*You know what's fabulous about this interview? This guy
is a famous web design veteran, and hugely influential,
but he's got no words to describe who he is and what he does,
or what his company is in the business of doing.
He's just kind of sitting there folksonomically tagging
himself. Let's listen, shall we?
http://www.nextd.org/02/08/03/index.html
http://www.nextd.org/02/08/03/index.html
Your question about what business is Adaptive Path in touches on something I've been struggling with articulating, (((
And while our website calls us a "user experience consulting company," that's not quite right either. [During the course of this interview, the website changed, and no longer says that.] (((
We, (((Note how he immediately invokes "we" after claiming to speak only for himself))) along with many others in our line of work, adopted the term "user experience" because "design" had become appropriated by graphic designers, and largely reduced to concerns with aesthetics and styling. However, I've noticed of late that when people say "design," they often don't mean styling. (((
And when my colleagues (((blame the colleagues))) talk about "user experience" as a discipline, they typically mean "web user interface." So now our industry is guilty of the same kind of pejoration that happened to "design." ((("Pejoration," noun. the process or condition of worsening or degenerating. In linguistics, the process by which the meaning of a word becomes negative or less elevated over a period of time, as with "silly," which formerly meant "deserving sympathy, helpless or simple," and has come to mean "ridiculous and goofy".)))
Now, where I believe "user experience" is still valuable is in describing an emergent quality of product development. A product or service can have a good or bad user experience. But it's foolish to think that the user experience can be owned by any one group in an organization - it's a result of the accumulation of actions taken by an organization. (((So is language.)))
Now, to actually answer your last question, let me recant what I wrote earlier (((
(((You know what? That MeasureMap thing of his is amazing. Does it MATTER how Merholz got there or what words he employed and discarded on the way? Google bought the thing. The results are the results.)))
http://www.measuremap.com/
