Adaptive Path Blog

Some of the most fascinating examples of journalism are where the author literally steps into the shoes of the people he or she is interested in and experiences their struggles first hand. To write Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin to experience life as an African-American in 1959. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to live on minimum wage to expose the difficulties faced by low income workers.

During a recent diabetes-related project, our project team informally conducted a similar experiment: What if we took on the personas of newly-diagnosed diabetics and sought to experience their challenges first hand? We recognized the caveats and limitations of this as a research method. The books above, for example, were colored by the authors’ agendas and have received criticism for being from a “tourist’s” perspective.

It’s this outside perspective that can bring value, however. As I pricked myself with needles and logged every carb at every meal, I quickly found that making these challenges my own got my mind’s wheels spinning a lot more often and a lot harder. They spun every time I rationed out cereal with measuring cups (subtracting fiber carbs in my head). They spun as I fretted over the ambiguous portions at restaurants. They spun as I snuck sandwiches onto the office mailing scale because I had no clue what 56g looks like.

While I could have learned about any of these issues by reading forums or blog threads, experiencing them for myself left me with a deep sense of empathy, a head full of ideas, and a nagging drive to find or build solutions. Immersive research has limitations — insights must be tempered by understanding that “we are not the target audience” and “design won’t save the world,” and there are many shoes you can’t step into (heart surgery anyone?) — but I found it to be an irreplaceable opportunity to change perspective. If you’ve had any experiences with immersive research, I’d love to hear about them!

P.S. I found these sites inspiring. Will someone please develop more resources like these?

HealthSimple Toolkits
Carb flashcards and magnets… I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes!

MySpace bashing seems to be a favorite pastime, especially among “designers” who can’t comprehend the appeal of a star-splattered, blinking, emo-blasting profile page. I personally believe that there’s always something interesting to be learned when we step outside of our usual circles, and so I jumped at the chance to be part of this redesign. Although I am not the target user, as I quickly realized, MySpace had played an important role in my life, so I was eager to understand MySpace, its users, and how to better support them.

Being the interaction designer on this project demanded a great deal of empathy for a user base that is incredibly diverse but often surprisingly different from myself or my Facebook friends. The sheer number of users that would be impacted by the redesign made this project a massive undertaking. I look forward to sharing more about the challenges and design decisions that drove this redesign in the near future.

For now, I’m excited that this work is becoming reality, much thanks to my colleague Ryan’s close collaboration with the MySpace team and Sequence, our visual design partner, over the past 6 months. Congrats to all!

Adaptive Path News
MySpace Press Release

For a recent project, we analyzed strategies used by sites that thrive on user engagement to encourage people to sign up and get established. We presented our findings, including design and usage guidelines, in this visually-rich report. I’m excited to be able to share it with you, for reference and inspiration!

You can enjoy the preview below (click it for larger version) and download the full report here (FREE to Newsletter subscribers).

At our recent MX Conference, we set out to capture emerging insights from the speakers using our graphic recording skills. With 4-5 colored markers fanning out from between our fingers at any given moment (picture a wolverine claw), we illuminated the speakers’ talks with memorable visuals and colorful typography. (Pictures coming soon.) On the last day of the conference, as I was running around with a pack of sticky notes trying to identify common themes across talks, it occurred to me: What if the conference participants were involved in this process?

At every conference I’ve attended, I’ve heard people express that they get as much out of interacting with other attendees as from the speakers. Everyone has a story to tell, but there’s only so much people can articulate in response to the FAQ, “What did you think of the talk?” It’s made me think: As design researchers, we often use hands-on, participatory techniques to draw latent insights out of our participants. Why don’t we use these same strategies to draw out and capture conference participants’ ideas?

What are some activities that could encourage deeper conversations and equip people to document their thoughts? What could conferences do to give people something to “triangulate” around — besides the wonderful food? Here are a few I’ve seen (not only at conferences, but at social events, college dorm walls, our office bathroom, etc.):

Graffiti Wall: Put up a giant piece of paper with some initial structure and encourage collaborative graphic recording — where participants can add their own notes, sketches and insights to a giant mural. Stickers and collaging images and words could be provided as well.

Open Whiteboards: Write questions on giant sticky notes (e.g., “What is service design?”) and put them in the halls where people can write on it during breaks. It could give people something to talk about while providing a forum for expression.

Five Minute Madness: We do this in our staff meetings: Someone makes an audacious statement that they may or may not agree with (e.g., “Experience Designer is a meaningless job title.”), and we discuss it for five minutes. Something like this could also be done on giant pieces of paper.

Projected Messages: Have a computer hooked up to a projector where people can type (or Twitter) ideas and thoughts and see them projected. Providing a question or conversation prompt, as described in Open Whiteboards and Five Minute Madness, might encourage participation.

Birds of a Feather: Place a “topic card” on each of the dining tables, such as “design research” or “managing internal experience teams” and encourage people to find a table with a topic that interests them.

