Adaptive Path Podcast

In recent years, museums around the world have been redefining interactive experiences. Museum interactives are environmental and experiential – offering visitors opportunities to experience history, technology, culture and science in custom-designed, dedicated spaces that include artifacts, lighting, audiovisual elements, electro-mechanical technologies, graphics and scenic treatments. The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC has earned industry-wide acclaim for its interactive visitor experiences.

This session, presented by the Museum’s lead exhibition designer and lead interactive developer, will explore both the overall exhibition design process and the development of specific interactives created for the Museum.

Search on the web is ubiquitous. Everyone knows and uses Google. Most websites include a way to search the content within their pages and web users are often classified as either searchers or browsers. For many companies, search is considered a solved problem—you get an engine, point it at your content, add an entry box to your global navigation and you are done. This couldn’t be further from the truth. As experience designers, we have an obligation to understand how search works so we can craft an experience that enhances the lives of our users. For too long we have lived at the mercy of vendors and IT departments and their directives of how search should work. We need to understand what goes on under the search covers so we can put the focus back where it belongs—on the person using the tool, not the tool itself. About Chiara Fox Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has developed successful information architectures for intranets, informational websites, and e-commerce sites. She’s worked with Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as PeopleSoft, AT&T, Square D, L.L. Bean, and Hewlett-Packard.

Kathan Brown, author of the book "Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life," discusses how her art publishing group Crown Point Press is helping bring artists together and redefine the communication of their ideas. In a conversation with Janice Fraser, at the Adaptive Path User Experience Week, Brown tells her story of art and working with artists.

Fraser, who is CEO and founding partner of Adaptive Path, discusses with Brown that in today's busy world there is little time for examining what leadership is - from a user experience point of view - in the art world. An answer to some of those concerns is the work by Brown, who recounts her experiences with artists, how they approach art as a magical, almost miraculous process.

Cooperation is a primary concern at Crown Point Press, where cooperation between artists is critical. Collaboration between artists and printers is another challenge when trying to present art in the best possible way. By recounting experiences with artists and broad movements in the art world, Brown explains the magic behind creating art and what place the arts has taken in today's world.

Many Adaptive Path projects have been successes, such as the recent acquisition of Measure Map by Google. But in each successful career happened mistakes that led to an understanding how not to be successful. Leading heads of Adaptive Path give examples how projects went wrong because of their personal mistakes. But, best of all, you also get to hear what they learned from that failure. You can understand by example what they understood by painful failure.

One of the biggest mistakes, already addressed by the existence of this panel, is not allowing people to communicate failure. Where failure is non-existent, less questions are asked. Some failures might even be inevitable, such as bold goals in an early stage of the project. They might never be reached in time, but they help you to get started.

Communication can be a source of mistakes in software projects. There is always the danger of not listening to critics or warnings. But, maybe even worse, you might be listening to the wrong people. Or you might be talking to the wrong people. The panel encourages to cultivate criticism, communicate in the open and identify the true stakeholders before too much work and money has been spent. Furthermore, they arrive at statements some might find too bold for everyday business, but could pay off in the long term: Do not take over every project. Instead, develop guidelines other than earning money that help you decide. You can also try to consider the emotional attachments some stakeholders might have to the status quo.

What are content audits and content maps, and why should they matter to companies who publish information on the Web? Chiara Fox, a senior information architect for Adaptive Path, defines the art of Content Analysis in the scope of web application design and migration. She identifies several milestones and key deliverables that most companies can use on their next (re)design project.

Content analysis is a core component of the information architect's toolkit. Content analysis is the examination of the content and features that make up a website. Through a content audit, or sampling of representative pieces of content, an information architect can understand the relationships, interdependencies and patterns that exist within the current content on the site. This process also allows the information architect to understand requirements and constraints inherent in the content. Content genres, or types, can be identified and used to create a content map of the site and site templates. The content map provides the basic building blocks for gap analysis, which maps user tasks with the content genres.

When his company, Adaptive Path, was engaged by a financial services firm to redesign their website that let customers perform retail banking transactions, Peter Merholz, Director of Practice Development, went into the homes of users asking them questions about their usage of the existing website, the kinds of reports they recieved, how they used their computer etc.

Designers, according to Merholz, must broaden their peripheral vision to other domains outside their own. A website designer, by habit thinks like a website designer. The task of designing a print document would be quite new and challenging for such a person. However, if designers thought beyond their domains, they would get a better grip on the nuances of design in general and deliver a richer experience to users.

If you ask Dan's parents what they think their son does for a living, they might say he's in advertising or that he's a computer programmer. Pressed further, they develop somewhat of a blank staring response when asked what their son does as an Interaction Designer. With that type of response in mind, both from his parents and from many people outside of the Interaction Design community, Dan Saffer presents a definition of his trade.

From the highest level, Interaction Design is all about communication. Dan's presentation starts from there and further breaks the communication into three layers. The first layer takes the perspective of the technology itself; what is it, how does it work, and what problems can it solve. The second layer focuses on behavior; what happens when a user pushes this button, and what behaviors will the user exhibit as a result. The third layer is all about people and how they will use a technology to interact with one another.

Dan takes time to define exactly what an interaction is. He identifies some of the attributes of an interaction that designers measure while they create products and services around the interaction. He discusses some of the history of Interaction Design, and some of the people involved in the discipline early on. Lastly, Dan takes a moment to map out the many disciplines that make up the User Experience universe and identifies where, he thinks, Interaction Design fits into this large community.

Web technologies in various stages of adoption are having tremendous impact on the way we all communicate and collaborate online. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path provides an overview of how online collaboration has evolved in the presence of wikis, syndication and blogs. He also looks at the impact on how teams work together to use these tools internally, and how they can be utilized to communicate effectively with audiences worldwide. In addition, Freitas surveys the horizon for the next generation of collaboration technologies, and attempts to auger what they might mean for all of us.

One of the major issues is how best to evaluate collaboration tools. Freitas reviews some useful methods, including whether the tool works appropriately and how easily it can be used immediately. he believes that collaboration is about fostering ideas so that you can get to a point of coordination.

Lou Carbone, author and CEO of Experience Engineering, Inc. will change the way you think about customer experience forever. His message to business leaders and professionals is simple: Create customers that come back and customers that tell others, by connecting emotionally with them through the experiences you deliver.

Carbone urges business to focus on managing experience "clues", conscious and unconscious, because experiences are what customers value most. He stresses that the world has moved from making and selling to sensing and responding—a dynamic change that requires new competencies. Through illustrations from Fortune 100 clients, Carbone shares how the systematic design and delivery of experience clues can have immense impact on customer value, loyalty, and the bottom line.

Today there is an increasing need for companies to deal with "schizophrenic" challenges in creating compelling and profitable user experiences: a long-term vision and roadmap must be developed in parallel with defining near term offerings and tactical development decisions. This leads to tensions and organizational obstacles that need to be managed effectively.

Using the example of the Alltel Celltop product — an innovative approach to improving phone navigation and data applications on a mobile handset — Adam Richardson of frog design looks at dealing with the complex challenges schizophrenic projects create. The Celltop was just launched, and went from conception to code to shipping application in 12 months, and illustrates ways in which companies can "manage schizophrenia."