Adaptive Path Podcast

http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/parallels-in-cooking-and-design

People love their mobile phones and they love the Internet. Based on user affinity for each, accessing Internet content on a mobile device should be a beloved and integral part of people’s lives.

However, despite development and investment by carriers, handset manufacturers, and content providers, mobile web usage has not enjoyed the success that was predicted and hoped for. While many speculate the release of the iPhone will create a tipping point for internet access via a mobile device, the future of how people want to interact with internet content on the mobile phone is still relatively nascent and undefined — and rich with opportunity.

In this session, you will:

* Receive an overview of the current mobile web landscape

* Discover research insights from mobile web field research

* Learn mobile user experience design principles

About Rachel Hinman

Rachel Hinman is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. Her focus is on developing insights about people and using those insights to create valuable user experiences that support business goals.

Rachel’s passion for people, design and business has been the driving force of her 10-year career in user experience design. Before receiving a Masters Degree in Design Planning from at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Rachel spent the first seven years of her career working as an interaction designer and user experience lead.

Prior to joining Adaptive Path, she worked within Yahoo’s mobile group, employing user-centered methods to inform the design and strategy of Yahoo’s mobile products. Her clients and previous employers have included IDEO, Microsoft, Yahoo, General Motors, Clorox, and Kaiser Permanente.

Designing for a desired user experience requires an actionable understanding of the emotions associated with that desired experience. This requires user experience research. While user experience research typically focuses on analyzing “clicks” and usability, the emotional aspects of how it feels to use a website or how people wish an experience felt have great potential to inspire design teams and align entire companies. An understanding of the dreamlike experience and the interactive components that can make the dream a reality is an invaluable resource for creating meaningful websites.

Everyone is always asking, “How can we connect with our user?” Well, connections are usually emotional experiences. If you can answer the question “what is the desired user experience,” then all functions within an organization can begin to work together with common goals and inspiration. Bringing the desired user experience into reality, however, requires that all functions in an organization agree upon the desired experience.

In this presentation you will be introduced to a simple participatory design research approach that will not only uncover the desired user experience (aka the “connection”), it is also supported by quantitative and qualitative data. When all functions within an organization participate in the process, they “buy into” the approach and goals of the user.

In this session, you will:

* Learn a participatory design technique that uncovers the desired user experience

* Understand how this technique can map interactive design components to emotional experiences

* Realize the importance of involving all functions within an organization to participate in the research process

* See how to effectively communicate this research to the organization in order to achieve “buy in”

About Marty Gage

For two decades, Marty has pioneered participatory design techniques that liberate the unspoken desires of user populations. Marty’s body of work crosses industrial and consumer product categories, encompassing subject matter as diverse as weapons systems and baby diapers; using multi-sensory toolkits and state-of-the-art ethnography, he has provided creative fuel for a collection of international design firms, engineering companies and corporate design teams.

Marty currently heads the Design Research Practice group at lextant, a user-experience consultancy. Before lextant, Marty ran his own research firms: Rocket Surgery, which he founded in 2002; and SonicRim, co-founded in 1999. Before that, he spent ten years at Fitch, Inc., which he helped to establish as a leader in design research.

Marty has won numerous design awards and has published widely on the topic of design research, including a chapter on participatory design research methods in the book, Human Factors Testing and Evaluation Methods. He has served on the jury for the Business Week-sponsored Industrial Design Excellence Awards, and is frequently asked to speak at design conferences and schools. Marty holds a BA in Psychology from Hendrix College, and he earned his MS in Human Factors Psychology from Wright State University.

