Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design |  | Authors: Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book
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Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 93874
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0596516835
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.575
EAN: 9780596516833
ASIN: 0596516835
Publication Date: March 26, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
The world in which we live and work is subject to change without notice, and succeeding amidst that uncertainty requires continuous improvement. The key to creating successful products and services in a rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adapt to it. With that in mind, Subject to Change presents ideas that will help you improve your work designing products and services that provide great experiences for your customers.
Praise
"Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound. I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful."
Don Norman
Author of Emotional Design and Design of Future Things
Co-Founder Nielsen Norman group
"Customers don’t care about how innovative you are. They just want to be happy and satisfied. Learn from Adaptive Path a passion for finding and solving the problems that will matter to customers no matter what the future brings."
Scott Berkun
Author, The Myths of Innovation
"Wake up. The future of business isn’t about flying cars and robot butlers. Creating the future is really about changing the way your company connects with its customers. Use this book as your guide."
Jeffrey Veen Design Manager, Google
"Subject to Change presents complex, challenging ideas in simple, compelling language, with illuminating examples and no shortage of memorable phrases. At once authoritative and nimble, the book itself is an example of the kind of experience the authors admire. No matter who you are, it will change the way you think about design."
Michael Bierut
Partner, Pentagram
Author, 79 Short Essays on Design
"The principles set out in Subject to Change are essential for the design of any product, but especially relevant for the fast-moving world of web software. It used to be the case that a software product was designed once, and refreshed every couple of years. Software is no longer a product. It is a process, a dynamic service that evolves as it responds to constant interaction with its users. The essence of Web 2.0 design is to create a dynamic framework that harnesses the collective intelligence of customers in such a way that the software becomes almost alive. This terrific book teaches the mindset required for this new kind of design."
Tim O’Reilly
Founder and Publisher, O’Reilly Media
Product Description
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. In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 A good guide for tech savvy Product Managers July 2, 2008
Michael Krotscheck (Columbus, OH)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Well-written work on flexibility, innovation, and adaptability May 11, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
making the business case for user experience design May 20, 2008
Karl Fast
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
Provides basics for designing products for web software and competitive advantage alike August 17, 2008
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
SUBJECT TO CHANGE: CREATING GREAT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR AN UNCERTAIN WORLD provides basics for designing products for web software and competitive advantage alike - but to limit it to computer collections would be a shame. It's the college-level or public library collection specializing in innovative business solutions who will find it a powerful discussion of strategy and futuristic thinking processes, packed with real-world examples.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
A great intro to empathy-driven design and developing an experience strategy for your products/services. August 3, 2009
Jeffrey A. Melton (fort wayne, IN United States)
If you're not already familiar with design thinking and research, this is a great intro to empathy-driven design and developing an experience strategy for your products/services. Even if you are, it's still a good refresher--though it doesn't offer a lot of depth or insight into Adaptive Path's unique approach. Recommended.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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