Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Looking at the other reviews for this book, it appears people either love it or hate it. It does make repeated references to the authors' consulting company and the "success stories" they have achieved using the principles in the book. That being said however, if you simply "tune out" the self-gratifying bits, there is quite a bit of useful content in this book and it is laid out well. I started reading it on a cross-country US flight and found that I could not put it down. I did gloss over the "advertorials" for Adaptive Path, but could readily relate to the pitfalls described as my current company (and several previous companies) have fallen into the trap of thinking that customers simply want more features and functions crammed into a single product. I actually applied what I read in the meeting that I was flying to, tuning my comments and suggestions away from features and traditional product design and development methods. Instead I looked at it from the vantage points discussed in the book -- designing for the user experience and designing a "system" of products that work together instead of cramming it all into a single product. And it worked -- we resolved several lingering product issues by looking at the overall experience the user expects instead of the minutiae of the functions and screens.

This book is a wakeup call for product designers and marketers -- stop focusing on features and try to understand what the user really wants to accomplish with the product. While this is not radical new thinking, the straightforward style in which the information and concepts are presented should make it easy for just about anyone to finally achieve a "d'oh!" moment when it comes to designing products and services.

Sooner or later, every developer out there gets sick of the long hours, the process, the verification and the deadlines. Even if we've naturally gravitated towards leadership, the clarion call of management is strong- it's perceived as advancement (potentially into a C* role), comes with the benefit of fewer long hours, you have people you can boss around... all in all good things when looked at in the right light. Yet most developers end up in Development Management, which ends up being more about estimates and balancing resources (aka beancounting), rather than Product Management, which continues apace with the thing I love most about being a Developer: Building Stuff.

When my User Groups' book shipment from O'Reilly came in with a complementary copy of Adaptive Path's "Subject to Change" I was intrigued. From the title, the book is about "Creating great products and services for an uncertain world". It claimed to be a book book that seemed to be all about how to create and manage a product in the everchanging world of the internet. Now, it turns out that my initial enthusiasm was a little naive, since the argument presented in the book was substantially different than what I was expecting. In fact, one of its chapters is titled `Stop Designing "Products"`, which made me more than a little concerned.

Yet having said that, and taking into account the often blatant plugs for Adaptive Path, it turns out the book was exactly what I needed, even though it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundation of the argument, which is that customers aren't attracted to features, they're attracted to an experience. Note that this does not mean bells and whistles - I can have an experience at a circus, but that's not what I'm looking for in a laptop. Instead, it is critical to look at what your customer is actually trying to accomplish, and to make the experience of accomplishing that task as positive as possible. Layering on feature after feature is good only if the original intended task experience is not compromised, otherwise it simply adds noise to what should be an all-signal experience. In other words, good products are well designed, by which they don't mean pretty, nor that they have an elegant software implementation. Design is instead used in the inclusive sense- all aspects of the product, experience and execution are carefully considered and integrated into one seamless whole.

This foundation is then built on in Chapter 2 by presenting the idea that the aforementioned experience is a strategic decision, and then clearly defining what that does and does not mean. Those of you who are trying to achieve some flavor of competitive advantage (aka differentiation aka edge etc etc) should definitely read this chapter, because it provides a long list of clarifications given the context. Quite frankly, the whole thing reads like a snopes article that slowly dismantles many lessons learned in academic marketing classes. My favorite one is the ideal of Parity - the misconception that a product can be competitive simply by matching features with the competition. See, a feature is simply that: An implemented piece of functionality on a product spec sheet. If accessing and using said feature requires an advanced degree in astrophysics doesn't matter; the mere fact that the feature exists makes the product competitive.

With the supporting framework of their argument is clearly established, and Chapter 3 puts in context of previously established marketing approaches. When your focus is on the experience and the user's motivations, habits such as market segmentation rapidly get turned upside down. You can no longer assume that the consumer is some faceless drone who exists to give you money, but instead have to give that person a face, a background a motivation, and an objective. A segment rapidly evolves into a persona, and eventually loses its distinction altogether- you're no longer sculpting your message for a particular group or persona, but are instead approaching individuals to discover how you can best meet their needs and improve their experience.

