AlexAitken.net

A couple of years back I half-yawned my way through a UX­Week break­out ses­sion on di­git­al strategy led by Hen­ning Fisc­her from Ad­apt­ive Path. Root cause ana­lys­is fea­tured. The group also went through a couple of mock spend­ing ex­er­cises. Then I re­mem­ber a Venn Dia­gram that had me say­ing, “I have to re­mem­ber this,” be­fore I skipped out early for some San Fran Chinese.

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.

UX Week 2009

Presentation Recap
Jesse James Garrett: The State of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path president and coiner of the term ‘Ajax,’ closed out UX Week 2009 with what he called a “state of the union for UX.” UX, Garrett reminded us, is a field that took root on the web. But over the past 15 years the concept of User Experience has spread to other media and technologies, and has implicated itself in the product and service economies such that today it is perhaps the key informant in the design of holistic, multi-channel experiences.

UX Week 2009

Theme

‘Perception and the senses’ was day three’s theme. Attendees were welcomed with an introduction to the concept of Synesthesia, defined as “a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, such as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”

See the synesthesia movie.

UX Week 2009

Theme

In welcoming us to Day 2 of the conference, Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz promised us we wouldn’t see any product or UI pictures as the goal was to move from technology tools and methods to reflection on the human experience. Day 2′s theme was ‘Expression.’

Keynote Recap
Sarah Jones

Tony Award® winning playwright and performer Sarah Jones brought life and meaning to the concept of personae. Those who weren’t familiar with her work (myself included) were greeted, in the first moments of her presentation, by a very proper English-accented woman whom we assumed would present to us for the next 40 minutes. What we in fact witnessed was a consuming character study that reminded us in a jolting way of the people for whom we work.

UX Week 2009

Aaron Forth: Mint.com – Why Good User Experience and Design are Essential

• Traditional tension exists between user experience and business objectives.
• “User Experience is where strategy must begin.”
• There exists a history of frustration with personal finance tools.
• The brand establishes an affiliation with a certain type of content, which in mint’s case is delivered through its blog.
• Key Aspects of the mint.com UI:
  • Setup in less than 3 minutes
  • Reduction of work and repetitive tasks wherever possible
  • Designing for ‘wow’ moments

UX Week 2009

Matias Duarte: Preparing for Revolution – Designing a Mobile Information Workspace

Matias Duarte is Vice President of Human Interface & User Experience at Palm and joined the company when, as he tells it, it was bordering on irrelevancy, bankruptcy, and ruin. To paraphrase, “The ship was sinking and even the lifeboat I chose to jump into was a rotten leaky one…” Duarte presented on how, from such a position, he was able to drive the thinking and process that led to webOS, the underlying UX foundation of the Palm Pre that Fast Company describes as the “Smartphone [that] Might Turn Palm Around.”