Adaptive Path Podcast

Peter has a conversation with UX Week 2009 presenter Scott McCloud, best known for his book Understanding Comics, and more recently for the comic explaining Google Chrome. They discuss comics, visual expression, Edward Tufte, and the importance of believing in the message.

Co-founder and President of Adaptive Path Jesse James Garrett provides an inside look at the process of creating Aurora, a concept video depicting one possible future user experience for the Web. Jesse talks about the technology trends that will shape the future Web, outlines the challenges of designing a future product, and takes the audience for a behind the scenes look at the creation of the Aurora concept video.

Architects make buildings for people. Information architects make information spaces for people. So how do you build doors, windows, and porches into information spaces? And how do you make it easy for people to find what they want in over 10,000 episodes of a daily TV show? To find out, I had tea with Audrey Chen, Senior Information Architect at Comedy Central who recently created a searchable online archive of 10 years of "The Daily Show". From 24 hour crews who watched and tagged every...

UX Week 2008 kicked off with an on-stage conversation between the President and founder of Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz, and industry legend Don Norman. Don wrote the founding text on user-centered design, entitied, “The Design of Everyday Things”, and also coined the term “user-experience” while at Apple in the early 1990s. They talk about the importance of the semantic differences around common issues in business like ROI from a design perspective, the necessity to look beyond the “all...

In this conversation, Experience Designer Leah Buley from Adaptive Path shares some of the lightweight techniques that she and her team use to explore a variety of solutions quickly and how to enlist the support of non-team members in the UX process. We talk about the video biographies of other team members at Adaptive Path and how all started out from humble beginnings – some in fields that had little to do with what we think about today as traditional UX projects – and how those...

Senior Interaction Deisgner at Adaptive Path, Kim Lenox chats with Kevin Brooks, the Principle Staff Researcher for Motorola Labs about his workshop entitled “Storytelling for User Experience Design”. They discuss various aspects of Kevin’s presentation including the importance of structure and patterns to guide creative endeavors. One critical aspect is listening when striving to be a remarkable storyteller within your own organization. Kim shares her art school experience where the...

Indi Young talks about the importance of continuing to ask “why” enough times to get to the core reasons for any individuals’ behavior or actions and how to convert stories into mental models. Her workshop “Unpacking Stories to Server People Better” includes these themes and more. We discuss the elegant way in which mental models can provide a visual representation of these behaviors and support elements that foster the likely repetition of any action. Indi also talks briefly about how...

Jennifer Bove from Huge and Ben Fullerton from IDEO sat down with me shortly after their presentation to discuss ideas from “We’ll Always Have Paris – What Makes a Memorable Service Experience.” We explore the six key elements about what it takes to design services that keep people coming back for more. We probe into the dynamics of service design from real-world examples of business that provide unique experiences. One shoe company will actually order a pizza for their clients as well...

Dave Wolf, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Cynergy Systems was kind enough to join me for this conversation about his presentation “ben: A Prototype for Democracy in the 21st Century.” We talk about Cynergy’s awarding winning application “ben” at the PhizzPop competition – a National Design and Development Challenge sponsored by Microsoft. “ben” is a series of interconnected, cross-platform applications that leverage the power of Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Presentation...

TVs in trouble! It might be terminal, but Rod Naber and Dan Levine from Current TV urge everyone not lose hope just yet. Discussing their presentation “TV with an API! Current at the Collusion of TV and the Internet” Rod and Dan describe how using their cable and satellite TV network along with their social news website, Current is experimenting across both media, looking for a cure. In this conversation we talk about how Current got started, the power of the community in generating content...

Google’s Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin discuss their experience and ideas from their UX Week workshop about managing UX teams. Topics covered in this conversation include: # Prioritization and project tracking # How to gain insight into career development paths within a user experience team # Finding out about performance management # Discovering how to tailor your own management style Margaret and Graham also tackled other tough issues during their session, such as: #...

Jake Barton gave an emotionally powerful presentation at UX Week entitled “New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space”. As the interaction designers for NPR’s StoryCorps and the co-leaad designer for the National September 11th Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center, Local Projects is creating new paradigms for interaction by tackling physical space. Jake talks with me about how the interaction design process bends, accelerates and sometimes completely falls apart, when applied...

On the last day of UX Week I had the pleasure of chatting with Adaptive Path’s new CEO Michael Meyer about his impressions of UX Week and the opportunities that come with this new position. We discuss his past experiences as a nuclear engineer, time spent in the US Navy, as well as working at some of the leading design firms in the world such as frog and IDEO before arriving at Adaptive Path. My heart-felt thanks to Michael and the entire team at Adaptive Path for allowing Boxes and...

Designers often talk about the results of their work, and even about the design process, but what we don't often talk about is the careful framing of a project that allowed us to do the great work in the first place. Lulu Pachuau and Bob Medcalf of the New Zealand consultancy Provoke share tools and methods Lulu learned at Adaptive Path's UX Intensive workshop and applied to a web strategy project with Industrial Research Limited.

A website costs money. It's your job, as a web professional, to make sure your website is written and designed well, that visitors can use it easily, that it's accurate, and that it's contributing to the achievement of your company's mission.

Peter Merholz and Chip Conley talk about recession planning, service design, systematizing experience design (Joie de Vivre Hotels uses a tool called "experience report cards"), team dynamics, succession planning, and all manner of things.

Peter Merholz talks with Scott Griffith about the balance of user experience and business concerns in the design of Zipcar's unique customer experience.

Brandon Schauer chats with Scott Hirsch, founding principal at Management Innovation Group, a strategy consulting firm that works with clients to understand where to play and how to win in world of rapid (and often disruptive) change in markets, technologies, and business models.

Peter Merholz chats with Don Norman, author and co-author of fourteen books, including the seminal The Design of Everyday Things, and his recently released The Design of Future Things, about what he thinks about user experience design today and what companies need to do to innovate.

Peter Merholz and Julie Peters talk about launching new Virgin brands in North America.