Delightful Experiences – Some Characteristics

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Sometimes, as a part of the initial experience design workshops we conduct for our clients, we include an exercise asking them to think about and share some delightful product or service experiences that they have had recently. After they share these experiences, we ask them to describe what made it delightful.

For purposes of the exercise, we define “delightful” as an experience that exceeds expectations and is something that was so good that you want to share the story of the experience with other people.

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Distractions for June 8, 2008

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1:04 – 2:46 pm, Cyclops Tattoo – Time lapse photography of Heather Champ, Community Manager for Flickr, getting a tattoo. Her husband, Derek Powazek’s, photos are here.

RoCo (Robotic Computer) Video – During our visit to the MIT Media Lab last week, Hyungil Ahn spoke to us about his project to create “designed to interact with users in a natural way for applications such as learning, rapport-building, interactive teaching, and posture improvement.”

Information Consumes Attention

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Herbert Simon writing in 1971 about the Attention Economy

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it

- From Designing for the Social Web (which I am now reading) by Joshua Porter.

MacWorld Keynote 2008 Thoughts

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Some quick thoughts and reactions to the MacWorld 2008 Keynote.

My first reaction is that I guess I am a little underwhelmed.

I am guessing that when I see the MacBook Air for the first time in person that it will be love at first sight, but I’ve got a MacBook Pro and I love that and there is no way that I could justify purchasing another laptop. I do wonder how well it would run World of Warcraft though.

On AppleTV, if it had a Blue-ray DVD player built in, I might consider it. If it had the Blue-ray plus some DVR functionality, then I would definitely buy it and happily pay twice what they are asking. We just got a beautiful new HDTV during Christmas and as predicted it has become a little bit of a puppy – meaning that you can’t just get an HDTV, you need to get food and shots and a bunch of other things with it. (We’ve basically redone our entire living room including new furniture since Christmas because of the television – pictures later.) If I weren’t thinking about a new car later in the month, given what AppleTV “Take 2″ is still missing, I probably would head out today to buy a PS3 for the Blue-ray DVD player and a Tivo Series 3 HD-DVR for the DVR functionality.

(Note: I do very understand that including both of these features are opposed to the iTunes model and are extremely unlikely to happen in the next or the next beyond that AppleTV, but if Apple wanted to dominate the living room like they do with portable media players, then this is the table stakes. Ideally, AppleTV should simplify my living room without forcing me to abandon my current investment in DVDs or my Tivo lifetime subscription. I don’t think I am quite ready to make that leap yet, but given the opportunity, I’d love to replace 3 devices with one that also allows me to leverage at least some of my previous investment in physical media and doesn’t completely lock me into a PPV model).

On the iPhone update, well, I’ve been actively clicking the iTunes check for update button since the update was announced during the keynote and just about 1 minute ago, the update to my phone was completed. The updates are all seem pretty nice (I haven’t played with them yet), but none of them totally knock my socks off. What I wanted most of all was for my To Do’s and Notes to sync to the phone. Unfortunately, I guess I am still going to have to wait for that.I think the huge news about the iPhone is that it appears that the SDK is still on track for (late) February. I am really looking forward to when this happens.

Other than that, I was hoping for an OS update. I know it is coming and can wait a little bit, but it would have been nice to have it today Also, I had hoped (even though I didn’t believe it would happen) for a next generation Newton. That would have been something for which I would have gone and stood in line.

I realize that being underwhelmed is simply because I have such high expectations for Apple (so carry on Apple..). I have little doubt that they will be knocking my socks off again sometime soon. It just wasn’t today.

Ok…well, now all of the software updates are available, so I need to reboot (and play)!

Italy Photos

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Well, Kim and I are back from our wonderful Italy trip and I’ve started posting some of the photos on Flickr. Since (as you might imagine) there are so many, the plan is to post some portion of the photos every day (or every couple of days).

I’ve made many of the photos public, but to see the photos that include Kim and I (rather than just the ones that include scenery), I need to add you as a Flickr friend (if I haven’t already) which means that you need to register for a Flickr account (here) and send me an email to let me know your Flickr id (I think if you have a yahoo id, that you can probably use that).

After I have your Flickr id, I will add you as a friend (assuming in fact you aren’t just a random stranger) and you can see all of the pictures.

Click here to see my Italy Photos.

The Sierpinski Gasket Makes Me Want to Cry

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It would be dishonest of me to claim that I understood even a small part of the mathematics, but here are a few things I learned to day from Benoit Mandelbrot (a former IBM Fellow Emeritus) who came to speak  at IBM in Cambridge this afternoon:

1. You can get to a point in life where you have been so successful when you can come into a room and ramble on about pretty much anything and other very smart people will listen very intently. Many will even take notes. (This might also have something to do with age.) The title of his talk was “About Fractals.” The title of his first slide was “Roughness and Smoothness.” He spoke about everything from the Internet to World War I. Oh yeah, he also spoke about fractals and math too. Myself, I really had no idea what he was talking about most of the time but I couldn’t help but find it interesting and entertaining. Looking around the room, I don’t think I was alone.

2. A lot of people with really really big brains often do not worry about their PowerPoint templates. In fact, sometimes they don’t even worry about whether or not they are using a single template for their presentation.

3. The ability to ask a concise question seems to be a lost art. At one point, Mandelbrot started to answer a question before the question seemed half over. I don’t think anyone even minded because the question seemed to go on for about fifteen minutes and hadn’t even really gotten to a question yet. I couldn’t help think that Mandelbrot was thinking to himself, “I am an old man. I better answer this question now as I might not live to see the end of it.”

And yes before you ask, as I was sitting there listening to Benoit Mandelbrot, Jonathan Coulton was in my head singing “Let Z1 be Z squared plus C…” over and over again.

A Trip to Italy

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The plane tickets are set. Kim and I are headed to Italy for about two weeks in the fall.The basic plan is Rome, Florence and Venice with maybe a night or two in or around Siena. We still need to figure out how many nights here and how many nights there and we also need to book our hotels (which we hope to do over the next several days), but needless to say that we are pretty excited about the trip.

If you had any, we’d be very interested in any recommendations (or tips, tricks, whatever) that you might have about what to see / what to avoid, how many nights we need in each place (or places close by), wonderful restaurants, hotels, etc. or any other thoughts you might have.