Archives / April 2006

It's been a tough week for good urban experience. First Jane Jacobs, and now, it seems, La Rosita. One of the most beloved neighborhood restaurants on Manhattan's Upper West Side may close soon.

From the NYT, For a Warm, Unvarnished Place, High Rent and Dark Times:

But as the neighborhood has increasingly buffed away its rough edges, rising rents have forced out many family-owned businesses, and La Rosita seems poised to become the next to go. After 24 years of dishing out carne guisada and camaraderie, Enrique Fernandez and his two sons, Eduardo and Fernando, have all but made up their minds to close up shop when their lease runs out in December. They may leave sooner.

As neighborhoods improve, old family-owned places disappear. I remember closing day at Zito's, the historic West Village bakery - I bought some of the last focaccia they ever made... and I kept thinking: does it have to be this way? Rising rents bring safer streets, but fewer Zito's and La Rositas (and more Starbucks, it seems).

Here's an idea... why not create a conglomerate company that buys up, and retains, beloved old neighborhood restaurants, bakeries, restaurants? Call it the Wal-Mart of Main Street - using corporate size to infuse life back into small, family owned places. Would this work?

(If you've been to La Rosita, add your own comments at addyourown.)

Part of learning to type means learning how to position the arms and wrists.

For years, to cut down on wrist pain, I've rested my forearms on a dictionary and a thesaurus, each 5 cm thick. That elevates my forearms above the mouse and keyboard and reduces stress on my wrists.

Today I spotted in Yahoo News, Forearm Support May Cut Computer Injuries:

An "ergonomic board" that provides forearm support may relieve upper body pain and disorders that can develop from spending extended hours on a computer, a new study suggests.

The device, a board that attaches to a desk and supports the forearm, lowered the risk of developing shoulder and neck problems by nearly half and significantly reduced neck, shoulder and right arm pain associated with computer work.

My favorite, though, was this quote:

The average cost per board is around $100, said Rempel. The study found that employers would recover these costs within about 10 months of purchasing the boards.

A hundred bucks? Buy a dictionary (from Erin McKean :'06:, please) and a thesaurus for much less than that!

More on the Internet radio story that I posted a few days ago.

From the great WFMU blog, Internet Radio's Lethal Injection:

Yet again, Washington demonstrates its elementary comprehension of digital media through bad draft legislation... senators are behind a piece of legal hooey that would cripple satellite radio's new receiver technology and also require internet radio stations to drop the popular, high-quality streaming MP3 format while adopting a different, no doubt inferior-sounding, DRM-embedded streaming format...

WFMU is right - this is dumb. If I'm not mistaken, FM radio itself went under attack after its launch, for some of the same (misguided) reasons.

Good Experience readers from California and South Carolina should oppose Feinstein and Graham in their effort to clamp down on Internet radio.

From the EFF, of which I'm a proud member (as well as KCRW)... EFF: DeepLinks:

Senators Feinstein (D-Cal.) and Graham (R-S.C.) have introduced S. 2644, dubbed the PERFORM Act, that is aimed at punishing satellite radio for offering its subscribers devices capable of recording off the air.

Buried in the bill, however, is a provision that would effectively require music webcasters to use DRM-laden streaming formats, rather than the MP3 streaming format used by Live365, Shoutcast, and many smaller webcasters (like Santa Monica's KCRW and Seattle's KEXP).

Californians can sign a pledge here.

(Thanks, bb)

Today, Wednesday, is the last day to buy Gel 2006 tickets.

Sign up for Gel 2006

Back to final conference prep...

We lost a great thinker today.

From Canada.com, Celebrated author, urban activist Jane Jacobs dead at age 89:

Influential urban thinker and celebrated author Jane Jacobs has died at age 89. She would have been 90 next week. Jacobs wrote frequently about the dangers of urban sprawl, as well as the car and its impact on modern society.

 Reminder, today (Tuesday, April 25) is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's.