Thinking about conferences you’ve attended (or planned), have you seen (or thought of) any other interesting strategies for helping people get their thoughts out there?

Update: UX Evangelist David Crow explores these ideas further on his blog.

“Every time he fired up his Netscape Web browser since mid-February, John Uribe was greeted with a message urging him to switch to one of Netscape’s two successors, Firefox or Flock. Mr. Uribe, a 56-year-old real estate agent in Waldorf, Md., ignored every message. ‘It’s kind of irrational,’ Mr. Uribe said as that deadline approached. ‘It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some reason to totally abandon it, I won’t.’” -NYTimes, “Tech’s Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True”

I appreciated this article, because I strongly believe there is always something important to be learned from “how the other half lives.” At the same time, I can’t help but feel a mild sense of annoyance when it comes to late adopters. Late adopters can be a thorn in the flesh for designers and developers. It sucks building backwards-compatibility into everything, or being unable to add, change or discontinue features because a small-but-vocal angry mob might revolt (see Facebook News Feed, the end of Tagworld).

So what are we to do with the people who live by the principle of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Here’s a breakdown of possible strategies for handling late adopters…

• Ignore them (assuming they’re not hurting you in any way, it’s their loss, not yours).
• Scare them (security fears are what finally compelled the man in the NYTimes article to give up Netscape).
• Shun them (eventually their Word docs will become incompatible with everyone else’s; then they’ll have to upgrade).
• Tantalize them (create desire/need by showing them what they’re missing or getting their friends to show them up).
• Accommodate them (with “classic” versions, “low-tech” versions, or lowest-common-denominator design).
• Serve them (simply avoid making changes at all, because it would displease “the users”).
• Learn from them (their fear of the unknown and desire for simplicity are valid — how can we learn from this and, in doing so, improve the experiences of all?).

That’s all for now. Eudora’s “new mail” jingle is calling.

In my mind, it seemed perfect: Technologists and transit-enthusiasts coming together to rethink the transit experience. A chance to bring the experience design gospel to an industry in need. Brimming with missionary zeal, my transportation planner husband and I headed off to the Bay Area TransitCamp.

I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock. My idealism was greeted by a ragtag bunch consisting of khaki-clad engineers, frumpy transit riders and suit-wearing transit officials. The engineers preached the possibilities of open-source data. White-haired transit riders screeched frustrations about their particular pet issues. And the transit officials defended cuts to bathroom-cleaning with the hard, cold facts of their bureaucratic reality.

Welcome to TransitCamp.

Could this possibly be the crowd that would transform transit? It felt like anarchy. “No complaints without solutions” was the only rule, and organizer Tara Hunt had to reiterate it again and again. Yet as idealism and realism collided, something impressive happened. We learned from one another. iPhone app developers learned that 40% of riders are below the poverty line. Cost-conscious officials learned that dozens of techies are eager to develop solutions — for free.

I realized that making a difference requires a humble and listening posture. Transit is an interdisciplinary problem that requires interdisciplinary understanding. While it produced interesting ideas, TransitCamp’s greatest triumph was fostering an atmosphere of learning and collaboration between unlikely bedfellows.

“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

Ever since my Participatory Design class with Liz Sanders (http://www.maketools.com/), I’ve been dreaming of an online collaging application. Whenever I found myself scouring Flickr for hundreds of mood board or collage images or designing a diary study for remote users, the thought popped into my mind again: Why isn’t there an online collaging tool?

The one tool that seemed to have potential was in beta forever, but when I checked in the other day, I found that Scrapblog is up and working beautifully! After playing with it briefly, I was impressed. I’d found the tool I’d been looking for!

The Flex-powered interface is intuitive and fluidly responsive…

The vast collection of backgrounds and stickers express a broad diversity of moods and styles and have an Apple-caliber elegance…

You can easily import content from Flickr (and other external sites)…

And the potential for using it with participatory design research methods seems great…

Collage Activities and Mood Boards

Imagine: Instead of printing out dozens of pages of images, which still limits your research participant to whatever you’ve selected, you can open up the entire Flickr universe to the participant to create their collage. Or, if you want the participant to choose from pre-selected images, you can create a Flickr gallery and ask the participant to draw from those.

Remote Participatory Design

The interface is pretty intuitive, so with little explaining, you can now conduct collage exercises with remote research participants. While it’s unfortunately not a collaborative interface (where multiple people can work on the same collage simultaneously and see updates dynamically), it’s easier than constructing and mailing participant a collage kit! (I’d love to see some collaborative functionality built in though.)

Diary Studies

Multiple page “scrapblogs” (which are actually what the site is designed to produce) can easily be created and published both publicly and privately. I can see scrapblogs being used for or supplementing diary studies, allowing participants to tell their experience stories in a fun and creativity-inducing way.

