A is for Advocacy
19 Nov 2010 7:46pm GMT In 2008, Peter Merholz wrote a blog post outlining the Adaptive Path Advocate program, which is the support structure for members of the Adaptive Path staff. He mentioned that it was an experiment and that we were still tinkering with it. It's now two years later, the Advocate Program is going strong, and we're still tinkering with it. Since it's an unconventional approach to managing people, I thought I'd refresh the conversation and share how the program has grown and evolved over time. ...
Soft Skills for Hard Conversations
13 Oct 2010 8:15pm GMT I'm very excited to announce that I recently began work on a book called the UX Team of One, to be published with Rosenfeld Media. In it, I explore the real life organizational situations that UX teams of one face. One important part of UX work (whether on your own or in teams) is the tricky interpersonal stuff that's sometimes referred to as "soft skills." In today's newsletter, I look at one aspect of soft skills for UX: how to introduce challenging design ideas without creating challenging...
Design Citizenry: Sharing What You Know
28 Jul 2010 4:52pm GMT Secrets. We keep them for many different reasons — surprise, protection, delight, shame. In business, where process and methodology are often the main product, secrecy is often competitive advantage. Having an advantage over your competitors is not a bad thing. It’s part of a defensible strategy that gives you a unique position in the marketplace. Your execution on this strategy — your product or service — is why people come to you in the first place. However, I would...
A Blueprint for a Creative Workplace
15 Jul 2010 9:43pm GMT How does a workplace culture support creative thinking? What kinds of cultural elements kill curiosity and team engagement? I’ve been exploring this question for a while, and I’m always on the lookout for new and insightful perspectives on organizational behaviors and how a culture of creativity can be fostered and maintained.In this issue, I share a map of the creative culture landscape that I’ve developed to identify areas of workplace culture that support creativity,...
All y'all. Arguments and principles for doing research and design for families, couples and other independent groups.
2 Jun 2010 6:54pm GMT One may be the loneliest number, but it is commonly the unit at which we practice research, strategy, and design. Most technology experiences are envisioned as solitary experiences: laptops, mobile phones, mp3 players and PDAs are all optimized for the individual, or at least for one person at a time. Email, user accounts, mobile phone numbers, and even social networks presume that people engage with a system in isolation. In the messy real world though, no person is truly an island. Most...