Registration closes for Gel 2006 tomorrow, Wednesday, April 26.

Sign up for Gel 2006... and see you next week!

This will be our biggest and best year yet... don't miss it -

Quick follow up on last week's column about the Copernican Awards, spotlighting customer-centric companies and organizations...

We just announced this year's Copernican finalists, and you can see them all here:
www.creativegood.com/press/copernican2006.html

Which ones would you vote for?

Winners to be announced at next week's ceremony in New York, the night before Gel 2006 starts.

Cathy Salit
President and CEO, Performance of a Lifetime

Performance of a Lifetime brings improv to the workplace through seminars and consulting, helping people listen and communicate better - among other benefits Cathy talks about below.

(Cathy is scheduled to speak at Gel 2006 next week in New York.)

Q - What is improv?

Improv is when you are completely accepting of, and interested in, what's actually going on before your very eyes. If I'm on a stage with fellow performers and someone enters the scene, and in my mind I think, "I'm going to make this person the cop on Main Street," and they enter and say, "Mom, I'm so happy to see you," I have to drop the idea of making him the policeman and accept that this person is now my son. I have to go with that, and that's where the magic begins.

It's a dance, a back-and-forth, where the creative collaboration that unfolds is one in which the participants are working off of, and building off of, and creating and responding to whatever comes their way. New possibilities emerge because you're so open to what's happening and what you have to build with. It's rooted in not being driven by having answers, but being excited by possibility. Being excited by not knowing, and letting the answers emerge from the creative collaboration of the people who are in the room.

Q - When you're running an improv workshop with a large group, what happens if someone wants to opt out?

I do nothing. I don't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. People participate in all different kinds of ways. Some people run on stage, major-league hams; others talk nonstop, and others sit there nodding.

We've done performance and improv work with four- and five-star generals, former directors of the CIA. No matter how shy or macho anyone is, we try to create the space and the environment in which people feel free to shed their characters and walk a different way, talk a different way, slow down and give of themselves, so they can break out of their usual roles. We try to help not by saying "stop that," but by saying "try this - perform this way."

Q - "All the world's a stage."

We take Shakespeare very seriously. We encourage our clients to adopt the language of the theater. These conversations, all these meetings, the contexts that we live and work in, these are scenes in the play that we're co-creators of. We're all in the scene and we're all directors of the scene.

Q - Finally: what happened in junior high?

I didn't like it, so I dropped out. Along with some other students and parents and community activists and innovative educators, we started an alternative school called the Elizabeth Cleaners Street School. We took over an abandoned storefront on the Upper West Side and we started a school. I was 13.

Katy Börner
Associate Professor of Information Science, Indiana University; also see her current exhibit, Places & Spaces.

(Katy is scheduled to speak at Gel 2006 next week in New York.)

Q - Describe your work.

I'm building a macroscope - not a microscope or a telescope, but a macroscope, which helps you make sense of huge amounts of data.

If you need to understand patterns and trends and outliers in data, or communities within a social network, today we have only limited tools. There are search engines, but it's like living in Flatland; there's no meaningful directory structure, no file structure. Google and Microsoft say, "We can find it for you," and they do find it, if it's facts we're looking for. But if you need an "up" button, or if you need to see how those results relate to each other, there's no such button today.

We'd like to give people back this global view, a top-down view of multiple areas of science. da Vinci and Einstein managed to do this, but today science is very specialized because this is how the reward system is structured. Tenure, promotions, salary,... it all pays to be a specialist in a certain area.

Our brains have very limited size. You can make it very slim, into this expert needle, or wide into a pancake; but try to do both and you typically have nothing. The question is, how can we use our little brains to use what we collectively know, which is hidden in books, publications, Wikipedia?

Some areas of science have thousands of publications per month. No one can read it all, and yet there are no tools to get the information out or interconnect it. Either you have a husband or wife who works in a different area, or you call a friend who has a friend who might know it, or you hire someone who has that expertise. But even those people have little brains. So you need to know a lot of people to patchwork a major area of research, expertise, or whatever you're interested in.

