UX Business

Today I stopped by a favourite local bakery (Uprising Breads) to get an iced latte and Avocado and Hummus sandwich. The people there are always friendly and that sandwich always terrific. The problem arose when the barista served me my coffee.

There's been quite a bit of buzz recently about the "daily deals" business, what with Groupon's upcoming IPO and the advent of competitors such as Google Offers.

The term innovation is often used, in conversations that I’ve been around, to describe product innovation. If you haven’t invented a new product or greatly enhanced a technology, then it’s not called innovation.

A couple of weeks ago Justin and I went to the Corporate Affiliates Day at University of Washington’s Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) program.

Last Fall, Karyn, Jessica and I attended the Gel Health Conference in New York. It was an amazing experience.

In 2008 I led a large intranet implementation project where the senior sponsors demanded that there be a governance plan developed. But when asked what governance meant, they were mostly interested in making sure that content was updated and that there be some form of oversight to ensure that business units were using the same platform for sharing information.

One of the main attributes of the design work we at ADGi do (and when I say design I mean interaction design and information architecture, not so much visual design) is that all of it is evidence-based. That is, all of it, and I really mean all of it, every interaction, every node in the site map, is driven out of user research and expert analysis.

In November I was lucky enough to be invited by my boss Karyn to go with her and Carol, our Senior Account Strategist, to a morning program offered through the Entrepreneurs Organization, called “Harvard Mini Business Program – Service Excellence Your Competitive Advantage

The On Demand Books ‘Espresso’ machine, that prints out a fully bound book in minutes, seems much in the news lately.

Around the time Alan Cooper was giving his really great talk An Insurgency of Quality at this year’s IxDA, I was giving a talk that came to some of the same conclusions from a different starting point.