Adaptive Path Podcast

This session will focus on the ways in which human-centered researchers team with colleagues across disciplines to transform a mass of data — field observations, contextual interviews, secondary research and anecdotal stories — into actionable design principles.

Note that while case studies shared in this session will refer to work that primarily informs decision-making in the tangible realm, the methods refined by researchers at the furniture manufacturer Steelcase can also be (and often are) effectively applied to the design of digital media experiences.

In this session, you will:

* Discover ways to both engage a multi-disciplinary audience in the design process and build shared ownership of stories and insights.

* Explore how this shared development of a research platform can be used to inform business, marketing and design decisions.

About Emily Ulrich

Emily is a design researcher in the EXP Brand Experience group at Steelcase, a global designer and manufacturer of products that are used to create high-performance work environments. Steelcase research explores the notion of work as a social activity, and speculates about the role office design plays in evolving organizational culture and enabling organizational change.

Since 2002, Emily has participated as both a team researcher and project lead in Steelcase’s “deep dive” explorations, where she has focused on the work behaviors of people in higher education, professional services and health care settings. The goal of this work is to contribute to internal product development and inspire client and design colleagues to think differently about the integration of architecture, furniture and technology.

Emily leverages techniques learned during her graduate studies at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she received an M.Des. in Design Planning. Today Emily explores distance collaboration with her Michigan-based colleagues from various locations around her home in San Francisco.

Every document created by web designers contains many layers of information. Too few layers, and the ideas within lose context and meaning. Too many, and the important ideas become obscured. Choosing the right ideas to include can make or break a document, or even the entire project.

To help you learn how to strike the right balance, we’ll take a look at several different user-experience documents, examining the kinds of information they contain and exploring new ways to select the right information for the situation at hand.

In this session, you will:

* Learn how much is too much, or too little, when it comes to creating web documents.

* Discover strategies for picking and choosing what information to include and how to display it.

* Explore examples of a number of different types of user-experience documents, with special attention to the potential advantages of each strategy.

About Dan Brown

Dan is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user-experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC, that has engaged with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech and other sectors. Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US Postal Service, the World Bank and the Federal Communications Commission to USAirways, FirstUSA and Fannie Mae. Before that, Dan was a Federal employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security Administration.

Dan’s portfolio includes work on public-facing websites, intranets and extranets, and it addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design. Dan has published dozens of articles for a variety of publications, and he is also the author of Communicating Design, a book about the ways in which high-quality visual documentation can be used to communicate complex ideas and abstractions. He has moderated panels and led workshops at almost every IA Summit since its inception in 2000, and he is very active in the local Washington, DC, information architecture community, organizing regular workshops and bimonthly reading groups.

As the technology for supporting more personalized experiences becomes available, we’re entering a new era of “adaptive interfaces,” where functionality is revealed over time and interface elements change based on individual usage. We can create interfaces that respond, suggest or change based on actual usage data.

While much of this is still speculative, we’ll explore some concrete examples of how such ideas have already been used, and many instances where this could be implemented, resulting in applications that are truly conversational and context-aware.

In this session, you will:

* Learn about the unique advantages and challenges of working with adaptive interfaces.

* Explore concrete examples of ways in which adaptive interfaces have been implemented.

* Identify opportunities in which an adaptive interface would create a conversational, context-aware experience.

About Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen is the principal user experience architect at Sabre Travel Network, where he leads the design of travel products used by more than 50,000 travel agencies worldwide. He is passionate about elegant design and the technological innovations that make desirable experiences possible.

Prior to Sabre, Stephen helped build Bright Corner, a creative design and technology services company. There he worked with a variety of businesses to create valuable online and offline customer experiences, with a special focus on custom business applications. Stephen has worked on Web 2.0-style applications with small startups as well as larger usability and information architecture projects for enterprise clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay and Chesapeake Energy. A former high school English teacher, Stephen brings a love for language and cognitive learning theories to the design profession.

Stephen’s online home can be found at poetpainter.com.

We listen to stories for enlightenment and tell stories for education and entertainment. Everyday people are convinced, impressed, enlightened, discouraged, encouraged and swayed by the stories others tell in the workplace. In business time may be money, but the power of a good story, well told at the right time, has changed the course of individual careers, corporations and entire industries. But the process of creating a story can also be enlightening and entertaining in its own right, and it can be a useful tool for helping groups of individuals collaborate to express a unified idea or set of goals. As “storytelling animals,” we all have the ability to create narrative, particularly about topics close to us. We are also capable of understanding stories, especially when we find a way to relate them to personal experience.