What we really need is tools that help us manage this flood of information, that's what the lab is working on.

Q - Describe the Places & Spaces exhibit, which you helped create, now at the New York Public Library.

It's a science exhibit, not an art exhibit, which tries to tell people about the power of maps for navigating and managing not only geospatial spaces, but also semantic spaces. You might imagine a map of all of nanotechnology, showing how it grew out of different areas of research and how it evolved over time, and how other groups joined.

The exhibit also shows some early maps of our planet; the reason is that the first maps of the planet weren't accurate, and similarly the first maps of the sciences we have today won't be totally accurate.

Vuk Cosic, ascii artist from Slovenia, euroGel '06 speaker, was interviewed awhile back by Regine.

From we make money not art: Interview of Vuk Cosic:

Q - In 2001, the Venice Biennale hosted for the first time a display of net.art. I can't remember having seen any trace of net.art at the Venice 2005 edition. How do you explain it? Were you just lucky to show works at the time? What's going on today? Isn't net.art worth exhibiting anymore?

Net.art is a bit like Eastern Europe. There was lots of expectations, some of them were met, but in general we stopped being terribly attractive and scary somewhere around the dotcom boom.

WSJ reports that Philips is paying ad dollars for some magazines to move the table of contents to a more reader-friendly location (with, of course, a thank-you to Philips on the page).

From Philips and Time Inc. Agree to Keep It Simple:

Philips has been burnishing a "Simplicity" ad theme since 2004. Lately it's been pushing the theme with ad techniques that provide a benefit to the person who sees the advertising.

In October, the Amsterdam-based consumer-electronics company paid about $2 million to be the sole national sponsor of "60 Minutes" on CBS. The show featured fewer ads overall, and some of the extra time was given back to the news program for longer story segments.

(Thanks, kottke)

Jobs tip - Anyone jobseeking in the DC area should know that this is my buddy Dan Malks's company... Dan designed the wireless magic for Bono & U2's Jumbotron on their latest world tour.

Good Experience - DC Job Opening: JackBe Corp (UI Design/UX Expert)

Tell him Good Experience sent you!

"Who's doing it better?" I get asked this a lot, given my frequent columns about bad customer experience and how to fix it (and, of course, the hundreds of examples at This Is Broken).

But some companies and organizations are really focused on the customer experience, and I have begun spotlighting them more.

One year ago, my business partner Phil Terry and I launched a new customer experience award to recognize customer-centric companies and organizations. It's called the Copernican Award.

Just as Copernicus pointed out that the planets revolve around the Sun, not the earth, the Copernican Awards go to companies that put customers at the center of their strategy.

For decades, most companies have operated with the company itself as the singular focus of business, ignoring customers' needs, reaching out to them only through advertising that was often boastful, deceptive, or both. But a few companies today are putting customers at the center of their operations, often decreasing or even eliminating their advertising budgets in the process, and are experiencing such dramatic success that several are now the unopposed leaders of their industries.

This is a dramatic transformation - we'd say it's the transformation of 21st century business - and it's just beginning with a few innovative companies. By giving them some credit I hope we can motivate other companies to follow in their footsteps, to help us continue to improve the customer experience in every industry and sector.

Here's a recap of our Copernican Awards from a year ago - April 2005 - when we identified twelve companies in three size categories as finalists. (Two weeks from today we'll announce the winners of this year's 2006 Copernican Awards.)

Each finalist was nominated by a member of our Customer Experience Councils, a forum of over 160 senior executives dealing with customer experience - in marketing, product development, product management, and other roles across a range of industries. (E-mail me if you'd like more info: mark at goodexperience dot com)

Winners were determined by a vote of all Council members; the company with the most Council member votes in each of the three categories won the award.

2005 Copernican Award Finalists

Finalists were organized into three categories, based on the size of the company or organization.

