Adaptive Path MX East Day 2 - impressions and notes

Day 2 was just as satisfying as day 1. As with the post I did about MX East Day 1, this is a stream of consciousness ramble rather than a deep reflection on the proceedings.

Mark Jones of IDEO started the day with a loosely joined series of experience design insights. He described the ‘new customer,’ who’s expectations are set by the best experiences they have from any industry. The new customer is not loyal to companies that provide lousy experiences, in fact they actively evade old-school lock-in techniques. Then Jones gave three techniques to design experiences for the new customer.

• Look wide: look at the customer’s whole lives; the service ecology that they inhabit; find appropriate, targeted and strategic roles for your services
• Prototype early: prototype services during the brainstorming phase; role play; use front line people and executives together; scenario, story board and video narrative
• Communicate: rally around a single vision; involve stakeholders in the design, then use them to help with communications; visualize the goal - be compelling; prototype branding and marketing to visualize how an offering fits in the market/strategy

Next was Chris Conley from Gravity Tank, speaking about building a creative culture. My favorite insight was that companies are organized to efficient execute their present strategy; innovation is pretty much impossible in a normal corporate environment because they are purpose-built to prevent it. He presented an extended examination of Pixar’s culture of innovation. It’s all from the Incredibles DVD, so you can watch it yourself.

Then came Sara Ulius-Sable of Whirlpool, who gave one of my favorite talks. She is the metrics manager for Whirlpool, which sits atop 22 famous brands, like Kitchen-Aid and Maytag. She spoke about how tactical metrics can have a major impact on strategy. Her team at Whirlpool works with business units, engineering and UX to target dimensions of experience that represent ‘healthy’ for each brand. She listed her four attributes of a good metric.

• Predictive: correlated to business measures and outcomes
• Sensitive: differences are detectable
• Actionable: able to provide clear direction
• Relevant: to brand strategy and product domain

Irene Au from Google gave us 9 ways to succeed as a UX manager. My favorites were #6 “let skeptics fail”; and #7 “deliver excellence on a few projects.” She recommended selecting projects carefully using explicit internal priorities. Be transparent about the UX team’s level of commitment. Avoid coming in late to rescue doomed projects. Avoid projects that aren’t committed to an open collaboration with the UX team. And so forth.

To be continued…

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Adaptive Path MX East Day 1 - impressions and notes

Let me start by saying that MX East was the best conference I have ever attended. It was fairly expensive compared to other conferences I regularly attend, but overall the value I got from the experience was well worth it. It included room and board, which were both quite pleasant. And it included a number of interesting perks, like a wine tasting with Joshua Wesson, the CEO of Best Cellars. If you have a chance to go next year, I highly recommend doing so.

This post is a stream of consciousness ramble rather than a deep reflection on the proceedings. There are a number of pictures up on Flickr. I will cover Day 2 later.

Jesse James Garrett started things with an interesting survey of well designed experiences and failed experiences. Most of the material was lifted from his previous talks elsewhere, but as an intro it was effective. He differentiated between outward projected Brand vs customer felt Experience. He talked about product value, progressing from the raw techology to features to experience. And he introduced a few organizations that got experience from the start, particularly Eastman’s Kodak and Apple’s iPod. Continue reading »

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Return from Italy

We had a great trip. We are going to start up a blog with our travel log. Stay tuned to this channel for details.

For now, we have posted pictures from the first stop: Rome.

Update! We have Florence pictures up too.

I’ve also begun geocoding our pictures, so there is a Flickr map.

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Going to Italy Today

Becky and I are putting the finishing touches on our suitcases. We’re ready. It has been seven years since we took a real two-week vacation.

We are starting in Rome. We see the Vatican our first day there. Then we are spending a week in an apartment in Florence, doing day trips into the Tuscan countryside. We finish up in Venice, Vicenza and Padua.

We will post pictures when we return! See you all in October.

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Switching from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for bookmarking

I use del.icio.us to archive the things I’ve read for later retrieval or for sharing. I use it to help manage to torrent of information coming across my desk (or phone) through email and RSS. It acts like a sort of supplementary memory so can I focus on other things. And on the whole, I have been pretty happy with del.icio.us. It’s always been slow and its interface has always been poor. But it had a number of advanced and rewarding features that made it the only viable option for social bookmarking (more on this later). I tried a handful of other products over the last few years and I wasn’t impressed with any of them - certainly not impressed enough to go through the hassle of moving services. Until now.

I tried Ma.gnolia at least a year ago. Nobody was on it. It was basically a pretty del.icio.us without any substantive new features or interaction improvements over its competitor. It was not something I would switch to. At the time Del.icio.us was still the ugly king of bookmarking. Well, things have changed a bit in the intervening months and my assessment has changed along with them. Ma.gnolia is pretty cool after all and I have made the switch. Continue reading »

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