Experience Mapping at Adaptive Path

We got in late on Friday and tried to hit up a few restaurants in the Mission but SURPRISE, everything on a Friday at 8:00 is pretty busy, so we got some grilled cheese sandwiches and called it a night. Our hotel was quite nice and located in Nob Hill, and my only regret about staying there was not writing down the name of the incredibly soft pillows.

We got up early the next morning, mostly due to being on East Coast time, and walked from Nob Hill through the Financial District to the Embarcadero. We hung out on Pier 14 for a second and watched the sun rise, and wandered around the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. The seminar was right next door, so we settled in and got started around 8:00 and noshed on coffee and snacks provided by AP.

Patrick facilitated the majority of the seminar for the day and while I don’t want to give too much away – you’ll have to attend the workshop to get all the details – it was a really great high- and low-level look at the how and why of experience mapping. It’s an exercise and practice I’ve done at previous jobs, but it was never quite approached with the same type of lens as what we were taught to use in this weekend’s session. I definitely came away feeling much better prepared to do some really necessary foundational work in experience design.

The majority of the second half of the day was spent getting into smaller teams and approaching a design exercise collaboratively. It was good to have diverse groups of participants and I had a lot of fun talking to one of the women in my group who is a dedicated researcher. It’s something I want to devote more of my time to in my “UX Design” role and it was great to get her perspective about her field over lunch.

We wrapped up around 6:30 after a low-key happy hour and had the opportunity to talk to a lot of the Adaptive Path staff who were gracious enough to give us feedback about our process and insight into theirs. Then, my coworker and I got oysters and mussels (it’s criminal to not get seafood when you’re right next to the ocean) and walked all along the Embarcadero to Fort Mason, then up and down Lombard Street (mostly by accident, we realized we were a few blocks away and it was a “why not?” moment), through Chinatown and back to our hotel in Nob Hill. I just mapped it out and we easily walked 5 miles.

The next morning, we got caught in a rare winter rainstorm / monsoon, and were quite literally soaked through within 10 minutes of stepping outside. We ducked into Blue Bottle at the Health Ceramics building in the Mission and were too early for the holiday market I wanted to go to, but we got a great brunch at Universal Cafe around the corner (more fruit plates with warm honey, please) and then decided to just catch an earlier flight so we weren’t getting back into Atlanta at 1:00 AM as originally scheduled.

So while we didn’t really get to experience San Francisco as we had hoped, the seminar was completely worth it and I’ve been having a good time writing a summary of it for my team members this morning. I think that putting it into a standard part of our UX design process is definitely going to aid our overall experience design and give us a more powerful platform to talk about users’ journeys.