Puget Sound SIG CHI - Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path Talk April 14, 2008

Topic:
Todd will talk about how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish. He will be drawing on material covered in his just released book, “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.”

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.

Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

Bio:
Todd Wilkens is a design researcher for Adaptive Path. Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design, Todd holds a passionate belief that by truly understanding people, we can create compelling product and service experiences as well as real value. Todd's research experience ranges from online communities to digital video to youth, religion, and culture. He has worked on research, strategy, and design projects for a diverse group of clients including large multi-channel media organizations to Internet start-ups. He is adept at working with people from different backgrounds to synthesize product, business, technology, and user needs into cohesive strategies and designs.

With academic training in sociology, information science, and computer science, he is also well versed in social science theory and a wide-ranging toolkit of research methods from ethnography and interviewing to statistical analysis and eye-tracking. Todd publishes and speaks regularly on design research and human-centered design generally. He also teaches courses and workshops in design research, interaction design, information architecture, and sociology at professional events as well as at several universities and colleges.

Time:
Monday—April 14th, 2008

6:00 pm networking and refreshments

7:00 pm Presentation

Job announcements to follow the presentation.

Official Website: http://pssigchi.acm.org/html/index.html