Sometimes collaboration or team building involves everyone contributing relevant ideas, sometimes it takes asking the right questions. But collaboration always requires listening hard enough to know which to do when, and group story-creation techniques can greatly help this process.

In this session, you will:

* Review and practice the three critical elements necessary for nurturing the creativity and collaboration inherent in storytelling: listening, structuring and telling.

* Practice telling a simple story both on your own and collaboratively, with the goal of learning how to communicate effectively.

* Discover how story structures and other patterns can be used to guide creative endeavors.

* Acquire the tools you need to bring collaborative storytelling techniques into your own organization.

About Kevin Brooks

Kevin is a principle staff researcher for Motorola Labs and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola, Kevin researches new user-interface technologies and expresses these technologies as connected user-centered experiences, creating “technology stories” that incorporate elements of audio, video, graphics, written language and computer programming. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood in the 60s to his present-day role as a parent himself, and he has been a featured performer at many storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues.

Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. He has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University.

Kevin has several published papers and has given numerous workshops on storytelling and interactive story design. In 2006 he released his first CD of stories, entitled Kiss of Summer.

Most of us who practice user experience design are generalists. We need to know enough about technology to work with engineers. We need to know enough about visual design to work with designers. Every time we start a new project, we need to learn about our client’s business problems until we can recite them in our sleep. We need to be part designer, part psychologist, part researcher, part corporate therapist. We need to be able to write cogently, sketch our ideas so that even the most distracted marketing executives can understand them, and give killer presentations.

Managing a user experience team takes these skills to a whole new level.

Whether you manage a UX team, or you’re just thinking about it, this presentation will give you practical advice grounded in real-world experience.

In this session, you will learn how to:

* Find people who have potential to be as good at this work as (or even better than) you are.

* Inspire your team members to do their best work, and keep getting better.

* Handle a team member who is not performing.

* Keep yourself inspired, especially when your job is to make the rest of your team look good.

About Katrina Alcorn

Katrina leads the user experience discipline for Hot Studio, an award-winning design firm based in San Francisco. Since 1999, she has led information architecture, user research and content strategy efforts on a wide variety of projects, including online magazines, Flash demos and health care enrollment applications for clients such as InformationWeek, Sun Microsystems, Charles Schwab, Blue Shield of California, Architecture for Humanity, the United Methodist Church, Gap Inc., LeapFrog SchoolHouse and Adobe.

Before her foray onto the Internet, Katrina worked as a freelance writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines in Hawaii and California, and as an associate producer for an award-winning national PBS television series. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the University of California, Berkeley.

Creating engaging and enjoyable user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people your product or service is meant to serve. Unfortunately, many companies don’t really understand their customers — even companies with large research groups. But understanding people takes more than simply hiring researchers armed with PhDs and the latest methodologies. Understanding customers isn’t something that a research team can do on its own; it’s something that the whole organization needs to do as a whole. That’s the only way that insights into the lives of your users have any hope of getting into the products and services you design.

Research is only effective if it integrates well with the larger design process. When done poorly, research does nothing but keep research staff busy. When done well, research can transform the understanding of users for your organization as a whole and empower your teams to create compelling experiences.

In this session, you will:

* Learn how to make research actionable and durable within an organization.

* Discover strategies for integrating other departments and key players into the research process, and vice versa.

* Examine and learn from case studies of successful research activities within design projects.

About Todd Wilkens

Todd Wilkens is the design researcher for Adaptive Path. Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design he holds a passionate belief that focusing on and truly understanding people allows us to create products and services that provide compelling experiences and real value.

Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and actually get it right (at least most of the time), win their customers’ attention and loyalty. And the key to creating a business that addresses the entire spectrum of user experience is to build empathy with your customers. An effective way to do this is to create a mental model, one that considers all the different ways an organization interacts with its users: stores, account statements, customer service calls, product ordering websites, packaging…everything.

A few years ago, I developed a mental model for JMS Entertainment, a movie distribution company that wanted to attract a larger audience of moviegoers. The model I created depicted the entire moviegoer’s experience, from watching trailers and reading reviews to discussing the plot points with a friend after the show. I then compared that mental model to the features of the JMS website, noting the interesting gaps and matches from a strategic point of view. I also help JMS brainstorm new ideas based on combinations seen from the perspective of the mental model. From there, an effective three-year roadmap was created, one with a clear business perspective. The result? A user experience that fully addresses the entire range of JMS’s customer needs.

