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 set of simple examples and some of the thinky-thinky behind why and how to design for adaptation. Here’s a couple things I’ve inferred from walking through the slides:

Choose: are you designing for tasks or experiences? Well, there’s actually a pretty wide spectrum to choose from between designing to support tasks and deigning to support experiences. And as you rise on this spectrum, the more you have to cumulatively design for. For example, designing for experience has to account for task as well as higher order concepts like convenience, pleasure, an meaning. So when initiating a design effort, it’d be practical to be honest and acknowledge where on this spectrum the project should be so you understand what design methods to engage in. Not all design is about creating experience — e.g., the design of an internal billing system UI probably doesn’t need to focus on creating meaning or pleasure. (And one aside: I still have some nit-pik concerns about this spectrum diagram, as I’ve certainly found things that are usable without being useful).
Information and rules drive adaptation. Adaptation is a smart solution for situations where we ask users to sacrifice too much to help the system, where all users may not be alike, or where we may not know enough to design the details correctly. Designers too often ignore the situations that drive the need for adaptation as well as the information we have available to us to address these situations. By realizing the information we have available to us (e.g., an IP address) we can define a simple rule and let the available information define the details of the experience.
Flow fosters passive adaptation. Adaptation might be more difficult to achieve with content-centric, hierarchical navigation patterns. Stephen’s focus is more towards Rich Internet Apps, which he seems to argue can better afford adaptive interfaces. Design patterns that support flow might yield more opportunity and more passive information for the adaptation of the interface.

This topic is worth following because it’s one of the most pragmatic, on-the-ground applications of letting customers design a solution for themselves. The designer and the organization relinquishes control over specific details, letting a set of rules and an inflow of information define the appropriate details of the experience.

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