Yet none of this can be accomplished without information, which is usually garnered by research (Chapter 4). Interestingly enough, the book does not necessarily go into individual research methods, but focuses more on the importance of qualitative over quantitative research and the need to involve every team member. Research, as is stated, too often happens in a strategy or research group independent of the team that will actually implement their findings, and thus the opportunity for consumer or persona empathy is lost within minutes of the powerpoint presentation. It is only by keeping everyone involved up front (though perhaps not directly contributive) that information gained is relevant, actionable, and provides durable insight.

Chapter 5 then takes us full circle back to the beginning, and really drives the idea that success is not driven by features, capabilities or marketing, but by the experience of the customer. It's not just the experience of completing a specific task that is meant here, but the entire support system ancillary to that task. You might have an iPod, but without an iTunes all you have is a pretty piece of plastic. Find out what the customer wants to accomplish, figure out what it'll take to perform all steps of that, and build a system to do so simply and elegantly.

At this point, the book could have ended and been a pretty effective piece on product design theory based on experience. It has taken us from the initial presentation of the idea all the way through the strategic advantage and full circle back to the beginning. Instead, it continues on and picks apart the actual implementation strategies, beginning with Design in Chapter 6. This is a beast of a chapter and not for the faint of heart, but is nevertheless utterly critical for understanding the depth of the argument. Design is picked apart by discipline, target, competency, strategic importance and implementation, and the chapter itself does a remarkable job breaking down common misconceptions. Design is necessary, strategic, and is presented as a mindset rather than a discipline, one that everyone must implement to properly contribute to the delivery.

Chapter 7 then goes into the nitty gritty of implementation by speaking about agile development methods. This is where the developer in me went squee, because for the first time I saw Agile presented within a strategic context rather than a reactive context. Too often when management hears "Agile Development" the first thing that comes to mind is "Development will be faster", or more responsive, and in many cases this is true. Even so, the book presents it as an integral part of experience based design, and discusses how its rapid iterative nature can be used to convert a design or motion prototype iteratively into a fully functioning application, while allowing user research and experience evaluation (and revision) at every step of the way. If you've ever had to say "That's what's written in the requirements, we can't change it now" this chapter is for you. Lets face it- issues and problems will arise during development no matter what happens, but if you keep everyone on deck (and not siloed into different expertise groups) you'll be able to confront it much faster.

And with that, Chapter 8 closes the book. I'd copy the two pages that compose it here verbatim if I didn't think there'd be conflict of interest issues, but safe it to say that it is the conclusion and summary of the entire book. The only thing certain is change, and here's how you deal with it.

Overall, a very good book, but I do have a few pointed comments. First of all, the cases presented within the book too often follow the pattern of "Here's company X, known as a genius at Y, and here's their process/methodology/etc." The academic in me chokes at statements like that, because they imply causality - that their process is the reason why they are so well known and respected, when in reality it could be something completely different. The book itself warns of making surface level assumptions like that, so I'm fairly irritated that they do so themselves.

The other one is the mixture of authoring tones. At times casual, at times formal, it's clear that more than one person wrote this book. When I'm reading a structured section about research and am suddenly approached in a conversational tone, my brain kicks me out of the narrative (and thus my experience with the book is diminished). Even so, I'd recommend this book to any marketer, strategist, developer... or, well, anyone who plays a role in a product production process. At 165 pages it's a light read, the ideas are straightforward and well explained, and though they aren't often supported as rigorously as I would prefer, the book itself make an excuse for that: If you spend too much time backing up your argument, you lose the time you'd spend on determining where your argument should take you.

I was disappointed when I got my pre-order of this book. At a scant 160 pages, I was skeptical that it could offer very much insight.

