Most folks wouldn't even yawn over the news that Capital One is purchasing the experience design group Adaptive Path. If you know about Adaptive Path at all, you are one of the .0002 percent of human beings who knows what UX means (it's "user experience"). If you do know about UX, you almost certainly know about Adaptive Path. Because the little San Francisco design firm founded in 2001 during the dot-com crash has basically defined what we know as good UX design today.
Adaptive Path has been at the heart of digital user experience research, teaching, consulting, and practice for more than a decade. Co-founder Jesse James Garrett wrote The Elements of User Experience, the seminal guide to user-centered design. Adaptive Path has consulted some of the smartest organizations including NPR, Twitter, and Flickr on how to improve the usability of their digital products. They sponsor one of the most important user design conferences (it will continue), and have freely shared their insights with the global web design community. As the mobile age rolled in, the design approach advocated by Adaptive Path has proved itself across the exploding universe of digital devices and platforms.
So what's a stodgy old bank doing buying them?
I suspect that someone at Capital One has vision enough to see the future in which user experience is the difference between failure and success. And that future is arriving fast.
Consider your experience on your bank's website. Here's mine:
This is their "upgraded" site launched just a few months ago. I won't even bother to detail all the ways in which it is clunky and hard to use. On a phone it's impossible. This site is their second "new" site in five years, and each time the usability gets worse.
The current Capital One website isn't lightyears better:
Bookmark this and check back a year from now. Hard to imagine an Adaptive Path design will look anything like this.
It's easy to beat up on corporate websites constructed in the pre-Responsive age. And it's not easy to re-build a massive site that relies on legacy data and IT infrastructure. But what's easy isn't the point. Survival and success are the point.
For today's users of digital services, expectations are much higher than they were two years ago. We expect things to simply work wherever we happen to be. We expect clarity in how to use things. We are being taught what to expect, and how delightful a digital experience can be, by designers who have adopted a user-centered approach.
But there's still a massive gap between the expectations of today's users, and the majority of corporate websites and digital services. By acquiring Adaptive Path, Capital One is betting the bank on filling that gap.
