most general topic you post is about and tag with that. Also, if you are commenting on someone else’s post or video, you should copy all of their tags and add a few of your own.

Um… excuse me? Sure, that’s best practice if you want to add tag spam, water down results and piss off people when they come to your post only to find that you are tangentially related to the topic they are interested in. Remember, it was this broad spectrum, shotgun approach to tagging that taught search engines they couldn’t rely on the keywords metadata field..

The rules for tagging are very simple:

1. Tag only significant mentions.
2. Tag at the level the item is about.
3. Use one tag per concept.

I like to use this rule of thumb to check to see if the tags I’ve chosen are accurate: If I did a search for the tag I’m considering, would I be happy getting this post/image/content item? If the answer is no, I drop that tag.

Following these rules to tagging insure that your tags are appropriate for your post/image/content item. Targeted tags help ensure that recall as well as precision are high. You want the folks who are interested in your specific topic to find your thing. If you are talking about the giant green dinosaur with glowing red eyes in South Dakota, you don’t want to tag your post with general terms like “United States” or “statues.” Better choices would be “Wall South Dakota,” “dinosaur statue,” “glowing red eyes,” and “kitschy roadside attractions.”

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Today marks day 30 of my 90 Mobiles in 90 Days project. I’m one-third done, and I’ve spent today reflecting on what I’ve learned so far.

Post-Project Blues = loss of a creative outlet
The purpose of 90 Mobiles in 90 Days was to help exorcise some bad vu from a project and to better understand why I got so blue after projects end. One of the learnings over the last 30 days has been this: the post-projects blues isn’t about mourning the end of a project — it’s caused by the loss of a creative outlet.

The benefit of my job is that it provides me with a creative outlet, but there is a natural ebb and flow to project work that is inherently inconsistent. It’s easy for me to get stuck in the “project hole”. I’ve realized that I need additional and consistent creative outlets in my life to remain happy and manage the natural flux of being a consultant.

The law of averages
This project reminded me of a college painting assignment. The instructor assigned the class the task of painting 30 paintings in a week. Seven days and a demoralizing critique later, she told us the point of the exercise was not to produce brilliant work, but to give us a template for a process. She believed in the law of averages — the more you paint, the better chance you will have at creating something great. She encouraged us to be prolific and success would follow.

Some of the ideas from the last 30 days are good, some of the ideas stink — but the point isn’t as much about the quality of the ideas, but to just put something down — make something, do something. Ideas in my head are just that… in my head - stuck, unexplored, undocumented, unborn. Writing ideas down and giving them form gives them somewhere to go - it gives them a sense of life and vibrancy; of movement and velocity.

Renewed engagement with the world
I’ve realized that ideas and inspiration can come from anywhere - in fact, most ideas come from the world around me. Since I’ve been documenting an idea a day, I’ve felt a lot more engaged with the world because I rely on it as a source of inspiration. This process has opened me up to people and conversation. I’ve become more engaged with my neighborhood, the city, with nature. This project has made me more observant and patient.

Most importantly, I feel deep sense of gratitude to friends, family and folks out there who have commented, emailed me, and referenced my work. Thank you.

Who knows what the next 60 days will bring….

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We’re honored that O’Reilly has selected Subject to Change as one of their first titles available in a DRM-free downloadable e-book bundle. As part of this, we are available in the Kindle Store (good thing our book has no tables of monospaced fonts!).

We haven’t written much about Kindle here (After Kindle launched, I wrote about it and e-books in general on my personal site), but in conversations internally, we’re both intrigued and skeptical. We all pretty much wish it had a better industrial design, but we also laud how Amazon figured out the service aspect of it so well — getting content on that thing magically out of the air just works (heck! it’s one of the themes of our book).

Anyway, if you’re a Kindle user, I’d be interested to know about your experience reading Subject to Change on it…

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So, I keep posting that UX Week 2008 programming is finished, but we keep adding to the program. The program is now for real and truly complete.

We’ve added Jury Hahn, from MegaPhone, who will talk using mobile phones as game controllers in the real world, and explore the intersection of game design, interaction design, and environments. Jury was recently featured in Wired magazine.

We’ve also gotten confirmation on the presentations we’ll get when we visit the Exploratorium on Day 3. The first, Instrumenting Chaos - Understanding the Visitor Experience in a Free-Choice Environment, explains the research projects, methods, and technologies by which the Exploratorium assesses visitor’s behavior, and what is learned. The second, Designing Over Time - Evolving Exhibits At The Exploratorium, reveals the museum’s famous exhibit design process, one of iteration and evolution on the museum floor.

So. That’s it. Really. At least, until we get another good idea and figure out how to squeeze it in.

You can register for any combination of days, and use the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!

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