Philip Greenspun on Citigroup: "It would be tough to come...
Philip Greenspun on Citigroup: "It would be tough to come up with a better example of socializing loss after the management of Citigroup privatized and pocketed gains." (See also my notes on the financial crisis)
Update: The bailout tab is now past $4 trillion. That's more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget - combined.
NYT on what happy people do: Happy people spend a...
NYT on what happy people do:
Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers -- but they don't spend a lot of time watching television.
Funny - I read this in the newspaper but didn't see any mention on TV.
Quietly announcing the Gel Videos redesign: I've been working on...
Quietly announcing the Gel Videos redesign: I've been working on this for months and am finally about to launch.
Official launch and assorted hoo-ha coming soon. Meantime, enjoy the initial videos.. -m
New Gel Video: Kelly Dobson
After communicating with Blendie, her custom-built blender, Kelly starts with a great first line - "I work with machines" - and describes her unique style of communicating with them. Her website shows more.
New Gel Video: Alex Lee
Alex talks about the rare Oxo products that have come from outside inventors.
Recorded: April 25, 2008
New Gel Video: Henning Rübsam
Henning describes the important place that dance occupies in culture today, and shows some of the elements that go into creating a choreographed dance - both for ballet and modern dancers.
Recorded: April 20, 2007
New Gel Video: Jim Bumgardner
Jim talks through screensavers, information theory, the music of the spheres, and ends with a demonstration with crowd participation.
Recorded: April 20, 2007
Uncle Mark 2009: now available for download
 I'm happy to announce the new Uncle Mark 2009 Gift Guide and Almanac available for download, right now: download it here.
If you have read Uncle Mark in the past (this is the sixth year!), you'll still find new material in this year's guide, such as...
• my favorite iPhone apps
• a new board game pick
• new items and gifts for new parents
• two new documentaries to watch
If you're not familiar with Uncle Mark, here's the deal: I review all the major consumer technology products and give my ONE favorite pick in each category... not the "17 coolest cameras" or whatever, but the ONE product that I recommend. The guide concludes with an Almanac section where I say whatever comes to mind, mostly tips and tricks that I can't fit anywhere else.
Please do share the guide: print it, e-mail it, forward it, and pass it along. If you have a coworker, friend, or loved one who needs a clue about today's technology choices, just hand them Uncle Mark 2009.
Get it here:
http://unclemark.org/unclemark2009.pdf
You can also tell a friend.
Taking efficiency too far
Retailers are learning from 20th-century assembly lines, according to the WSJ. Major chains are measuring employees' efficiency down to the second, much like Frederick Taylor did in his studies a hundred years ago.
Reporting from one grocery chain...
[the] system has spurred many to hurry up -- and has dialed up stress levels along the way. Mr. Gunther, who is 22 years old, says he recently told a longtime customer that he couldn't chat with her anymore during checkout because he was being timed. "I was told to get people in and out," he says. Other cashiers say they avoid eye contact with shoppers and generally hurry along older or infirm customers who might take longer to unload carts and count money.
Here's where a holistic view of business would have recommended a different path. The customer experience is largely determined by the employee experience. If employees are rushed - and are rushing slower customers - what does that do to the environment in the store? Is it really worth saving a few cents?
If you're reading this via our RSS feed, you might...
If you're reading this via our RSS feed, you might have missed these recent...
Job posts from the Good Experience jobs board:
• Facebook (UI Engineer)
• Facebook (Product Designer)
• Smarter Travel Media (Interaction Designer)
Games from the Good Experience games list:
• Hanna in a Choppa - Stylish, elegant, friendly helicopter game.
• Zilch - Simple, well-executed dice game.
The baseball fan experience
The new "fan experience" at Yankee Stadium: NYT reports that Cisco is being hired to blanket the place with high-tech screens.
The monitors will be located at concession stands, inside the 59 luxury and party suites, around the restaurants and bars, and in restrooms. They are designed to surround fans visually from the moment they walk into the stadium, especially when they stray from a direct view of the field.
Cisco exec Ron Ricci describes the ideal fan experience:
"I can't emphasize enough how important video is. It's the killer application. It's what fans want to see, to see more angles and do it on their terms."
Well, here's the thing. Screens and bitstreams are really good at distracting people from what's around them. That's why the personal TV screens on airplanes are so valuable - people don't want to fully experience a crowded, claustrophobic metal tube. Inflight video is a little anesthesia from the unpleasantness of the moment.
So Cisco might consider blanketing dentists' offices with movies on demand - that would make lots of patients happy (or less anxious).
But at a live sporting event, people are there primarily to experience the event itself, not to be distracted from the event. At Yankee Stadium, the fan experience is about baseball... the old-fashioned kind, where actual humans throw an actual ball, in real time, in physical space, FirstLife, 3-D, flesh-and-bones, that kind of reality. Right?
Gel 2009 conference: initial speaker list
 I'm happy to announce the initial speaker list for the Gel 2009 conference coming up on Thursday-Friday, April 30 - May 1, 2009 in New York City.
