Adaptive Path Blog

Earlier today, Nokia announced an agreement to acquire Plazes, the Berlin-based service for connecting people to the places where they spend their time. We’re very excited for our friends on the Plazes team, and offer them our heartfelt congratulations.

Last year, Plazes partnered with Adaptive Path to help simplify their product experience, and to build a utility for creating real connections between people and places in the real world. Ryan Freitas and Rachel Brune spent many long days in Germany working with the Plazes team to refine how people interacted with the platform across different channels, while Bryan Mason engineered the business partnership between Adaptive Path and Plazes. Together we evolved the product to make it exceedingly useful, consistent, and something that fit in nicely with behaviors in which Plazes users were already engaged.

Additionally, Adaptive Path is delighted that for the the second time in the last several weeks, one of our New Ventures investments is announcing an acquisition. Last time it was Tony Conrad and his team at Sphere going to AOL. This time, it’s our friends at Plazes.

Again, congrats to the Plazes team and to Nokia!

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Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. I had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about his role at the Times and the challenges facing design managers.

Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Khoi, hello and welcome. Let’s start with your role at the New York Times.

Khoi Vinh [KV]: My title is Design Director and I run the design group for NYTimes.com. A lot of people make the very understandable mistake of assuming that we are responsible for all of the interactive graphics that you see on the site — Flash graphics, interactive charts, and so forth. That’s actually not the case. What we’re responsible for is a bit higher level, and a little bit more invisible. We’re actually designing the platform of NYTimes.com much like a design studio or a consultant would. I have to design a site for editors to work with and for multimedia generalists to produce those graphics. We consult with the graphics folks, to help them with best practices in terms of how to make their graphics in keeping with the overall interaction models for NYTimes.com. We don’t get into the business of being generalists. That’s what they do and they do it better than anybody else. So we try and get out of their way as much as possible.

JJG: Is this a role that existed there before you started there?

KV: Yes, it did. It’s a fairly unique set of requirements. It’s a bit of a creative director role, it’s a bit information architect or usability authority role, it’s a bit of technical generalist. It requires some savvy about how journalism works and how the Times treats news. And it requires a lot of straddling the divide between journalism and business at the New York Times; trying to reconcile that stuff as the company heads towards a digital future.

JJG: This role is pretty unusual in most organizations. Most organizations have a design team on the ground on a day-to-day basis working alongside someone responsible for the content. The idea of someone in a strategic role interfacing between both of those groups is a relatively new idea. How did The New York Times recognize that that they needed someone in that position between those groups?

KV: The Times, throughout its history, has tried to do things in the best possible way with best practices. There is a long tradition of appreciation for really good design here in all its forms. Plus, the people who run the site — the assistant managing editors responsible for the editorial and integrity of the site — play a huge part in directing the evolution of the site. They are all something unique in my experience: They’re actual bona fide users of the Internet, something you don’t find at a lot of organizations. A lot of times responsibility for the online business falls to somebody with a lot of seniority but not necessarily a lot of experience. It’s something that passes into their portfolio as a reward for having brought in $X million of sales. These people are genuine, enthusiastic, passionate users of the Internet and they understood early on that they needed to bring aboard somebody who is actually a web designer and not just a graphic designer transitioning from print; somebody who understands this new medium.

Read the full interview. Sign up for MX East with promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price.

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Congratulations to our friends (and neighbors!) at Satisfaction on the debut of their site. We’re very pleased to be one of the initial investors in this latest venture from Adaptive Path co-founder Lane Becker. Satisfaction promises to improve customer service for just about any product or service by connecting customers with each other to answer questions, fix problems, or just get their voices heard. We’re not the only ones excited by Satisfaction’s vision: their $1.3 million initial round of funding includes investors such as First Round Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and they’ve already gotten some press attention from the likes of BusinessWeek and TechCrunch.

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As experience design consultants, we love having the opportunity to tackle lots of different kinds of problems. But we don’t always get to try out all the problems that interest us the most — after all, we can only solve those problems somebody has seen fit to devote some money to solving, and then shown the good judgment to hire us to take them on. So we decided to go hunting for problems nobody’s asked us to solve yet.

Then blogger Amy Tenderich posted her “Open Letter to Steve Jobs” in April, pleading with the Apple CEO to apply some of that company’s design expertise to improving the lives of the 20 million American diabetics who rely on technology to manage their condition every day. Amy’s blog post got a lot of attention, even making its way to TechCrunch. Amy asked for better products for diabetics, but we recognized that those products had to add up to an experience that would satisfy their emotional and psychological needs. So we set out to develop an experience design concept that addressed user behavior and psychology as well as current technological trends to project how insulin pumps and glucose meters might work five years from now.

We spent time with diabetics, who showed us their routines and talked about how hard it can be to stay motivated to keep themselves healthy. They shared their experiences with the technology products that they literally depend on for their lives. With their insights, we were able to formulate a set of design goals we’d have to meet in order to transform the experience of managing diabetes. We came up with dozens and dozens of possible design concepts, sketching out different approaches to achieving those goals. Out of those concepts, a few key elements started to fall into place. We looked at the solutions out on the market and talked to diabetes educators about what works for people and what doesn’t.

We built on those concepts by fleshing out the interaction design of the product, mapping out how the users would monitor their condition and give themselves insulin. At this point, it became clear that a bunch of interface mockups wouldn’t be enough to convey our ideas. That’s when we started producing this video.

The video doesn’t stand alone. We’ve provided all the background on the thinking behind the Charmr concept, including our research findings, as part of our case study. It’s been an exciting project that has pushed us in unexpected ways — in other words, just the kind of project we had hoped for. We look forward to doing more of them!

