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.

Merholz is president of Adaptive Path, a consulting and training company founded by a small group of product designers and user-experience experts. In this book, instead of developing new products and services from the inside out, he looks at the process from the outside in, starting with the customer experience. He demonstrates how businesses can and should use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish. He advocates 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. The principles he sets out can be used for the design of any product, and are especially relevant for web software. B&w photos are included. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A leading user-experience research, development, and training firm has created a roadmap to guide businesses--large and small--through the process of developing the organizations, skills, and strategies essential for success in environments that are constantly changing.

As markets, people's lives, and the world are becoming more complex and unpredictable, many of the old approaches to solving business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches is becoming critical business practice for small and large companies alike. But just knowing about these approaches isn't enough. Companies need to develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand the behaviors and motivations of customers; 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. With Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading user-experience research, development, and training firm, has created a roadmap to guide businesses large and small through the process of developing the organizations, skills, and strategies essential for success in environments that are constantly changing.