About Peter Merholz
Peter Merholz is the Director of Practice Development and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the world's premier user experience consulting company. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker, and leader in the field of user-experience design. Clients include Cathay Pacific, Yamaha, and the California Health Care Foundation.
Professional Background
Peter's major projects at Adaptive Path include unifying PeopleSoft's 3 disparate Web properties into one unified presence, conducting research on health care policy for CHCF, recommending improvements for Yamaha's next generation digital keyboards, and helping Intel wrangle their massive set of product offerings into a manageable experience.
Peter is a regular speaker at Web design and information architecture conferences, such as ASIS&T's Information Architecture Summits (years 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004). He keynoted both the Institute of Design's 2003 About With and For conference, and 2004 SIGCHI.NL, the premiere Dutch HCI conference.
Peter is an advisor to the IA Institute, and an active member of the ASIST and ACM's SIG-CHI. He serves on the organizing committees for the Designing User Experience conference and Information Architecture Summit.
Before joining Adaptive Path, Peter served as creative director of Epinions.com, a leading community-based product information site. While there, he led a site-wide redesign using branding, user research, and data analysis to inform visual design, interaction design, and content strategy.
Stop Designing Products (abstract)
The world of business and product design is changing. In fact, we have seen a number of trends taking shape that we believe are all pointing to the end of “products”. There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing single, stand-alone, centralized, static things, web sites, or systems.
As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s hard to find a “product” that is not also, or even mostly, a service. These service design projects generally involve multiple touchpoints or channels (i.e. the web, mobile devices, and physical spaces, etc.), a focus on long-term relationships, and the need for consistent experience across throughout.
In fact, consumers expect more variety, more control, more interoperability, more adaptability, and more consistency in experience than ever before. This has serious implications for business, design, and development