On reading it, I was proven correct. Much of the book was nothing more than an extended advertisement for Adaptive Path. Case studies were too short to learn much from. The only case study really discussed in depth was of Target's new prescription bottles, which have been discussed more in depth and more usefully in too many other books.

The book's eight chapters are full of short sections; many of them read as though they are blog entries. They're strung together with little regard for content or context. The seventh chapter, a flawed discussion of agile development, is completely worthless. The book could have been so much better if the authors had taken the time and effort to better consider their arguments and write a more cohesive work.

If you can look past the book's many shortcomings, there are some interesting nuggets in there. Sadly, the useful bits comprise less than 10% of the book, but they're good enough to earn this book two stars.

On one level, I was quite gratified to read this book, being as it is a wholehearted affirmation in favour of effective research in the context of product conception - not just product development and enhancement. Being schooled in social research myself and practiced in market research, it has been a continuing mystery to me why it seems that only under certain stones can one find effective experiential research taking place in interactive product development (which is where these authors have most of their background).

Nonetheless, however well-intentioned the messages, I find that the real-world as presented in this book is a partisan world. I also find there is a bit too much gloss, which leads to the professional landscape in which this book stands being incorrectly assessed and in some places, cheapened.

For example, it's in more than one place in the book that the discipline of marketing is associated merely with the messages around a product and not with the core development of a product itself; and that marketing research is considered to be the minion of an advertising master domineering the consumer as a message receiver with exhortations designedly to serve communications that are generally a one-way traffic. Now even I could see through this one. I spent a lot of my undergraduate time interviewing people - either face-to, in groups or on the phone, and although much of this was quite non-penetrative as regards the real sounding reaches of the under-running consumer waters, I did manage to get glimpses; fleeting but definite glimpses, of marketing research going a lot further than that and pointedly in the development of some very high-profile products.

I once worked on a project where we spent 3 hours interviewing individuals one-to-one about a postulated new car design, going into stacks of detail around all the corners and curves to all the internal gadgetry; and if I was doing this, albeit serving the research design of a very good and innovative agency; what were all the other research agencies doing? They must have been doing the same thing. And lo and behold, later on I discovered that they were. Overall then, I feel it's a bit crass of these authors to conceive of marketing and marketeering in the way that they do. There is a lot more work done on product development than these guys realise.

At other places in the book, I became a bit worried about the partisan aspect and often when I least expected it. I know that Adaptive Path is a company and I know the work they do; but they are not the only people out there doing it and nor, necessarily, are they the best authority. In places, this book reads like an expanded White Paper or an extended philosophy brochure. I don't know how many times I came across sentences or phrases beginning "At Adaptive Path....", but it was way too many for the book to be taken seriously as a piece of intellectual authority.

There were other issues too. A remark about shavers particularly rankled with me. The authors danced over the subject, saying something about there having been no innovation around user experience in the shaver market (page 6-7), and that functional and technical considerations had driven innovation in this area. Really? Had these boys done any proper work? I once went to an exhibition which showcased the work of a designer who had spent almost the entirety of his professional career as head of design at the German electronics company Braun. This chap designed shavers that were nothing short of miracles in form and function - truly fantastic, performant objects; and for so may years Braun has been such a durable business. And yet here were these authors glossing over the entirety of this industry and inspiration. I think personally I'd always rather be a Braun - someone who has done it repeatedly and consistently, made money and livelihoods for thousands; rather than just be in Adaptive Path who seem to be a morphable and morphing consultancy who only want to capture my intellectual castle any way they can, tell me what they think I want to hear and potentially risk me sending my product development effort down only their path, and not the one perhaps best fit.

So I'm suspicious - more than that, I suspect self-interest. This book, for all it's seeming plausibility, for me is just that - plausible in the proper sense of that word - possibly specious - well-seeming, with underneath, the potential to be harmful. The writing is too good. It's all too smooth - too glossed. It's sales copy.

For all those issues though, the book in itself could be a reasonable distraction for some light reading if you can find it in a library, borrow from a friend or download it illegally somewhere. Whether it belongs being for sale on an e-tailer site I can't comment.