High quality video of Charmr (18 MB)

Movie Credits:

Sushi: http://www.flickr.com/photos/purpleslog/233433951/
Doctor’s Office: http://flickr.com/photos/sbconsci/361586238/
College: http://flickr.com/photos/genvessel/110114471/
Background of Charmr: http://flickr.com/photos/post/19350897/

Voiceover by: Laura Kirkwood-Datta
Music: Andrew Crow

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Lou Carbone has been one of the business world’s foremost advocates for the value of managing experiences. He was coauthor of the seminal 1994 article that introduced the marketing world to the idea of customer experience management. Through his consulting firm, Experience Engineering, he advises companies on how to deliver value to customers through experience.

His book on customer experience management is entitled Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again. Lou Carbone will be delivering the keynote address on day one of MX East, Adaptive Path’s conference on management experience through creative leadership, being held October 21-23, 2007 in Philadelphia.

Jesse James Garrett: How did you get into this area of customer experience management?

Lou Carbone: It’s really very fascinating. I began to observe companies. I’d come out of an advertising background originally, and observing companies as they managed value and the experiences that they created, and I was amazed at the lack of rigor, discipline and methodologies around the lining of clues in the experiences that people have, and ended up believing that managers in companies basically left experiences very, very haphazard and that they weren’t very well managed or purposefully designed and executed. I became fascinated by the opportunity to really manage the clues and align the clues in an experience that an individual has.

JJG: Explain what you mean by clues. This is a core concept in your book, I know.

LC: Yes, it is. In all of the experiences that we have, we are doing what we refer to as “clue math.” Unconsciously and consciously, we are processing all of those things that we perceive in physical experiences. Those include humanics, which are the human elements in an experience that are emitted by humans in the experience, and then there are clues that we refer to as “mechanics,” which are all of those physical signals that we take in through our senses.

The other area is what we refer to as “functional” clues. Those are the goods or services that actually function and do what they are supposed to do. And so in any experience, we are simultaneously — consciously and unconsciously — processing all of these clues, which creates a feeling that we have that emotional connection, which is built on how the experience makes us feel. Therefore, all of those clues become very powerful when they’re aligned and working toward creating this emotional connection with customers.

(more…)

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The recent relaunch of CNN.com has a lot of people talking — and wondering just what went into such an ambitious step forward for an established brand like CNN.

We’re excited to announce that Lori Adams and Dermot Waters of CNN.com will be joining us at User Experience Week 2007 to present the inside story of CNN.com’s relaunch. Join us in Washington, DC August 13-16 to find out firsthand how CNN put it all together.

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When Google acquired Measure Map from Adaptive Path last year, we were sad to see our team go, but we were excited about what they might be able to do with Google’s ever-growing portfolio of interesting products.

It took some time, but it was worth the wait: Our team’s thorough rethinking of Google Analytics has finally launched — check out the demo of their new design. Congratulations to the Measure Map team, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do to top this one!

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The latest addition to our jobs page is an open position for a marketing manager:

Adaptive Path is looking for a Marketing Manager who can help us build on our thought leadership position and continue to develop our brand. A successful Marketing Manager will thrive in a highly decentralized, dynamic and collaborative creative environment.

As Marketing Manager, you’ll need to think strategically, work tactically, and keep an eye on both marketing and public relations. You will have to be able to balance marketing for our consulting and events lines of business, and to work independently yet collaboratively. Industry experience a plus but not required.

As part of your role you will:

• Articulate and guide a focused marketing and PR strategy
• Develop and manage a budget for marketing initiatives
• Find appropriate writing and speaking venues for our staff
• Produce case studies of our consulting projects
• Manage development of online and offline promotional materials, including our website and email newsletter
• Organize and host industry social events

Please email marketingmanager AT adaptivepath DOT com if you are interested in this position.

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One of the most satisfying things about being at AP is having the opportunity to work with lots of smart people on a wide variety of challenging projects. But as the company has grown, we’ve hit some inevitable limits: any one of our designers or strategists might work on, at most, half a dozen projects in a year, and each of those project teams is likely to comprise only three or four people. As a result, some of us go a long time as colleagues without ever actually working together.

We’re fighting this through a practice we call open design sessions. We have a couple of standing meeting times during the week that are reserved for project teams to open up their process to the rest of the company. Anyone can attend and participate, and by having the sessions at regular times we allow people to easily plan this participation into the rest of their work schedule.

These sessions can go many different ways. Sometimes teams gather up the toughest design problems they’ve got and ask for help cracking them. Other sessions simply draw the group into whatever problem the team is facing at the moment. Sometimes we’re trying to poke holes in research analysis, other times we’re using multiple whiteboards to explore design possibilities.

We often do collaborative work sessions with our clients in the course of our regular project work. When we’ve combined these with open design sessions — bringing together the project team, the client, and the rest of Adaptive Path to collaborate on solving a problem — we’ve seen enormous benefits to everyone involved.

For project teams, open design sessions give them the opportunity to solicit a fresh perspective on their challenges, and maybe break some of the assumptions they have about their constraints. For others, the insights from these sessions can be carried back to their own projects, suggesting either new design approaches or new methods for reaching solutions. For everyone at AP, they enable us to learn from each other, as well as allowing us to talk from first-hand experience about the work we’re doing, rather than relating second-hand information overheard around the office. And for our clients, it’s a chance to benefit from the talents of our whole company, not just the few we’re able to dedicate to a project team.

Are you opening up your design process? Share your experiences in the comments.

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We’d like to congratulate our friends on the Super Deluxe team on hitting one million users in just their first month of operation. We’re proud to have helped create such a successful new product!

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