Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design

by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba

Overview

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.

Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596516833
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/28/2008
Series:	Adaptive Path
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Peter Merholz is President and one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, he has been instrumental in developing the company's world-class consulting, training, and public events. Peter began his work at Adaptive Path with a focus on information architecture, and has since developed expertise in product strategy, user research, and practice development.

Peter's personal blog, http://peterme.com, and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his unique ability to foresee what's coming next in information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. He has the perhaps dubious distinction of coining the term "blog" in 1999, when blogging was still a nascent genre.

As a design researcher for Adaptive Path, Todd Wilkens has worked on research, strategy, and design projects for a diverse group of clients, from large multi-channel media organizations to Internet startups. He is especially skilled at working with people from different backgrounds to synthesize product, business, technology, and user needs into cohesive strategies and designs.

With academic training in sociology, information science, and computer science, Todd is also well versed in social science theory and a wide-ranging toolkit of research methods from ethnography and interviewing to statistical analysis and eye-tracking. He publishes and speaks regularly on design research and human-centered design.

Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks on, writes about, and practices design as a means to create value. He has *over * a decade of experience developing new user experiences on the Web, desktops, and products. His passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World.

Brandon holds two master-level degrees from schools with the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago and an MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

David Verba is the Technology Advisor for Adaptive Path and the Chief Technical Officer of Emmett Labs. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies, including Sun, Java, Oracle, and a variety of open source technologies.

In 2000, David launched the WholePeople.com initiative as part of Whole Foods, Inc. He was also a core developer for CodeZoo.net, a web site for programmers sponsored by O'Reilly Media. He provided essential technical leadership to Measure Map, a free web service (now part of Google) that tracks blogs' traffic stats.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Predicting the Future Has Never Been Easy; Chapter 1: The Experience Is the Product; 1.1 You Press the Button, We Do the Rest; 1.2 Increasing the Importance of Design; 1.3 Technology, Features, Experience; 1.4 The Experience Is the Product; Chapter 2: Experience as Strategy; 2.1 Competitive Advantage: A Little History; 2.2 Escaping Parity; 2.3 The Escape of Novelty; 2.4 Why Experience Matters; 2.5 An Experience Strategy Isn't a Brand Strategy; 2.6 Embodied Experience Strategy; 2.7 Creating Effective Experience Strategies; Chapter 3: New Ways of Understanding People; 3.1 Empathy; 3.2 Old Models and Their Problems; 3.3 What's Been Missing?; 3.4 A New Model; 3.5 Embracing Complexity; Chapter 4: Capturing Complexity, Building Empathy; 4.1 Why Research Is Essential; 4.2 Capturing Complexity with Qualitative Research; 4.3 Where Organizations Go Wrong; 4.4 Making Research an Organizational Competency; Chapter 5: Stop Designing "Products"; 5.1 Doing It Right; 5.2 Doing It Wrong: A Classic Mistake; 5.3 Doing It Right Online; 5.4 When Services Behave Like Products; 5.5 Symphony or Cacophony?; 5.6 Don't Over-Engineer; 5.7 The System Is the Product; Chapter 6: The Design Competency; 6.1 Obstacles to Adopting Experience Design; 6.2 Understanding and Affecting Experience; 6.3 About Design; 6.4 Design as an Organizational Competency; 6.5 Advantages of a Design Competency; 6.6 The Idea Lab; 6.7 Creating the Long "Wow!"; 6.8 Four Steps to Your Long "Wow!"; 6.9 Relinquishing Control; 6.10 DIY Design: The Customer as Designer; 6.11 Design Competency: A Strategic Advantage; Chapter 7: The Agile Approach; 7.1 The Agile Manifesto; 7.2 Less than Agile: The Waterfall Approach; 7.3 The Emergence of Lean Manufacturing; 7.4 The Agile Approach; 7.5 The Iterative Approach: A Little History; 7.6 How Companies Create Agile Environments; 7.7 The Shifting Landscape: Embedded and Networked Systems; 7.8 MIT's Fab Lab; 7.9 Overcoming Obstacles; 7.10 How to Get There; Chapter 8: An Uncertain World; Bibliography;