About Rob
Rob Adams makes products people love. He is currently employed as a design researcher by Adobe Systems, Inc.
Category Archives: design research
The Context Scenario – Bridging Research and Design
Smart teams begin new design projects by getting to know their customers through design research. The best ones build models of those customers, their goals, their behaviors, and/or their environments. Models like personas do an awesome job of describing what … Continue reading
Posted in design research, interaction design
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Stop Giving Your Personas Stupid Names
Are you a design researcher, interaction designer, product owner, or other product-maker-type person? Have you used personas to represent your customers on at least one product you’ve been involved with? Then you may have run across personas with names like: … Continue reading
Posted in design research
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Seven Questions to Ask Before You Design
All design projects start with an idea. Sometimes it’s a big idea – a new product, service, or business. Sometimes it’s a small idea – a minor tweak to something that already exists. But big or small, the quality and … Continue reading
Posted in design research, interaction design
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Hindsight Bias and $300 Million Buttons
This morning I came across Jared Spool’s article about the $300 Million Button. To summarize, Jared’s team worked on an ecommerce site that required a login/registration to complete the checkout process. They did some design research and found out this … Continue reading
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The Four Qualities of Successful Design Researchers
In my four-plus years of being a professional design researcher, I’ve worked with a fair number of other design researchers. As part of my own professional development, I’ve reflected on what makes the great ones so great and the mediocre … Continue reading
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Thermo: The Board Game
As many of you may know, I’m currently hard at work on Thermo (demo video), our next generation RIA design tool, along with the rest of the design team. I wanted to share one of the research techniques we’ve used … Continue reading
Posted in design research, flash catalyst
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MAX Talk: Creating Learnable Applications
Thanks to everyone who attended Stephen and I’s talk at MAX 2006; I thought it went pretty well and we already received some great feedback. I’m looking forward to getting the reviews! Since I’m not sure if the organizers are … Continue reading
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Ideas in the World
My friend Dan has started a little blog project called “No Ideas But In Things”. Although the name is quite a mouthful (it’s inspired by a poem) I love his premise. Basically Dan is collecting pictures of artifacts out in … Continue reading
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