There has been significant interest lately from the business community in the value of design research and design thinking. This is particularly true when it comes to the very early front-end of the design process. Generative Tools help create a shared design language that designers, researchers and other stakeholders can use to visually communicate with each other. The design language is Generative in the sense that with it, people can express an infinite number of ideas (e.g., dreams, fears, insights, opportunities) through a limited set of stimulus items. In this session, you will: * Obtain a map of the design research landscape as it has emerged over the last 20 years. * Discover the newest developments in the research industry, with an emphasis on generative design research, characterized by design-led research from a participatory mindset. * Discover the many ways in which Generative Tools can be used to inform and improve the design process. About Liz Sanders Liz is the President of MakeTools, a design research company that focuses on collective creativity. Liz is a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods in design, and her numerous design awards, patents, publications, presentations, along with her proven track record in the marketplace have established her as a global leader in the field of design research. She sees the emergence of a human-centered design revolution growing out of the current state of technology-driven innovation, and she frequently speaks about and teaches human-centered research and design to clients, colleagues and students around the world. Liz was educated as a social scientist with undergraduate degrees in psychology and anthropology, followed by a PhD in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology. Previous client relationships include 3M, AT&T, Apple, Baxter, Becton Dickinson, Coca Cola, Compaq, IBM, Intel, Iomega, Johnson Controls, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Siemens Medical Systems, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, Thermos, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Toro and Xerox. For an overview of Liz’s ideas about design, research methodology and more, visit MakeTools.

Learn the true power of the sticky note — yes, stickies! — to quickly and effectively organize data, visualize themes, and identify patterns.. We’ll start with an overview of how Adaptive Path uses sticky notes (aka: Post-Its) in user experience projects. Then, we’ll jump into a set of hands-on activities to test your stickies aptitude and gain experience in multiple methods.

You’ll learn methods for rapidly visualizing and organizing data into clusters using sticky notes and how these simple, elegant, and versatile tools can help you untangle problems, set priorities, understand complex work flows, and gather feedback from others.

You’ll leave with a greater appreciation for the sticky note, a killer vocabulary for how to creatively use stickies, and an enhanced ability to sort, track, and organize information. You’ll be amazed what you can do with these simple little tools.

About Kate Rutter

Kate Rutter is a Senior Practitioner for Adaptive Path. During her ten plus years in the Web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.”

With the rise of YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace, there is a clear trend toward social design, or designing for the social lives of users. What isn’t so clear is how to design for different social situations that may not have appeared on the web before.

To help you attack this problem, we’ll look not only at current good and poor examples of social design, but also mine social psychology to get a larger view of how to design for the social lives of users. After all, humans are social animals. Software should be social, too.

In this session, you will:

* Learn the advantages of investing in social features.

* Discover how to expand current user-research strategies and apply social psychology to enhance the social design aspects of your next project.

* Explore new ways to get people to participate in your social-design-enhanced application.

About Josh Porter

Joshua is a leading member of UIE’s research team and has written extensively on such topics as Web 2.0, Ajax, web standards, and on-site search systems. Josh shares many of his design thoughts and commentaries on his personal blog: Bokardo.com.

Josh is responsible for overseeing the development of the User Interface Engineering’s web sites, managing UIE’s top notch team of web developers.

Josh received his Master’s degree in Information Technology and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this consensus.

By greasing the tracks in the early stages of a project, designers can gain the much-needed support of business stakeholders, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence (within their teams and the company at large), and make a more meaningful difference with their work. The key is to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and break through project roadblocks. And it all starts with the right combination of tools and techniques.

In this session, you will:

* Discover how to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and eliminate roadblocks on your next project.

* Explore the ways in which your existing design skill-sets can be expanded to improve communication within your team and throughout you company.

* Learn facilitation techniques to help engage business stakeholders and manage the conflicting priorities and lack of direction that so often derail a project.

About Jess McMullin

Since 1997, Jess has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their customers. Drawing on sources ranging from social sciences and behavioral research to gaming, market analysis and future trends, Jess generates client insights that drive innovation and create better customer experiences.

Jess often speaks at conferences focusing on user experience, design thinking and innovation, topics he also writes about on a regular basis. His ideas have been featured in several user-experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed. and Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience.

