Adaptive Path events: cheap before January 1

December 23, 2008 in Design, Experience, Management, Strategy | No comments

Here’s the deal: Register for an Adaptive Path event before January 1 and you’ll get it MUCH cheaper than you’ll ever get in 2009. And use the discount code FOBS and you’ll get another 15% knocked off the price.

I’m really excited by the line-up of events we have at Adaptive Path in 2009. Scott McCloud at UXWeek, Scott Berkun at Managing Design Products, and several great virtual seminars. But there are two events that I’m intensely enthusiastic about:

MX logoThe MX Conference: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership
This is the event that Henning Fischer and I have designed and programmed for our own education. Managing experiences is a tough job: convincing others that experience can be practiced strategically in an organization, building an leading a team to do the work, and then persevering through it all to get great experiences out into the world.

This event has a killer line-up of the people I want to learn from, thought leaders and real-world managers who know how to get it done, even in a down economy:

  • What does it mean to be a Designful Company? Marty Neumeier, author of one of my favorite books, ZAG, will explain.
  • Bruce Temkin from Forrester Research will be sharing his unique insights on how organizations can/are getting the most value out of user experience.
  • Professor Sara Beckman of Berkley’s Haas School of Business will reveal the connections between design thinking and business value.
  • Dan Roam, author of one of BusinessWeek’s best innovation books of the year, will show us how to draw to solve big problems.
  • David Butler, VP of Design at Coke will share how he’s made design a strategic force at Coke.
  • Margaret Schmidt, VP of User Experience Design & Research at TiVo is sharing how TiVo made experience the differentiator of their successful service.
  • And back again will be last year’s most popular speaker, Margaret Gould Stewart, manager at Google, with her one-of-a-kind perspective on effectively managing and inspiring creative teams.

Plus, we’ve mixed in hands-on workshops in this years program so you can try out new tools and techniques for solving hard experience problems. I can’t wait.

GDF logoGood Design Faster: High Value Experience Design
I’m passionate about reinventing the toolset that designers use today for experience design. Today’s decrepit common toolset (WUSS: Wireframes, Use cases, Sitemaps, and Specs) is horribly outdated and inappropriate for taking on the problems we face. Good Design Faster is a hands-on 2-day guide to new tools and methods to supplant that last generation toolset with fresh new approaches that, yes, get you to good design faster.

We’re creating a studio environment where you’ll get inspiration and instruction, then immediate apply what you’ve learned to exciting test cases. By the end of the two days, you will have been through a new approach to experience design, taking your raw ideas for a solution and making them real.

The hard science of soft science

November 30, 2008 in Management, Trends + News | 1 comment

I believe that soft science is on the verge of a swell of new findings and data, driven by the increase in online activity and the ubiquity of sensors. More behavior is being observed. And no doubt, someone will eventually compile and analyze the trails of data generated. It’s exciting for soft science, as it suddenly has the empirical evidence of hard science. In short, it’s possible to study soft science with hard science techniques.

The New York Times article, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?,” shares multiple examples of tracking behavioral data, calling the emerging field, “collective intelligence.” Some examples of data being collected (note that the article focuses on the more spooky cases):

  • social network activity
  • spoken search queries for Google’s 411 service
  • GPS units in cars and phones (think rental cars)
  • shopper movement in retail stores
  • employee communication and collaboration
  • and San Francisco taxicab GPS data

Errors?
Take the San Francisco taxicab data for example. Using this data Sense Networks found that “middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.” Now, I’m sure Sense Network’s work was statistically robust, but I worry about how frequently we’ll look at the available data and come to conclusions that aren’t true. We’ll see patterns that really aren’t there
— what’s known as a type II error. I also worry we may often mistake correlation for causal relationships.

Back to Privacy
If you or your business collects data, it’ll be increasingly important to think about the data you retain and how you manage it. Because one day the customer may want (and be able to get) their data back. In the UK, the Data Protection Act already guarantees this right, which was creatively demonstrated by Chris Downs who compiled all the data organizations had collected about him and then sold it on eBay.

Dr. Alex Pentland, of MIT and Sense Networks, suggests the follow guidelines:

  • that people have a right to possess their own data
  • that people control the data that is collected about them
  • that people can destroy, remove or redeploy their data as they wish

Ideas are cheap. Have a lot of them.

November 22, 2008 in Design | 1 comment

This past week at CanUX I presented sketchboards, a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts. One thing we worked on was using a template that accommodates the sketching of 6 ideas. Here’s an example:

After some sketching on a problem, I asked the audience to tell me which sketch captured their best idea (the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth)? Admittedly, not everyone got to the fifth of sixth sketch, but the results still show the benefit of going beyond your first or second idea:

Note that no one thought their first idea was the best.

Sketchboards at CanUX

November 18, 2008 in Design, Experience | 3 comments


I’m lucky to have the pleasure of spending several days at CanUX in Banff, Alberta, plus getting the chance to present the skethboards method with the great folks at the conference. Here’s a sample of what I’m sharing:

And here’s a quick list of the references I might be dropping during the session:

CanUX has been a great event, with interesting and very practical content, and some super scenery. Check it out in 2009.

open sourcing prosthetics

September 20, 2008 in Design, Trends + News | 2 comments

We have open source browsers, operating systems, and other digital solutions, but it’s heartening to see open source also make it into physical products. October’s Scientific American covers the Open Prosthetics Project, a clearinghouse for free new designs for better prosthetics. (Just think of groups of people swapping and checking in CAD files instead of pieces of code.)

prototypes for improvements to a prosthetic arm design

All started by Jonathan Kuniholm—himself an amputee from the Iraq War—and his North Carolina firm Tackle Design, the project has generated numerous improvements to the classic prosthetic arm, fixing common failure points partially by working with test patients who take their prosthetic arms to extremes.

Also see the article in Wired, the BusinessWeek post, and the podcast with Red Hat Magazine. And note the Project’s interest in Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, the same dude that’s nuts for another open source approach to physical products, Threadless.

The problem for the Open Prosthetics Project is now an economic one. Through open source they’ve eliminated the cost of design and development, but they still battle the cost of manufacturing an improved design. There’s the challenge for physical product open source systems: after design and development, they still have to manufacture and distribute, something the digital world takes for granted.

predicted brandon sightings

July 21, 2008 in Whereabouts | No comments

At two upcoming events in San Francisco and in Calgary I’ll be sharing the benefits and the how-to basics of sketchboards:

  • First, at UXWeek in August I’ll be conducting what’s likely to be a crazy high-energy workshop with the smart and vibrant Leah Buley where we guide everyone in producing Better Design Faster. UXWeek should be more awesome than ever, with fundamentals, play, service design, media design and a freakin’ incredible list of speakers. And, you can get 15% off with the discount code FOBS.
  • Then in Calgary in November I’ll be unlocking all of the sketchboard secrets at nForm’s CanUX 2008 conference. This is also looking like a great event, as I’ll be able to learn from Dave Gray of XPlane (I’m a big fan of his flickr photostream) and Luke W., whose forms book I’ve been following religiously.

But still my very favorite thing to host is the Design Strategy day of the UX Intensive workshops, which will be in Copenhagen in October. I keep on finding more interesting methods and tools to share and pack into this very hands-on day. The gist: I want to demystify strategy for UX designers and provide some lightweight tools that are meaty enough to help their work be successful without being so involving that they have to request special time/resources to do it. Here too, you can get 15% off with the discount code FOBS.

Drop me a line if you think you’ll be at any of these too!

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