Adaptive Path Podcast

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and current member of the Yahoo's Technology Development Group, explains the humble beginnings of one of the earliest and most successful Web 2.0 applications, Flickr. Flickr actually began as a feature in Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game that was focused on social interaction rather than the more typical battle-style MMORPG. Ludicorp (from the latin word for "play") was a small game development company in Vancouver started in 2002 by Fake and her partner Stewart Butterfield. Though the community that grew around the game was very dedicated, Ludicorp couldn't make it profitable.

Creation of a photosharing component was the last gasp in the game's development. Looking back, Fake now realizes that had she and her team done any research on photosharing at the time, they probably would never have moved in that direction, as back then photosharing was little more than a loss leader for photoprinting sites. But by 2003 both camera phones and blogging reached a tipping point that made the market ripe for a solid browser-based photosharing application.

Since Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Fake is now with the Technology Development Group at Yahoo, charged with creating a culture of innovation in new product design at Yahoo. In this fascinating interview Fake fields questions including how do you most effectively incorporate user input in the development process? How do you infuse a development behemoth like Yahoo with Flickr's small startup-style innovative mojo?

rene Au discusses her previous experience at fast moving companies Netscape and Yahoo!, and how that experience will influence her latest challenge. As the new Director of User Experience at Google, she will be confronted with an organization that is clearly defined by its engineering culture. A shift in priority empahsized hiring for the UI role in 2006. But this does not automatically mean a shift away from Google’s strict engineering orthodoxy. Getting the strategic decision makers in a non-design drive culture to consider user experience and UI design as part of their process will not be an easy task.

While there is no clear vision of how design will play a more strategic role, Ms. Au believes change can come through hiring strategies and cross functional education. She comments that many groups at Google currently believe they are user centered based on consistent use of usability studies. But they are not taking advantage of more advanced design techniques such as user pathology or ethnography techniques. She hopes to bring in more specialized skill sets - anthropologists and cognitive psychologists - in addition to traditional design and computer science specialists. This will allow her to take advantage of a wider range of experience to build cross functional teams tasked with developing innovative new interactivity and design ideas to set Google products apart from the competition.

Where is design thinking taking us? The role of design is evolving within organizations, from simply optimizing what exists to being a source of new growth. The change is thrusting designers into new roles and domains, including the design of services and the transformation of organizations.

Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, reviews these new contexts and how they require designers to apply traditional skills in new ways, or find completely new methods of problem-solving. He broadens our thinking beyond the familiar borders of design and the web, exploring how design can yield a new breed of innovation.

Whirlpool Corporation is a global manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances. Sara Ulius-Sabel, Metrics Manager for the company, presents a glimpse into Whirlpool's product development process through the lens of designing "Useful, Usable, and Desirable" products.

She presents examples of how Whirlpool creates their appliances, including a discussion of some of the orthodoxies, challenges, and shifting market and user trends that surround these dimensions. She describes design metrics as one of the tools that Whirlpool uses to bring objectivity to the trade-offs between Useful, Usable and Desirable, ultimately helping to drive both coherence and differentiation in a multi-brand portfolio.

What does it take to create great design experiences? User-Centered Design is built on the principle that focusing on people will lead to better design. In attempting to understand consumers, companies tend to overlook the messy complexities of life, resulting in incomplete ideas about their customers' behavior. Empathy and insight are needed to fundamentally change generative research and design.

"Thou shalt understand people," the first UCD commandment, is key to achieving empathy. This requires a thorough study of individuals--complete with complexities and emotions. The recent rise of ethnography and company-employed anthropologists is a testament to the importance of adopting a holistic way of viewing people.

The second commandment, "Thou shalt get that understanding into your design," addresses the difficulty of integrating contextual research into the design process. Insight that is traditionally buried in research reports can stay fresh through the creation of honest personas. Researchers and developers can work in tandem with designers to tear down walls, producing clear, straightforward deliverables.

The way organizations see customers is improved with the adoption of a new way of thinking about people. Understanding the relationship between motivations and behaviors underscores the importance of emotional connections. By embracing complexity, insight is increased rather than reduced. When properly executed, this insight reinvigorates the design practice.

