Adaptive Path MX Conference in San Francisco
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path
I had the very fortunate opportunity to spend the past two days at Adaptive Path’s “MX San Francisco: Managing Experience through Creative Leadership” conference in San Francisco. It was an all around outstanding experience and my hats off to everyone involved that make this event a huge success. Without hesitation, it's easy for me to say that this was an extremely relevant, thought-provoking conference that related directly to my job at hand.
Conference speakers included:
- Tim Brown of IDEO
- Jeffrey Veen of Google
- Irene Au of Google
- Scott Berkun author of The Art of Project Management
- Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering,
- Caterina Fake of Yahoo
- Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path
- Brooks Protzmann of Dell
- Adam Richardson of frog design
- Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path
- Sara Ulius-Sabel of Whirlpool
- Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path
- Jennie Winhall of RED
My brain is chock-full of ideas triggered not only by the speakers, but also by the conversations that I had with other attendees. For those that haven't had the chance to seek out conferences or workshops related to their own profession, I highly recommend it. For me, it was a huge breath of fresh air.
Once I've had a chance to analyze my notes a bit more, I'll put up a summary of my key takeaways. One major theme that seemed to resonate with many people was just the continued pattern of organizations to think about "building products" instead of "designing experiences." However, designing experiences is much more than designers hypothesizing what they think users might want -- it's about designers testing their ideas with their target audience using user-centered design principles. Also, several discussions related to "experience strategy" arose that have challenged what I know about experience design, ethnographic research and design thinking.
Most of the attendees were either high-level managers responsible for experience design like programs at medium to large corporations (primarily in the technology or financial sectors). Other attendees included government agencies, consultants and even a couple of start-up companies.
I've uploaded some of the photos I took from the conference to Flickr.
