Adaptive Path Podcast

Creative Project Leads and Team Managers face numerous challenges in a corporate environment. Often their working styles or problem-solving skills differ from the methods used in other departments, creating communication and collaboration issues. This can present problems when creative teams need to communicate new ideas throughout the organization.

To clear these hurdles, you need to know how to identify people’s motivations, navigate office politics, and understand your company’s structure. Utilizing these insights can help minimize the roadblocks to a project’s success.

In this session, you will:

* Explore how clear communication, compromise, and expectation management can create a successful working environment

* Learn how to customize your creative team’s approach to build a sense of trust and mutual respect with other departments

* Discover ways in which an understanding of your organization’s emotional and political landscape will help you communicate with the people who can make a difference

About Andrew Crow

Andrew Crow is a senior experience designer at Adaptive Path and has a passion for developing innovative and measureable design solutions for customers’ needs.

Initially a print and web designer, he moved into information architecture and promoting holistic user experience to corporate clients. Andrew has 11 years of design, technical and strategic experience.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Andrew managed the web and user experience team at Princess Cruises. This gave him the opportunity to lead the development of an entirely new online booking system, e-ticket solution and oversee online branding and marketing initiatives. Prior to that, he worked with element18 and Interfocus Advertising in Los Angeles.

Past clients include Cunard Line, Lee Iacocca’s eBike, ILIO Entertainment and Millimeter Magazine.

The cluster of practices and professions we’ve come to think of as supporting User-Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person’s discipline define that person’s work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues among communities of “learning and doing,” i.e., “communities of practice.”

The communities of practice model gives us a better language for discussing our roles, our work and the future of our respective practices and disciplines. It also gives us a useful way of thinking about how to design for particular kinds of collaboration, especially emergent, collective work in support of improving a practice.

In this session, you will:

* Explore the meaning and importance of a “community of practice.”

* Discover ways in which the community of practice model is more relevant now than ever before.

* Learn how a working understanding of a community of practice can improve the ways in which user-experience practitioners work together.

About Andrew Hinton

Andrew has been designing for digital environments of one kind or another since 1991. Currently he is a senior information architect in the User Experience Group of Vanguard, and he’s also a co-founding member of the Information Architecture Institute. In the past, he has done IA-related work for companies such as American Express, Sealy, Wachovia, Shaw and Kimberly-Clark.

Andrew regularly speaks and writes about user-experience design, and he also blogs about information architecture, design and more at Inkblurt.

Like every other design discipline, an important component of self-education is learning to critically examine what others have produced. And when it comes to interaction design, there are plenty of good and bad examples to guide us.

Inspiration for interaction design is all around us; all we have to do is stop and really look at the objects inside our homes, our cars, our workplaces or our pockets. Microwaves. Remote controls. Alarm clocks. Cell phones. Digital cameras. Game controllers. Music players. Washing machines. What icons, labels and colors do you find on these objects? How many buttons do you see? Too many? Too few? Is there enough uniformity? Variation? Most importantly, how easy is it for a new user to comprehend and actually use this interface?

Every one of these details is a direct result of someone’s design decision, whether intentional or subconscious. The key is to learn how to divine these intentions (or lack thereof) so that when we design, we leave nothing to chance.

In this session, you will:

* Discover new methods and tools for learning interaction design lessons from everyday objects.

* Explore the ever-changing culture and language of interface design.

* Pinpoint areas and strategies for improving on the interface design strategies of today.

About Bill DeRouchey

As a writer, web producer, product manager, information architect and now senior interaction designer for Ziba Design in Portland, OR, Bill has been simplifying how people interact with technology — including handheld devices, websites and environmental spaces — for over fifteen years.

Bill also writes about the evolution of technology on his blog, History of the Button, where he poses esoteric questions such as: What was the first button? Who invented the pause icon? And why does “pushbutton” translate to “easy”? From these explorations, Bill hopes to understand how people think about technology — the cognitive foundation of interaction design — and apply that perspective to the design of the ubiquitous, content-dense, touch-sensitive future.