Many museums present exhibitions about architecture and design. In doing so, they typically treat buildings and other designed objects much as they do paintings, drawings, or sculptures — as individual creative works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or craftsmanship.

The National Building Museum approaches this subject matter quite differently. Its mission is to examine the broader cultural implications of the “built environment,” and to reveal the profound impact of architecture, engineering, and urban planning on people’s lives. Rather than simply displaying countless discrete artifacts of our built heritage, the National Building Museum instead seeks to present coherent stories—stories that not only inform visitors’ understanding of the past and present, but also suggest possibilities for a better world in the future.

To achieve these goals, the Museum has developed a unique approach to the organization of exhibitions and education programs, with an unusually strong emphasis on the visitor’s experience. The Museum’s approach to exhibition and program development will be the subject of this presentation.

In this session, you will:

* Learn about the National Building Museum’s unique mission and identity

* Discover how the Museum engages diverse audiences through innovative exhibition content and design

* Learn to the Museum’s renowned, hands-on educational programming

About Martin Moeller

Martin Moeller is Senior Vice President and Curator at the National Building Museum. He has been the lead curator for various exhibitions including “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete” and “Reinventing the Globe: A Shakespearean Theater for the 21st Century.” In addition to his curatorial duties, Moeller edits the Museum’s quarterly magazine, “Blueprints”, and frequently represents the Museum on television and radio programs. He also coordinated the Museum’s recent symposium series, “Building in the Aftermath”, examining the implications of Hurricane Katrina for the built environment.

He previously served as the Museum’s Executive Vice President, overseeing all exhibitions, education programs, development, and administrative operations. He stepped down from this role in 2001 in order to have more time to pursue independent writing and consulting projects.

Before joining the Museum in 1998, Moeller served as Executive Director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Moeller holds a Master of Architecture degree from Tulane University. He is the author of the fourth edition of the “AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C.”, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2006. He was co-editor of “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete”, which was published in English by Princeton Architectural Press in June 2006, and in French under the title “Architectures du béton: Nouvelles vagues, nouvelles recherches”, by Le Moniteur Press.

Every now and again, a project just jumps the rails — all the best intentions and planning just don’t stack up to the unanticipated challenges. After the dust settles, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on. We can also tell you all about them. (Names will be changed to protect the innocent. The guilty we’ll name.)

About Bryan Mason

Bryan Mason is the COO of Adaptive Path and is responsible for managing Adaptive Path’s business operations. He oversees Adaptive Path’s events and training business development and helps to ensure coordination of all affiliates and partners.

Bryan has over ten years of organizational management experience, including work in special event production, political campaign management and not-for-profit arts administration. His special events clients include the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, The White House (Office of Scheduling and Advance), CMP Media Inc. (WEB2000, WEB2001, etc), and Lincoln Center Theater. His political work includes the campaigns of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), New York Attorney General candidate Evan Davis, the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign and many county and city elections. Bryan spent several years in New York City, working on-, off-, and no-where-near-Broadway. He managed Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, was the Company Manager for six productions at Playwrights Horizons, and produced sold-out premiere productions at the Edinburgh and New York Fringe Festivals.

The Semantic Web – as popularized by Tim-Berners Lee – is developing so rapidly that references to “semantic” and “Web 3.0″ are commonly treated as synonyms. Apart from information discovery and aggregation, not much has been written about how semantic technology can be leveraged to improve user experience as a whole. This is unfortunate for a technology where the “semantic” is often overshadowed by the “web.”

But in reality, machine-readable concept structures – and the rules underlying those concepts – can be used to support any aspect of context-reliant user experience. In fact, because semantic web technologies provide such a powerful way of discovering not just new data, but new types of information, semantic technology could play a key role in managing uncertainty across the entire user experience. Fortunately, new and developing semantic applications are exploring just such an approach.

In this session, you will:

* Gain a brief overview of key technologies, applications and frameworks surrounding semantic technology, and explore their positive and negative impact on user experience.

* Explore specific examples of how semantic technology can support context-appropriate information displays and user work flow.

* See demonstrations of existing semantic implementations that support context-appropriate visualization and interaction.

About Cameron Hunt

Cameron has been working with user-driven information systems since the mid-1990s, and he has designed, built and supported applications for military and law enforcement intelligence, analysis and operational customers. He is currently a semantic knowledge management analyst for the EmergINT team at CommIT Enterprises.