--- Large ($1 billion or more in annual revenue or budget) ---

• Amazon: To create its consistently good customer experience, Amazon reports that its internal product development philosophy dictates that every project must "start with the customer and work backwards."

• JetBlue: This customer-centered airline is rocking. New planes, leather seats, free DirecTV, all flights sold one-way, Saturday night stays never required, and a change fee of only $25.

• Staples: It put customers at the center of recent strategic changes, resulting in the "Easy Rebates" program and many operational improvements.

• Westin Hotels: Beginning in August 1999, Westin installed over 50,000 "Heavenly Beds" at a cost of $30 million. The investment generated industry-leading metrics, including daily rates and guest satisfaction, and forced competitors to change.

--- Medium ($100 million or more in annual revenue or budget) ---

• ING Direct: Breaking many "rules" of the banking industry, ING Direct has no fees, minimums, or customer-hostile policies hidden in the "fine print"... and it offers some of the highest interest rates in the country.

• License Express (New York State DMV): Designed for "quick and easy transactions," this customer-centered branch of the New York DMV can get you in and out in under ten minutes. (In Manhattan, find it on 34th Street just west of 8th Avenue.)

• Netflix: pioneered the "no late fees, no due dates" model, which broke the "rule" that late fees were an unavoidable part of renting movies - and forced Blockbuster to change.

• Uline: distributor of packaging, warehouse, and shipping supplies; it surpasses the competition by serving customers on the basics, not by following fads in management or technology.

--- Small (Less than $100 million in annual revenue or budget) ---

• Blacksocks: One customer insight - no one likes shopping for socks or finding the pair that match after laundry - spurred them to launch "sockscriptions" which periodically send high-quality socks in envelopes, Netflix-style, to your mailbox. Swiss company.

• Chambers Street Wines: The Tribeca, Manhattan wine store knows customers by name, cares about quality, pays staff well, and gains very loyal customers as a result.

• Flickr (nominated before its sale to Yahoo, and before the Newsweek cover story about the company): A pioneer in storing and categorizing digital photos and other images on the Web.

• Sigalert.com: Offers free traffic reports and real-time speed and accident information in the L.A. area. Well loved by Angelinos.

- - -

Before I tell you the winners, consider - which company would you have voted for, in each of the three categories? Can you guess who won? See the winners here: http://creativegood.com/press/copernican-winners.html

Stay tuned in a few weeks for news of the 2006 Copernican Awards.

Erin McKean :'06: was recently the guest blogger on Powells.com. From What's a Word Gotta Do to Get in This Joint, Anyway?:

It does take a bit of work to get a word into the dictionary, but inclusion in the dictionary is not an honor. The dictionary words are not more real than the words not in the dictionary. What they are is more USEFUL.

See all Erin's posts here. She also points us to her dressaday site, showing a different dress every day.

Niko writes why to experience Good Experience Live:

This is not a conference you go to to learn a specific technology or inside information on the newest buzzwords. I believe the main thing I will get out of GEL is a sense of open possibilities: anything can be done, and any crazy idea that provides a good experience can be worth doing.

Registration closes on Wednesday, April 26: sign up now for Gel 2006... or, if you're in Europe, for our first euroGel.

(See Gel video clips here.)

Mixed review of my talk at the NYC Tech Meetup talk last week... from Scott Francis's blog:

I was much more impressed with the presenter and his presentation than I was with the product.

As presented the product is a simple online to-do list that distinguishes itself by being able to convert email forwarded to it into to-do list items. In my book this is a neat feature, but it's one that could be easily copied by any of the other to-do list services such as Ta-da Lists. Outlook already does what is effectively the same thing - to convert an email message to a task you just drag it to the tasks folder or shortcut.

He emphasized the popular “less is more” approach to feature implementation in selling the benefits of GoTodo. I agree in principle with minimalism, but I personally consider things such as RSS feeds to be a basic requirement for a lot of services nowadays, including to-do lists.

