An Adaptive Path Kind of Day
SEATTLE — The day started out like any other. No, really, it did.
The first thing that happened was I fired up the iPod on my way to the bus stop. I subscribe to a number of podcasts that get downloaded every night so each morning is kinda a surprise – I don’t know what I’ll be listening to on any given today.
Today it was Janice Fraser giving a talk at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership program for undergraduates (listen). Janice is CEO of Adaptive Path, a web design consulting company based in San Francisco.
No big deal, I know.
But here’s where things start getting weird. Once I got to work I saw that one of the companies Janice mentioned in her talk, Measure Map, was bought by Google.
“That’s interesting”, I thought. “Let’s check out the Adaptive Path website and see what they say.”
Once there I noticed that Lane Becker and Indi Young were giving a talk in Seattle of all places:
Beyond Usability in Seattle. Indi Young and Lane Becker will be in Seattle for two full days of Beyond Usability: Designing the Complete User Experience this February 15 & 16, 2006.
Darn! Since today is the 15th it dosen’t look like I’ll be able to make it. Then I read a little further down…
We’re coming to Seattle! If you are in the area, please join us for cocktails & networking on Wednesday, Feb. 15 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. at the Hotel Monaco Sazerac Bar, 1101 Fourth Avenue (at the corner of Spring St.), Seattle, WA.
Now we’re talking! This happens to be about a block from my office and almost on the path to my bus stop. Needless to say I re-arranged my day to stop by.
I met some good people including Rob from Whitepages.com, Tom from Children’s Hospital of Seattle, Lisa from Ameriprise, Mary from The Fireman’s Fund, and Mohamed from the BC Tourism Board.
Most participants seemed to be getting good information out of the session. I did hear some concerns about, A) having enough time to implement all of the steps outlined by Adaptive Path while designing the user experience (internal sites, mostly) and, B) setting aside business functionality while focusing on the UI (especially for web-facing applications).
So, what is that? Four different ways that Adaptive Path touched my life today? As I sit here and write this, I realize that I now know way more about these folks than I did when I woke up. And that’s probably okay with Janice.