Archives / March 2003

Great creativity can come from great constraint. I've often found that interactive technologies, born under some heavy limitation, create a better experience than those applications enjoying much richer resources. That some innovators work better under pressure is interesting, but it's more than that.

What most amazes me is that such small amounts of raw material can be transformed into rich results. Call it "the alchemy of experience" - the creation of a unique, engaging experience out of almost nothing.

Much like the medieval alchemists who tried to create gold out of lead, some experience designers have ways of creating something from nothing.

Consider two examples from 1980s computer games:

1. Early console games created whole worlds, with multiple characters, sounds, actions, and levels, in just a few kilobytes. The blocky graphics were forced by the limitations in memory, but the game play was superior; much better than today's top-end games, in some cases.

2. Text-based computer games, like the old Infocom text adventures and Nethack, are great examples as well. Zork, listed below, creates an entire world in just 134 kilobytes. That's smaller than a single picture from your digital camera.

More recently the Web has brought about two fine examples of "experience alchemy" (both of which, incidentally, will have speakers at the Gel conference):

1. the5k contest ran annually a couple of times recently. The contest gave awards to the best experiences created in under five kilobytes. (That's less than half the size of a typical Good Experience newsletter.) Animations, interactive art exhibits, e-commerce prototypes, even a 3d game - all fit into five kilobytes.

Find last year's winners here.

the5k's founder, Stewart Butterfield, will be speaking at the Gel conference on May 2. His ideas behind the contest, and philosophies about small numbers of bits, are themselves a rich experience that I knew I wanted at the conference.

2. explodingdog: Cartoonist Sam Brown takes random phrases e-mailed to him from complete strangers, and draws those phrases. There's no memory constraint here, as in the5k, but there's still some strange alchemy: Sam takes otherwise meaningless or context-free phrases and turns them into drawings that suddenly make sense. The drawings, populated by simple stick figures and line drawings, are strangely affecting. You'll know it when you see it. (He'll also speak at the Gel conference.)

not as small as you think
are you broken?
wrong turn
explodingdog home

Writing about enormous constraints brings me back to the drive I took through the desert last year.

About a year ago I stopped in at Death Valley National Park, in southeast California. The park contains the lowest elevation in the western hemisphere, a salt flat called Badwater. When I got there, I parked the car and walked over a mile into the middle of the salt flat, the ground nothing but white salt, bleached by countless hours in the daily furnace of sunlight, accentuated only by small ridges of salt, as though the ground were the icing on top of a wedding cake.

I sat down on the salt and meditated on my surroundings. I was probably the only living creature within a mile. No people, no birds, no insects. What can survive in such a place? Yet somehow it was there that I achieved some unique clarity. This totally quiet, motionless part of the world - this nothing - was itself a tangible, real experience that I've reflected on many times since.

This was in great contrast to Las Vegas, which I visited soon after. Badwater is upfront in its emptiness, yet the visitor experiences something real. Las Vegas, on the other hand, pretends that something *is* there, which belies the fact that there's nothing there at all... not even the austere beauty of an empty salt flat.

...

History of alchemy

The old Atari 2600 games live on, played on various freeware emulators

Intellivision has a CD out called Intellivision Lives.

Zork, perhaps the most famous text adventure, is a free download.

Nethack home page (this great game deserves its own essay, which I'll get to some other time).

By now you may have heard of the study that proclaimed Google to be
"brand of the year." Above Coke. This is for a company that is less
than 10 years old, with no advertising firm, and almost no visual
elements anywhere on its site.

Whatever happened to the naming firms that named every company to
end in "nt" (Viant, Scient, Sapient, Lucent, etc.)? Whatever
happened to the branding firms that would copy and paste an arc or a
swoosh and call it a logo? Whatever happened to ad firms that would
pay $20 million for 30 seconds during the Super Bowl and declare
victory (despite the horrible website the ad pointed users to)? In
short, what happened to all the old ways of building a brand?

Google has done none of these things. Instead, it has focused on the
EXPERIENCE. The user experience, customer experience, searcher
experience, whatever you want to call it - Google knows that online,
the brand is the EXPERIENCE. Good experience, good brand. Bad
experience, out of business.

I'm not suggesting that every site look and feel like Google.
Rather, I'm trying to point out that Google's "secret sauce" is its
insistence on creating a good experience for its users at every
opportunity, on every page. There are other sites that create a good
experience that look nothing like Google. Here's one example.

This is CBC's online special on Congo: its people, culture, history,
and economy. Full of graphics and sound and Shockwave and all sorts
of technology, it looks nothing like Google. And my visit there was
a good experience. How do I know? Because it was engaging; because I
learned something; because the site provided all this without any
other distractions, without selling out to any other interests. In
short, the site provided the user experience it promised, and I
wanted: getting a glimpse of the Congo. I can't remember the logo or
color scheme of the site, but I do remember the African pictures and
sounds I saw and heard. The "brand" of this site, in my mind, is
defined solely by the experience I had there.

How good is the experience your company creates for its users?
Remember that it all hinges there: Experience good, brand good. That
means revenues good, company good, job security good.

Experience bad, company out of business sooner or later. (Unless
it's a monopoly.)

- Counterpoints -

To be fair, while I firmly believe in my thesis that the experience
is the brand, it may be best not to get over-excited about the
"brand of the year" study. Here are a couple of thoughts:

1. The study was run by BrandChannel.com and involved 1,300 readers
naming which brand had "the most impact on their lives" in 2002. As
a Web-based audience, opting in to this survey, these respondents
were self-selected for people who use the Web a lot. Look at the
rest of the winners and you'll see what brands these Websters like
to use: Apple, Coke, Starbucks, Ikea, Nike, Nokia, BMW,...

2. Apple came in a very close second place in the survey. I happen
to be a fan of Apple, but for different reasons. Apple's website is
good, but not excellent - not to Google's standards. So how did
Apple come in second? Its product, of course. Supplemented by its
"switch" ad campaign - the best around, in my opinion - Macintosh
computers provide a better overall user experience than Windows PCs.
My point is that a good product, with good advertising, can still
work to create a strong brand. And a good product is just another
version of a good user experience.