Initial Gel 2009 speaker list (see headshots):
• Graham Hill, founder of the wildly popular TreeHugger.com, will offer his refreshing perspective on the need for less of some things, and more of others, in our quest for good experience.
• Robin Nagle will share her story of being anthropologist-in-residence for New York City's sanitation department. Fascinating case study of empathy and authenticity.
• Fred Kent, founder and president of the Project for Public Spaces, has a unique eye for the design of physical space... in particular, which public spaces create a good experience, and which don't, and why. Universal patterns throughout.
• Marion Nestle, NYU professor and author of the outstanding book Food Politics (among others), is a hero of mine for her clear and direct explanations of how food is marketed to consumers. Shenanigans you wouldn't believe (unless you've read her books).
• Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore professor, spoke at Gel a few years ago on his book The Paradox of Choice. This time, though, he will speak on wisdom - the subject of his forthcoming book - and how it relates to good experience.
• Jamy Ian Swiss is a leading sleight-of-hand magician I've written about in Good Experience multiple times. A true expert in deception, though that hardly describes what he'll do at Gel...
• Yours truly, hosting the event once again.
• And: the visual creator; the musician; the visionary; and several others... as always, we're planning on having 15 or more speakers throughout Friday.
This, of course, is all the day after we run 20 or so Day 1 events all across New York City. (See last year's Day 1 selections.)
Why you should be at Gel
If you enjoy Good Experience, you should come to the conference.
Here's what past attendees say about the Gel experience.
Attending Gel also allows you to meet creative leaders from hundreds of companies. Here's who came last year.
Other notes on Gel 2009
• Our Friday venue remains the TimesCenter, where we held Gel 2008 - a new theater in the New York Times building with a great layout, lots of space, and a clean modern design throughout.
• Lots of Gel '09 tickets have already sold. Last year sold out, so if you want to be with us, please do sign up soon (especially before the ticket-price jump next month).
• As always, we assign Day 1 events based on your ticket-purchase date. The earlier you buy, the better chance you'll have at getting your first-choice event.
• For the first time, we are allowing ticket transfers until the date of the conference. Transfers are free through April 20, and incur a fee thereafter - see details. (This change is based on attendee requests at Gel '08 to transfer tickets closer to the event.)
• We're preparing Gel 2008 videos for online posting. Stay tuned for an announcement on that soon. (If you buy a ticket now and want another year's DVD, drop me a note..)
Gel 2009 home page
Sign up for Gel 2009
John Williams movie music, a capella. By one guy. The...
John Williams movie music, a capella. By one guy. The Web still delivers gems.
I'm happy - more like exuberant - over the election,...
I'm happy - more like exuberant - over the election, but now it's time to get to work. Here are three good pointers:
• From 52 to 48 with love is Ze Frank encouraging voters on each side to reach out to the other. This is a small but great project, and I'm only sorry there aren't more such examples I can point to.
• Bill Moyers on Fresh Air: a great post-mortem on the election, especially regarding John McCain (who Moyers and I both admire).
• Garrison Keillor's sensible suggestions to our incoming president.
One number to grade any executive
Seems like everyone wants to be customer-centric these days - or so they claim. "You're our number one priority." "Your call is very important to us." "We love our customers."
Often this is just lip service, but there are some executives, and even entire organizations, that actually do live up to their commitment to customers. There's an easy way to evaluate anyone who makes such claims.
I call it Tesla. No, not the measurement of magnetic flux density (so beloved by my fellow Course VI majors). It's actually a very simple measurement that gets to the heart of what customer-centered business is all about.
Tesla stands for "time elapsed since labs attended." In other words, your Tesla is how long it's been since you've spent time directly observing customers as they use your product or service.
I generally recommend research to take place via listening labs (the non-directed, customer-centered research methodology that my company Creative Good pioneered); but really it can be any method that your team finds effective - as long as it involves decisionmakers watching, in person, real live customers flail around with the product.
There's no substitute for having stakeholders physically present during customer research. If stakeholders are there, they buy into the process. No one needs a master's degree in human factors to understand that three customers in a row failing at the same place is cause for immediate improvement.
Conversely, if the UX team just delivers a report or some Powerpoint bullets about research that no one attended, executives have no buy-in, and things stay the same.
So: get stakeholders to attend customer research. This lowers the average Tesla in the organization, which is good for everyone.
The key question is whether executives are clued in enough to invest some time observing customers. It's easy to find out. Just ask, "What's your Tesla?"
Sadly, many executives have never taken time to do this. "I read survey results," they might mutter. Surveys are fine, but they're absolutely no substitute for direct observation. Or: "I get the reports my people hand me." That's not a ringing endorsement, either. If the average Tesla in your organization is "never," you have your work cut out for you.
Get stakeholders to lower their Tesla, and you may just see a lot of other numbers - acquisition, revenue, profits - go way up.
See also:
• Tips on moderating listening labs
• Creative Good's listening labs
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