Optimistic about this tool’s possibilities, I did a little mock study with my 15-year-old sister. I sent her a link to Scrapblog and no more instruction than, “Create a collage about MySpace and a collage about Facebook.”

In closing, I’ll share the clever creation she sent back:

View on Scrapblog

What impressed me the most about Emergence 2007 — Carnegie Mellon School of Design’s conference on service design — was the diversity of disciplines and industries that were represented among the speakers and the attendees. Social scientists, customer service managers, community planners and designers of every kind shared experiences ranging from humanizing customer service and call centers to turning a transportation payment system into a valuable, cross-platform service.

Now it’s not these disciplines or their problem-solving approaches that are new or emergent. In fact, the familiarity of methods demonstrated in many case studies seemed to provoke a discipline-defending reaction among attendees of, “But haven’t we [product designers/architects/customer service teams] already been doing this? How is this new?” Compounding this defensiveness was the ever-felt pressure to give service design a clear definition and boundaries, as if we need to separate it from “other” disciplines like product or experience design.

But what is emerging is not so much a new discipline, as it is a cross-disciplinary awareness that:

1. To make a significant impact, we must look at entire ecosystems vs. isolated problems.
2. The complexity of doing so requires not necessarily more “service designers” but rather a “service mindset” that unites practitioners across disciplines.

As participants in Oliver King’s audience-engaging panel described, “The world’s problems stretch across disciplines. Service design is about facilitating multi-disciplinary communication.” To do so, we must all learn to relinquish control, as Chris Downs from live|work emphasized. The flow of designs-as-concepts has increased, spurred by the ubiquity of creative tools, and the notion of authorship has become more nebulous as designers have been empowered and linked by the collaborative web, as Core77’s Allan Chochinov cited among other “disruptive” trends.

By the end of the conference, the push to define “service design” seemed increasingly meaningless. As CMU’s Richard Buchanan concluded in his powerful closing keynote, “Did anyone find a definition of service design? I didn’t find one, and I am not bothered by that. Defining disciplines lacks value. Instead, we should ask ourselves, ‘What is the RESULT of service design? What industries does it touch? What is its deeper purpose?”

Buchanan’s conclusion was that the ultimate purpose of service design is to give people the INFORMATION and TOOLS needed to ACT — to be free to live as one would choose. Collectively (as we played hot potato with the microphone during Oliver King’s facilitated discussion), we concluded that service design is about designing for the greater good — though what that means may be sometimes be debatable.

Perhaps the meaning of service design has less to do with “customer service” or “public services” than simply: Serving. Buchanan quoted George Nelson saying something to the effect of, “Design: Don’t get too pretentious. All we do is serve. We’re not that important.” Perhaps what service design really means is giving up our rights — to flashy job titles, authorship, even to “changing the world” — so that we can come together to improve people’s lives… one service at a time.

I’ll have to admit that I struggled with some skepticism of the Charmr project when it first began.

How could we take a complex subject that others have studied and researched for years and make a meaningful contribution to the field in a matter of weeks? With all of the engineering problems that remain unsolved, what could we, as user experience researchers and designers, bring to the table?

As I worked on the project, however, I realized what we could introduce by taking an “engineering problem” and approaching it from a user experience perspective: An experience-centered vision of the future and a more human approach to medical device design.

A Vision of the Future

The result of this project was not a polished product, but a vision — a vision of what the diabetic experience could look like in a few years if considered from a user-centered perspective.

People generally agree about what technology is desirable, but we wanted to go a step further and paint a more concrete picture of what it might look when these technologies are brought together to create a coherent experience. Beginning with the assumption that technologies under development will become reality in the next 2-3 years, we asked, what could the end result look like?

The idea was to give diabetic device companies a more concrete goal to aim for and to promote a user-centered approach for getting there.

A Human Approach to Medical Device Design

The technologies used in the Charmr are not new ideas: The Omnipod (with its remote controlled pump and insulin reservoir that’s kept close to the body) and the Minimed Paradigm Real-Time (continuous glucose monitor that communicates with the pump) have already been introduced; other technologies are under development.

Our focus was not on the technology itself, but on humanizing it. As Amy’s original call to action read:

“We’re people first and patients second…. If insulin pumps or continuous monitors had the form of an iPod Nano, people wouldn’t have to wonder why we wear our “pagers” to our own weddings… In short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era; they continue to design these products in an engineering-driven, physician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept that medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to feel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in addition to keeping us alive.”

These devices are not just medical necessities… they’re part of millions of people’s lifestyles. Understanding the complete experience surrounding these devices — the emotional struggles, the everyday hassles, the social scenarios — is critical to creating a device that looks and feels like it was designed with people in mind.

Our primary hope is that device companies will see the enthusiasm that a vision created from this perspective can generate and might embrace a more human-centered approach in their work. And we hope to inspire others to answer Amy’s call to take action now.