In this session, you will:

* Examine the mental model for opportunities to support moviegoers in attractive ways.

* Learn how to gather innovative ideas by combining or building off of related features.

* Create a strategic roadmap for your organization.

About Indi Young

After nearly a decade working with Unix, pen-based systems, and Windows, Indi began her work in web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. Her clients include Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, Bell Canada, Intuit, Qualcomm, and PeopleSoft.

Indi specializes in gathering user research data to create mental models for use in business/user gap analysis. She has completed over 30 of these projects since 1995. She is also one of the founding members of Adaptive Path, which she left in 2006 to write her book on the subject of mental models, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media in late summer 2007. Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior.

Indi graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the Cal Poly School of Engineering in San Luis Obispo, and worked on her master’s degree in Computer Science at Colorado State University Fort Collins. She is a lifetime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

As Ajax, RIA’s and Agile methods become ever more common, we increasingly hear about the value of prototypes for design and development. Unfortunately, choosing the right prototype can be an exercise in uncertainty.

To get a better handle on the prototype process, we will survey several different types of prototypes, with special focus on the appropriate audiences and uses for each. We will also consider the advantages and disadvantages of using interactive prototypes, whether you are incorporating them into your development process or using them as a self-documenting deliverable. We will then dive into specific techniques and methods for creating prototypes, providing examples and discussing the skill-sets required for each approach.

In this session, you will:

* Explore an array of prototype options, learning the ideal uses for each.

* Discover the advantages and disadvantages of interactive prototypes, as well as the different ways of putting them to use.

* Learn practical prototype-creating methods and techniques.

About David Verba

David is director of technology for Adaptive Path. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies. He has over 15 years of development experience, and has worked with technologies ranging from Sun, Java and Oracle to open-source favorites such as Linux, Perl, Apache, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Ruby and Ruby On Rails.

David helped launch the Wholefoods.com initiative as part of Whole Foods, Inc., and was a core developer for CodeZoo.com, an O’Reilly and Associates web product. He also provided necessary technical leadership to create Adaptive Path’s Measure Map (recently acquired by Google).

User and usability testing of mobile applications requires an understanding of when to use devices, emulators, laboratories and field testing. This session targets user-experience professionals, teaching them how to expand and adjust their current testing procedures to address mobile applications and websites. UX practitioners will also discover how and when to use each tool, with a specific focus on market-acceptance testing and ways in which it can be radically improved using SMS.

In this session, you will:

* Discover ways in which current usability testing strategies can be modified to tackle the mobile sphere.

* Learn about the specific applications, advantages and limitations of various testing tools, including emulators, laboratories, field testing and key devices.

* Gain a working familiarity with market-acceptance testing, with a specific focus on how SMS can be used to improve its effectiveness.

About Barbara Ballard

Barbara is the President and founder of Little Springs Design, a user experience consulting firm that specializes in serving the mobile industry. She has been working on mobile services, devices, websites and applications since 1998, helping Sprint launch such sites as MapQuest, Yahoo! and AOL.

Barbara contends that mobile user experience goes beyond simply designing for the small screen, and she regularly talks at Mobile Monday events to help industry developers and marketers improve their usability. She is also the author of Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written specifically to help user-experience professionals make the transition to mobile.

There are dozens of development platforms in the mobile sphere. And 1,700 different devices on the market, each with its own rendering idiosyncrasies. Of course you also have to contend with carrier influence and distribution. How do you choose which devices to target and which platforms to use for your application? Mobile phone and applications are shaped by The Carry Principle: the simple idea that the mobile phone is a personal communications device always with the user. This simple idea has profound impact on design, technology strategy, and product strategy.

In this session, you will:

* Learn how to identify and tackle issues concerning data freshness, application responsiveness, data availability, target device types and browser technologies.

* Create a distribution strategy that incorporates and addresses data gleaned from business models, market segmentation and user needs.

* Gain a working understanding of the benefits and challenges of different platforms, including Java ME, Flash Lite and SVG, BREW, WAP, XHTML, AJAX and SMS.

About Barbara Ballard

Barbara is the President and founder of Little Springs Design, a user experience consulting firm that specializes in serving the mobile industry. She has been working on mobile services, devices, websites and applications since 1998, helping Sprint launch such sites as MapQuest, Yahoo! and AOL.

Barbara contends that mobile user experience goes beyond simply designing for the small screen, and she regularly talks at Mobile Monday events to help industry developers and marketers improve their usability. She is also the author of Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written specifically to help user-experience professionals make the transition to mobile.