I just finished reading Subject to Change (yeah, I just put the book down) and I think it's a great and easy read on experience design and innovation.

I'm convinced the folks at Adaptive Path sure know what they're talking about because they were able to write a book that's less than 170 pages and be able to provide very good and conscise insights on customer/user research, agile methods, strategy and experience design.

The authors submit that qualitative data and research is as important as the quantitative methods (e.g. usability testing & evaluation versus interviews and observation). My key takeaway is really the importance of context for you and your customer when developing new services, interfaces and customer touch points.

The book does cite a lot of Adaptive Path's experience in dealing with companies and it highlights how they were able to help them to be more customer-centric and adopt a design culture. I wish there were more specific examples on how they went about in doing customer research and implementing design strategies. The authors are able to make the topics "industry agnostic" and work even if you're not in the IT field.

Subject to Change reads very much like a blog because there are very short sections and chapters, but that makes it easy to put the book down when you want to reflect on the points the authors are raising.

I got this book about product marketing because I wanted to gain insight on the marketing of my own product http://www.code-roller.com so I was a little frustrated by the overall direction and focus of the book which is to motivate the reader into hiring Adaptive Path. All four authors either currently work for or have recently worked for that marketing company. According to the on-line edition of the book, there are twenty eight references to Adaptive Path in the content.

While light on theory, the book does give good advice. This advice is mostly in the form of what not to do. This most probably reflects Adaptive Path's pain points in earlier engagements with customers. Don't use competition as your main driver. Don't depend on novelty. Don't get stuck on research or reporting. Don't get stuck on product design. Don't over-engineer. Don't get too confident about what you think your customers want.

If there is only one important take away from this book, then I believe that it would be this. It's all about the user experience. What you should be focusing your design efforts on is the user experience. What you should be focusing your strategy on is the user experience. The only thing you do that your customers care about is their experience of your product or service.

They heavily advocate using an Agile methodology. They agree with early prototyping, failing fast, and continuous customer involvement. They are lukewarm on the SPARC model.

I think I had the essence of this book by the time I got to page 30: Times have changed, and packing in a checklist of features is not enough to gain marketshare anymore.

They talk a lot about having an "experience stragegy". I understand this to be building a product by aiming to meet the user's needs. Google Calendar is a good example. They stole a large portion of the online calendar market, even though users were already heavily invested into Yahoo and Hotmail's email/calendar. They did this by sitting down with people who used calendars a lot, and finding out what they wanted in a calendar (not exactly rocket science, I know).

Kodak is another company that had a developed experience stragegy. When Kodak cameras first came out, they reduced the task of taking photos from one that required you to be a technician, to something anyone can do. They did this by selling the entire "experience" - you purchase Kodak film rolls (before this film was on expensive and fragile plates), put it into your Kodak camera, point & shoot, then send the film into Kodak for processing. Apple is another good example of a company that has an experience strategy.

There are lots of other interesting examples and an anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book. There is even a whole chapter on Agile Development, both from software and hardware perspectives.

In summary, the message of the book is that we need to design products and services that deliver a positive experience to the user (notice "user", they take issue with the word "consumer"). The book expounds on this with much detail and examples, but I believe this is the main message.

Unfortunately I found this book extremely hard to get through, due to the "dry" writing style. It made me feel as if I were listening to a boring professor's lecture. There may be better books on this subject, something from Seth Godin for example.

Subject to Change is short, concise, and very well-written. It offers up insights on how companies can be more flexible to meet market changes by working in new ways for solid customer research, product design, and agile approaches, among other things.

The book's nicely done and is filled with good examples of how some companies have come up with concepts which completely changed the industry. Kodak's first box camera is an example of a product which fundamentally changed how companies treated their customers. ("You press the button and we do the rest.") Kodak also gets slammed for their ignorant approach to the digital camera age -- failing to adapt to a changing environment isn't a great way to run a business...