I appreciate the kind words, of course, but somehow I failed to convince him of my message - this is different from and categorically better than any productivity tool you've ever used. It's a paradigm shift, not a new take on an old tool. I must improve the explanation of Gootodo and bit literacy.

Gootodo featured in this Tech Review story about emerging Web 2.0 tools. From Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact:

"The current suite of office tools, Word and Outlook chief among them, are simply too hard to use," says Mark Hurst, author of Gootodo...

Hurst argues that mainstream software and Internet companies are still obsessed with finding ways to send consumers more information -- for example, in the form of RSS feeds and shared calendar entries. "Most tools allow people more ways of consuming more bits. But that doesn't make people more productive," Hurst says.

What's needed instead, Hurst argues, is a way to receive fewer bits. A central feature of Gootodo, for example, is the ability to transfer non-urgent tasks to the Gootodo task list at a future date by e-mail, thereby keeping the current day's to-do list as short as possible. "If people use Google Calendar without also using a to-do list manager like Gootodo, they are at risk of being overwhelmed," Hurst says. "Everyone's got different needs. But there is a psychic cost to keeping bits around."

ABC News asked Technology Review's Wade Roush about his favorite Web 2.0 tools. He listed Flickr and Gootodo. Great list!

Watch the broadcast

From plusminus design: flashbag

The size of the device changes depending on the amount of data it holds.

Great idea. Now we just need one to physically show the size of an e-mail inbox.

(And they need to get rid of the microscopic gray-on-white text on their website. Why are we still dealing with this? It needs to stop.)

via bb

Have you noticed the new trend in technology?

I don't mean the latest acronym - RSS, API, AJAX, XML, GPS - though these all play a part in the trend. Instead, I mean the major strategic shift, the new conversation, about how digital technology is changing our lives.

The conversation is about thousands of new bitstreams and tools that create and categorize those bits. It's the age of the bit.

Here are a few places I've seen it recently:

1. Events (O'Reilly ETech, New York Tech Meetup, and others) are full of the conversation about tools creating and categorizing bits: I've heard pitches for tools that, in part or exclusively,...

- categorize pictures, music, and other files
- organize files
- archive podcasts
- categorize calendar listings and project-management items
- record and organize personal stories from years past

2. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal recently redesigned, and the strategic focus of each was how to cut through the clutter of the online news experience while still allowing for the serendipitous encounter of a section or article that the customer didn't know to look for. The key issue is balancing the number of bits, as described well in Steve Johnson's Chicago Tribune piece (I'm quoted saying as much): Link

3. Bob Tedeschi's most recent New York Times column on Seth Godin's Squidoo, which promises to cut through the clutter by helping people see the Web through "lenses" on particular topics: Link

4. The Trendwatching report on "Infolust", which advises, "forget information overload: this desire for relevant information is insatiable, and will soon move from the online world to the 'real' world to achieve true ubiquity." Examples include consumer-reviews sites, mashups of different services, mobile applications like audio recognition, and barcodes and tags in (what used to be called) the offline world. Link

5. And of course add in the cover story from Newsweek a few weeks back, which featured Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake... Flickr, of course, tags and archives digital photos. Add to this item all the other major news outlets talking about similar tools (Squidoo, del.icio.us, Technorati, and many others).

Do you see the pattern? More to the point, do you see how different this is? From five to eight years ago, in the dotcom boom, everyone talked about e-commerce - and online community - and user interfaces and standards and plumbing and all sorts of foundational issues as we set up the Web. (I wrote my first bit literacy essay in 2000... but much of my focus was on the other topics, too.)

Today it's about the bits.

My last question: how much of the conversation you see above is about creating and consuming more bits, and how much is about letting the bits go?

