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.By Peter Merhoz

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 …

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 C…

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 imp…

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 …

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 asp…

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 visu…

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 …

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.…

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 ac…

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 # Di…

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 physi…

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 fr…

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 Intens…

Andrew Crow is a senior experience designer, trainer, and speaker at Adaptive Path. He has a passion for developing innovative design solutions for customers' needs.Initially a print and web designer, Andrew moved into information architecture and interaction design to promote holistic user experiences to corporate clients. Andrew has over 12 years…

Andrew Crow is a senior experience designer, trainer, and speaker at Adaptive Path. He has a passion for developing innovative design solutions for customers' needs.Initially a print and web designer, Andrew moved into information architecture and interaction design to promote holistic user experiences to corporate clients. Andrew has over 12 years…

Andrew Crow is a senior experience designer, trainer, and speaker at Adaptive Path. He has a passion for developing innovative design solutions for customers' needs. Initially a print and web designer, Andrew moved into information architecture and interaction design to promote holistic user experiences to corporate clients. Andrew has over 12 year…

Part one of our intervew with Chiara Fox from Adaptive Path. Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has developed successful information architectures for intranets, informational websites, and e-commerce sites for Fortune 100 and 500 companies. Chiara specializes in content analysis, metadata and taxonomy developmen…

Part two of our intervew with Chiara Fox from Adaptive Path. Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has developed successful information architectures for intranets, informational websites, and e-commerce sites for Fortune 100 and 500 companies. Chiara specializes in content analysis, metadata and taxonomy developmen…

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.By Adaptive Path

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.By Peter Merholz

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

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.By Brandon Schauer

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.By Peter Merholz

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

Jesse James Garrett and Secil Watson talk about managing customer experiences through Wells Fargo's web sites and its phone and electronic servicing channels.By Jesse James Garrett

Henning addresses the question "Should small businesses have mission statements too" and talks about the value of the "Elevator Pitch" technique.By Henning Fischer

Bryan and Sarah introduce you to 10 techniques used by creative management professionals to get great work from a wide range of employees.By Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson

Peter and Jared Spool discuss how the best products never offer their users an incomplete feeling experience.By Peter Merholz

Brandon lays out an experience centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and againBy Brandon Schauer

In this discussion about presence, identity, and attention in social web architecture the panel talks about core IA related issues.By Andrew Crow

Leah teaches techniques that any individual can use to generate and refine ideas, outlining flexible, simple activities that can be used quickly, wherever they're neededBy Leah Buley

Peter discusses how focusing on consumers' experience of new products and services through rapid prototyping and other means can inform and shape designBy Peter Merholz

Dan and Kim share their experiences in how to think through the UX design process and the many tools to help guide their thinking like research-based design and injecting users directly into designs.By Dan Harrelson and Kim Lenox

Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Peter Merholz provide insights about how prosperous businesses can — and should — use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.By Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Peter Merholz

Todd shares his thoughts on the emerging field of service design and its implications for product design.By Todd Wilkens

Mike discusses how information processing is integrated into everyday objects, and the 'desktop' metaphor is obsolete. This post-desktop model of computing is known as ubiquitous computing.By Mike Kuniavsky

Peter participates in a panel with Andy Budd of ClearLeft and Hammad Khan (persona creative) to discuss the creation of a positive user experience and the importance of user experience design.By Peter Merholz

Understanding the psychology behind how users relate to a product is the key to its lasting success. Users tend to anthropomorphize, or ascribe human personality traits to products they use. Products with long-term success have developers who recognize the identity and personality of the product they want to convey. They create integrity with the p…

Changing working environments, complex business requirements, projects, and technologies are placing new demands on user experience designers. The site architectures, content inventories, wireframes, personas, and creative briefs that once formed the keystone of our user experience toolkit, only represent a portion of our responsibilities now. This…

For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance important principles like consistency, creative freedom and effective problem solving, all under stressful conditions. Ryan Freitas discusses these and other parallels between the worlds of the cook and the designer. Read more about Ryan…

People love their mobile phones and they love the Internet. Based on user affinity for each, accessing Internet content on a mobile device should be a beloved and integral part of people’s lives. However, despite development and investment by carriers, handset manufacturers, and content providers, mobile web usage has not enjoyed the success that w…

Designing for a desired user experience requires an actionable understanding of the emotions associated with that desired experience. This requires user experience research. While user experience research typically focuses on analyzing “clicks” and usability, the emotional aspects of how it feels to use a website or how people wish an experience fe…

There has been significant interest lately from the business community in the value of design research and design thinking. This is particularly true when it comes to the very early front-end of the design process. Generative Tools help create a shared design language that designers, researchers and other stakeholders can use to visually communicat…

Learn the true power of the sticky note — yes, stickies! — to quickly and effectively organize data, visualize themes, and identify patterns.. We’ll start with an overview of how Adaptive Path uses sticky notes (aka: Post-Its) in user experience projects. Then, we’ll jump into a set of hands-on activities to test your stickies aptitude and gain exp…

With the rise of YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace, there is a clear trend toward social design, or designing for the social lives of users. What isn’t so clear is how to design for different social situations that may not have appeared on the web before. To help you attack this problem, we’ll look not only at current good and poor examples of social…

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this co…

Millions of people from around the world come to eBay every day, and the eBay user experience design group applies a range of design and research methodologies to understand and address the perceptions and needs of its widely varied customer base. Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop will co-lead this session, sharing some of their methods for collaborating …

Interactive behaviors are plastic, flexible things, always subtly shifting in response to the actions of the user. As such, they can be hard to pin down on the printed page. Demos can help express the vision of the design, but the nitty-gritty details must be committed to paper if the design is to survive the development rollercoaster. The challeng…

Too often in the field of interaction design, designers only look at other digital products for inspiration. But this narrow stance soon leaves designers devoid of any fresh ideas. If we were to look at the physical world around us, there are sources of inspiration that interaction designers have barely tapped. We should examine mechanical objects …