For the second year running I’ve spent four late summer days at Adaptive Path’s UX Week in San Francisco. The 2009 edition saw me diligently posting day-by-day notes and accounts. This year I simply relay quotes and sources while steering clear of attribution. The conference was again killer, the perspectives at the same time refreshing and affirming, the challenges plenty and increasing, the inspiration ubiquitous and palpable. Thank you Merholz and co. for another unqualified success.
flexibility vs. fidelity?We wanted to design a product with less complexity.?Question your questions.?Our blend of technologies changes and shifts while our psychology remains the same.?Solitude is generative.?walk-up usability?We believe in small teams because they’re efficient and fast.?Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods you’re going to lose everything.?Engineers as system thinkers are always looking for the rules.?How do we design for disconnection??touchpoints?montages?When people laugh is when we pay attention.?We march backwards into the furture.?We express individualism but value community, express independence but value relationships…?free hugs?acquire, parse, represent, interact?differentiating needs from solutions?The better the design the easier, deeper, more, stronger…?fluid motion?The first time is cognition, the second time RE-cognition.?metagame?It pays to be bold.?You are the packaging for the product.?We’ll never have less data.?From the harvesting of ice to the warehousing to the appliance manufacturers, no one company successfully spanned an iteration.?Let’s look at the forest and the trees simultaneously?28.7 percent of the world is on the internet.?The wonderlik test shows that the quarterback is actually not the smartest guy on the field. Instead it’s the center, whose job it is to make sure the QB isn’t killed.?With each layer of fidelity less imagination is required.?Design for the reality instead of the ideal.?We’re trying to get more designers coding and more programmers designing.?Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.?Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration.?Words are tricky, they carry baggage.?I can write an article about it or I can get people hooked into the data and interacting with it.?The most effective persuasion won’t feel like persuasion at all.?Darwin plus track changes?There’s too much stuff – we live in a stuff-a-lanche?magic skateboards?If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product you’ve waited too long.?Victorian internet?revolution through evolution?Attitude-Behavior Fallacy?the long slow death of the middle man?pleasure/pain, hope/fear, acceptance/rejection?cultural inversion?Blogs are starting to express themselves in stripped-down designs by taking advantage of new typographic capabilities.?Execs. seem to trust outside sources more than their own teams.?Along with motivation and bold moves comes the risk of failure.?Can a business succeed without creating a daily habit??content layer, UI layer?Credibility comes from trust which is based on positive experiences that stem from opportunities to show value.?web plus one?People don’t want features.?inflection point?If I come along and just re-arrange your desk one day you’re going to be pissed!?If we can understand the way the web works and we can work the same way, we’re going to be a lot more successful.?Even in a 20-person company customer support folks aren’t talking to developers.?Encourage fishing.?rough consensus and running code?native to the web?In-house design teams are our heros… but they face challenges.?There are no quick wins.?Overreacting to data often results in micro-optimizations that come with expenses.?Empower people to focus by saying ‘no’.?pizzability?Information-Action Fallacy?Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.?dot behaviors, span behaviors, path behaviors?More important than motivation is ability.?For us the greatest risk is taking no risk at all.?At the end of the day we make decisions based on gut and common sense while using data to inform.
Adam Mossier (Facebook)
B.J. Fogg (Stanford)
Paula Welling (Adaptive Path)
Cameron Gray (Mindflash)
Andrew Crow (Adaptive Path)
Jeffrey Veen
Ben Fry
Michael Wesh (Kansas State)
Christi Zuber (Kaiser Permanente)
Chris McCarthy (Kaiser Permanente)
Christian Palino (Adaptive Path)
Ben Fullerton
Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo)
Sarah Ohrvail (Bonnier)
Wyatt Mitchell (Wired Magazine)
I hope your “corporate writeup” is less of a stuff-a-lanche than this…