Flow diagrams are a key component of an interaction design specification. Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary uses a set of simple shapes to diagram user flow and illustrate basic relationships between webpages. However, using Visual Vocabulary to describe more sophisticated behaviors of “rich” interfaces — enabled by technologies such as AJAX, Flash and Ruby on Rails — can sometimes prove challenging. But with some additions and creative modifications, Garrett’s language can actually be used to effectively communicate the design of a rich or conditional UI.

In this session, you will:

* Gain a deeper appreciation of the power and flexibility of Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary.

* Discover how to utilize an augmented Visual Vocabulary to describe the dynamic nature of rich or conditional interfaces.

* Learn tips and tricks to improving your flow diagrams through the addition of key information.

* Find new ways to bring unrealized clarity to your specifications, illustrated via a series of specific examples.

About Anthony Colfelt

Anthony applies his strong human-centered approach to the design of social software applications, online communities and digital identity systems. Currently, he is the creative director at myfamily.com, where he leads a team of user-experience practitioners and oversees design processes, methods and tools. Before joining myfamily.com in 2006, Anthony led UX teams as an interaction design manager and senior practitioner for Classmates.com and the BBC in London. Anthony also graduated with a Bachelor of Graphic Design from the University of Canberra, Australia in 1996.

To learn more about Anthony and his work, visit Cofelt.com, or read his blog, The Vanity Experiment.

The goal of this undertaking was to enhance and simplify online news for consumers to allow them to interact with news in more ways than ever before. With the site’s enhancements and redesign, users can access the news of the day through an integrated storytelling experience that provides text, images, video, commenting, and other interactive elements all within one cohesive package.

The site also incorporates the latest technologies, such as AJAX, a recommendation engine, and a “From the Blogs” feature to enhance the user experience. Another core offering — live, streaming video previously available by subscription only — became free and integrated into the fabric of CNN.com. All CNN.com video including on-demand clips, live breaking news and an archive with access to over 50,000 news videos is now available to users for free.

In this session, we will walk through the user-centered process undertaken in this project, including the early user research and analysis all the way through implementation and post-launch feedback mechanisms. We’ll also discuss the challenges involved in a project like this in a company of CNN’s size. We’ll explore how the early research evolved and was refined throughout the process, leading to the site that was recently launched.

In this session, you will:

* Discover the steps of the process required to bring such a huge project to market, including some tips and tricks on how to get stakeholders and participants fully invested

* Find out how the user was involved in shaping the requirements and end product

* Learn why CNN.com plans to never “relaunch” again

About Dermot Waters

Dermot Waters is the Director of Technology and Business Strategy for CNN.com, most recently working on the relaunch of CNN.com where he co-led the effort from the beginning research phases through launch. Since joining CNN.com in 1999, Dermot has developed and managed a wide range of products across many of the CNN and Turner brands, including search, social media, mobile, registration, e-mail services, weather, and syndication.

In his tenure, Dermot has lead CNN.com’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and been the product manager for Turner’s Digital Media Technologies managing the search platform across Turner brands; working closely with Google, Yahoo!, Verity/Autonomy and other 3rd parties in this area. He is a point person for management of vendors across a variety of technical areas, most recently working on partnerships around blogs and social media.

Dermot holds an MBA in E-Commerce/CIS from Georgia State University, an MS in CIS from Georgia State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Georgia.

About Lori Adams

Lori Adams is the Director of User Experience and Site Integration at CNN.com. Along with Dermot Waters, she led the CNN.com relaunch project, steering the effort from the beginning phase of user discovery through implementation. Since joining CNN in 2004, Lori has managed hundreds of site changes and brought with her a focus on user-centered practices, overseeing the implementation of several user feedback mechanisms and qualitative research methods such as personas.

Lori’s background includes work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she served as Lead Information Architect and Usability Specialist for websites dealing with topics such as flu, anthrax, and smallpox emergencies. Her experience also includes several years as a senior information architect at an agency and freelance work for a variety of companies in Atlanta. Past clients have included BellSouth, Coca-cola, Ritz-Carlton, TravelSmith, Ballard Designs, and WebMD.

Lori holds a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Ohio University.