- - -

P.S. One other common thread to note: what else do Scott Heiferman, Bob Tedeschi, Seth Godin, Stewart Butterfield, and Caterina Fake have in common? They've all been to the Gel conference. You should be there, too, next month: Gel 2006

From Orange Shop: Notting Hill:

U.K. mobile operator Orange is experimenting with shop concepts that create a better customer experience. We stumbled on this one in Notting Hill last week, apparently the only one of its kind in London. The "not another phone shop," opened about 8 months ago, is a laid back place where you can try out working phones and talk to salespeople who are both intelligent and patient - surprisingly rare. As one employee explained, they're not paid on commission and are rewarded for positive feedback from customers...

(Thanks, Matej)

A couple of people have asked - here's the Gel 2006 refund and transfer policy.

Every Gel 2006 attendee, before buying his or her ticket, has to check the box shown below:

All sales are final, and tickets are transferable through Wednesday, April 26, but not after.

We plan to check IDs at the door, so please do let us know before April 26 if someone else will be attending instead of you.

Two exhibits worth seeing in midtown Manhattan, if you're passing through:

• The Big Easy in The Big Apple: Two Centuries of Art in Louisiana from the Battle of New Orleans to Katrina. At the AXA Gallery (787 7th Ave between 51st and 52nd Streets), in the Equitable Building, which of course is where Gel 2006 will be held. (exhibit info)

• Great Pots: The Vessel as Art 1900-2000. Through May 19 in the UBS Art Gallery, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd Streets. (exhibit info)

Both exhibits are free and well designed - recommended as good experiences in New York.

Also note that you can walk from one to the other by crossing the street. They're next door to each other.

Authentic experience: now mandated by law. From Nantucket Votes to Ban Chain Stores - Yahoo! News:

Nantucket joined several other historic tourist towns across the country in approving a measure that would ban chain stores from the island's downtown, a move endorsed by more than 480 residents at a town meeting.

The rule would bar any new chains with more than 14 outlets that have standardized menus, trademarks, uniforms or other homogeneous decor from opening downtown. The ban would not affect gas stations, grocery stores, banks and other service providers.

A few more thoughts from Gelers in the community:

From a longtime Geler, Lisa Sulgit (read full post):

As I've gotten more experience [with Gel], I very clearly see how conversations with many different view points, experiences in completely diverse industries, countries and roles stretch my imagination.

And Kareem Mayan, who created the Day 1 montage overnight last year and will do so again this year, writes ( read full post):

[Gel] brings together folks who create great experiences in different disciplines--areas like art, technology, film, theater, retail design, community building, etc. The conference is designed to be a great experience, and last year, it was. This year's lineup looks to be amazing...

And from Stephen Sherlock (read full post):

If you want a GREAT experience, you'll consider attending GEL 2006!

Even technology billionaires struggle with bit literacy.

From How I Work: Bill Gates:

We're at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like "in-box rules" and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

Even with an assistant filtering his e-mail and manually creating a summary, he still sees his own information overload as a key challenge!

Bill should read all the bit literacy columns and then start using Gootodo.

(Anyone without a personal assistant should "run, not walk," to those links.)

Thanks to UX Magazine for posting this little tidbit, shown at left, on their homepage.

Today, Tuesday, is the last day for Gel 2006 regular ticket prices.

Here's what others are saying:

"Gel is definitely the best conference I've ever attended."
- Jason Fried :'06:, founder, 37signals (Read full post)

"Gel is the only conference I've been to that is self-reflective: many of the principles of design and good user experience espoused during the day can be found in the way the conference itself is run."
- Scott Berkun :'06: (Read full post)

"Good Experience Live, that zany conference with such an eclectic gathering of speakers, sounds a lot more like guaranteed admission to a super cool cocktail party.... Hurst spends his entire life making sure all these experiences are 100% good. Just imagine what kind of conference he could put together."
- Alissa Walker at MediaBistro (Read full post)

"Spectacular... fantastic... amazing..."
- Gel 2005 attendees (Read more attendee comments)

Last chance for regular price! Register now.