It’s been exactly two months since I received my Google Wave preview invitation, and began playing with the application. Here’s my take on using Wave to date – the good, the bad and yes, I have invitations for those of you who still feel like they can’t live without it.
Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category
2009: The Year of Customer Service
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008In late 2007 I wrote my first blog post about what I called the user experience economy. That post described the necessity of providing exceptional customer service and noted the growth of the UX Fund which, over one year’s time, saw an increase of 39.37%—outperforming all of the major stock indexes.
In 2009, businesses will live and die by the level of customer service—designing memorable and positive user experiences—that they are able to provide. The competition for customers’ attention and loyalty will be fierce, and simply cutting prices and expenses is not going to be enough to thrive or even survive during a global economic crisis.
What’s Wrong With Easy? How to Achieve Simple Goals
Friday, December 12th, 2008I recently participated in a team building exercise where teams were responsible for designing and building sculptures out of canned goods. After the structures are built and judged, the canned goods are donated to shelters and food banks to feed the hungry.
During the brainstorming process when our team was determining what to build, several ideas were presented—including mosaics, user interfaces, corporate logos, sculptures of food and immersive physical environments. The ambiguity and complexity of each idea varied, but I noticed an interesting trend: many of the less abstract ideas were dismissed by members of the group as “too easy.” This got me thinking, what’s wrong with easy?