In 2003, Jess founded nForm User Experience, a boutique consultancy that counts Comcast, Ancestry.com and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute as clients. Jess also organizes CanUX, the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop in Banff, Alberta, and he is the cofounder of the international Information Architecture Institute.

For Jess’s latest thoughts on business, design and innovation, visit his blog, bplusd (business + design).

Millions of people from around the world come to eBay every day, and the eBay user experience design group applies a range of design and research methodologies to understand and address the perceptions and needs of its widely varied customer base.

Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop will co-lead this session, sharing some of their methods for collaborating with eBay’s customers and exploring the ways in which they use customer insights to inform specific design solutions.

In this session, you will gain a better understanding of how to:

* Engage customers throughout the design process.

* Apply new methods to address a wide range of customer goals and needs.

* Seamlessly blend design and customer research to contribute to your success.

About Jeff Herman

Jeff leads eBay’s UI and Visual Design group, which is responsible for the design of eBay’s sites around the world. He has over 20 years of experience as a designer at Apple, Yahoo! and the MIT Media Lab, and he has been a guest speaker at CHI, BayCHI and various university design programs.

Jeff holds a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has received 10 patents. He is also on the Advisory Board of an early-stage Silicon Valley startup.

About Ann Bishop

Ann manages the Content Strategy practice at eBay, which is responsible for the strategic direction and execution of eBay’s interface content globally. As one of the first user experience architects at eBay, Ann continues to bring a holistic design approach to her work, and she is leading efforts to define content strategy as a design practice rooted in human-centered design methodology, including user research, concept development and execution.

Ann has over 15 years experience designing interactive content for companies such as Microsoft, Travelocity and Yahoo!. She holds a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Interactive behaviors are plastic, flexible things, always subtly shifting in response to the actions of the user. As such, they can be hard to pin down on the printed page. Demos can help express the vision of the design, but the nitty-gritty details must be committed to paper if the design is to survive the development rollercoaster. The challenge is to create a document that remains useful as requirements are added and timelines shift, a document so all-inclusive, it remains relevant even after new problems arise, elevating it to a level truly worthy of an axiom dear to developers’ hearts: “RTFM.”

At Cooper, a pattern language is used to structure documents and describe interactive behaviors. Patterns help designers express the design itself, break down the structure of the document into core elements (e.g., the table of contents, section headings, etc.) and lay out the page. Using Cooper projects as an example — including the company’s team structure, methodology and project scoping — along with an actual case study, this session will explore the many ways and means of documenting the wily interactive behavior.

In this session, you will:

* Get an overview of Cooper methodology, including team structure and project scoping.

* Discover methods of documenting interactive behaviors.

* Explore the use of pattern language as a tool for structuring a document and describing interactive behaviors.

About Doug LeMoine

Doug is the director of design communication at Cooper, an interaction design consultancy based in San Francisco. Since joining Cooper in early 2000, Doug has tackled design problems in neurosurgical planning, financial portfolio analysis, database marketing, telecommunication network construction and computer-assisted surgery.

Before making the move to Cooper, Doug coordinated inner-city literacy and job-skill programs, developed exhibits at a science museum, and taught city kids about where food comes from on a fully operating educational farm. For more information about Doug and his work, visit http://douglemoine.com.

Too often in the field of interaction design, designers only look at other digital products for inspiration. But this narrow stance soon leaves designers devoid of any fresh ideas. If we were to look at the physical world around us, there are sources of inspiration that interaction designers have barely tapped. We should examine mechanical objects and observe their workings. We should look to nature, with its variety of forms and its intricate ecologies. And we should incorporate lessons from other applied arts such as architecture and film into our designs, drawing from their rich histories and products. Let’s turn our eyes to the vast and varied world we inhabit and discover what we can use.

About Dan Saffer

Dan Saffer is a senior interaction designer for Adaptive Path. Dan has developed successful designs for transactional and e-commerce sites, as well as for applications and devices. He’s worked with a wide variety of organizations, from startups to Fortune 100 companies.