This same theme runs through the book: approaches that have worked wonders for companies contrasted with flops that haven't. Successful approaches almost always come from businesses which have spent time understanding their customer base; flops come from companies which do silly things like create hardware which is feature-scarce, expense, and hard to use without having ever talked to a customer.

I liked most all the chapters and found the ones on design competency and agile particularly interesting. No surprise about me liking the agile chapter since I'm a nut about agile software development! There are also a number of great discussions on brainstorming UIs, layouts, and product prototypes, something which I think gets little or no coverage in other works.

Overall it's a good read.

This book makes the business case for user experience design (UX). It shows how businesses need to think about designing compelling, positive experiences for people, not merely products and services. It is a fine book, and more important, a timely one.

Design, the book argues, is a competitive advantage and should be a core organizational competency. In the past this argument was rarely understood. Today, you simply must understand it. This book will help anyone who doesn't understand it yet, who doesn't really get it, and that means most of the business world.

It reminded me of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper. Written a decade ago, Inmates made the business case for interaction design (ID). "Subject to Change" makes a similar case for user experience design (UX; the distinctions between ID and UX and information architecture (IA) are decidedly blurry).

I think this book does a better job.

For one reason, the scope is broader, more holistic, and more integrated. This kind of perspective couldn't have been introduced a decade ago. Back then, few of us, even the most prescient of us, truly understand how deeply our lives would change once the connections between our digital tools and information artifacts -- the Web, iPods, laptops, blogs, wifi, cell phones, email, wikis, etc -- became sufficiently rich, pervasive, and continuous. This picture is becoming more clear every day. "Subject to Change" synthesizes the design-thinking approach that has emerged in recent years, reflecting not only changes in technology but also our adoption and uses of technology, and explaining what this means for business.

Subject to Change also has a more positive tone than Inmates. From the title on down, Inmates seemed born of frustration and anger. It always struck me as an odd title given the audience. The book was clearly aimed at business, yet the tone seemed aimed at our personal experience of technology. Business people are not, in a business context, angry with technology. They're afraid of it. They don't see a clear path through the digital thicket.

"Subject to Change" explains the path offered by experience design. It argues that this approach is both necessary and obvious, and that other paths are insignificant in comparison or no longer offer much of a competitive advantage (though eventually, as with everything in business, once enough people adopt a UX mindset, this advantage will be lessened and the search for new ones will go on).

Business is the primary audience for this book. It is not aimed specifically at designers (my sense is that critics of the book are designers who know most of his material already and want more detail than the book seeks to provide).

Yet it will also speak to many practitioners in the field, and students as well. I teach IA, ID, and UX in a university graduate program. I routinely encounter students struggling to understand of what this field is about. Part of my job is to give them a broader perspective. This book will make my job a lot easier.

I have my critiques of the book, but they're mostly academic or fall outside the authors goals for this book. For example, ethical aspects of how integrated experiences, like the iPod, create their own kind of lock-in that adroitly couple technological, cultural, economic, and psychological forces. Another critique is the business-centric nature of the book. There is almost no mention the important of UX to non-commercial and public-service settings: education, government, libraries, NGOs, etc.

But these are not useful critiques because they attack the book for being something it, quite clearly, is not intended to be. Valid criticisms are not necessarily useful ones.

The ideas underlying user experience design (as well as interaction design and information architecture) need to be understood more widely. And accepted. And become a core part of how we design our world. Right now, this is one of the best books that explains the value of this approach.

It is a solid piece of work, and a timely, necessary contribution.

I'm 100 painful pages in to this 160 page book that seems so far to be at least 100 pages too long. In a nutshell: think about design. Oh - and think different. There. You don't have to buy one. The "quotes-by-interesting-people" sprinkled throughout the book only serve to show you that meaningful ideas and insightful thoughts lie elsewhere - in other books that you've probably ALREADY READ. I am forcing my way through it just to see if there's a twist that reveals this isn't just an painfully long and patronizing Adaptive Path credentials presentation.