March 2007
8 posts
2 tags
Design for adaptability
An underutilized capabilities of the web today is the ability to passively adapt interfaces based on context, use, and any information the interface can gain about the people using it. That’s why I’m intrigued by the slides of Stephen Andersonfrom his presentation ‘The Conversation Gets Interesting: Creating the Adaptive Interface‘ at theIASummit. Stephen addresses this capability head on with a...
1 tag
The last great breakthrough in financial services
I have reason to be thinking about the financial services industry these days, and in a recent conversation I made the offhanded remark that the Morningstar Fund Report was the last great breakthrough design in the delivery of financial services.
Thinking a little deeper about it, I might have been close to right. Morningstar released their first Mutual Fund Sourcebook™ to individual investors...
1 tag
Less is more—a compilation
Choosing to do less, and creating a better offering because of it, is a great approach to design and a great approach to business. It allows you to focus on a particular customer, place, process, or even a time of day. One of the great benefits is it also help you know who, what, or when else to ignore.
Doing less with more allows for a tighter scope, something we at Adaptive Path...
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“And um, can we get that tomorrow?”
Recently when I’ve been asked to turn around some design work in an unreasonable timeline, I’ve started to look at it as an opportunity to do some good work. It could actually be a great time to turn on iterative design techniques and agile-like methods to get some great things accomplished.
Chris Conley turned me on to the concept of “dailies” at last year’s UXWeek conference. He showed how...
2 tags
Designing with people
During a recent re-read of Henry Dreyfuss‘s seminal book Designing For People, I realized just how little the basic design process has changed since his practice began in the 1930′s:
study the problem,
talk about objectives and requirements with the stakeholders,
study the current use and current market,
understand the means of production or enabling technology,
build conceptual prototyping...
1 tag
News flash: design thinking located in brain
Researchers at Muppet Labs have localized the design thinking function in the brain. In their research, they had persons with stylish shoes complete that nine dot exercise while undergoing a CAT-scan to find the parts of the brain most active with thinking outside of the box.
It’s no surprise that the active region was found within the temporal lobe, responsible for semiotics. It’s also no...
1 tag
Wrapping up customer experience » for business
HBR’s February article on “Understanding Customer Experience” wraps up several thoughts on experience: how to define it, why it’s not being focused on in organizations, and how to obtain insights on experience that you can act on. Some of the interesting things authors Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager had to say:
A definition of customer experience They also took a swing at defining...
2 tags
The stupidity of crowds
There’s plenty of talk about the wisdom of crowds, but what about the opposite — what about the stupidity of crowds? What about the power of our collective mistakes?
Certainly some people make a buck off of this: Las Vegas survives on our collective inability to understand probability in a cold, rationale way.
But my favorite example is how Google handles misspellings. I’m...