excerpt from a Wired magazine article: Innovation Consultants While the digital pioneers of the late 90s were rapidly disappearing, the heavyweights of the product design world re-crafted themselves as consultants at the forefront of innovation leveraging rapidly changing consumer expectations and a renewed interest in human-insights. IDEO took the lead in embracing a broader application of design “thinking” that is divorced from the shiny outputs of websites, consumer products or digital gadgetry. Working closely with A.G. Lafley of P&G, IDEO legitimized this broader notion of human centered design (HCD) as a powerful (and scalable) approach to innovation in large organizations. I was fortunate to join Frog at the time and helped drive our transformation from a firm organized around design outputs—products, packaging, brands, websites—to one organized around integrated disciplines like design research, interaction design and experience strategy. This shift in strategy allowed Frog to play a similarly transformative role for large clients like GE and Disney. In this new era, one of the most talked about fields to emerge from design was User Experience. One of the first firms to embrace UX was Adaptive Path (AP)1, a startup founded in 2001 by a group of Bay Area designers including Jesse James Garrett—who put his stamp on the concept of UX with the celebrated infographic “The Elements of User Experience”. AP rose to prominence not just through the quality of their work, but by building a side business running UX conferences that introduced the concept of user experience design—as well as the AP way of working—to product managers from every conceivable industry. That was a pretty clever way to build your client base but hard to see how this wing of their business will now survive the Capital One merger. Will senior stakeholders at Capital One be happy to continue to share AP’s UX gospel with the folks from Fidelity or American Express—both of whom are building robust UX design teams?
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:24:50 +0000
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