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Thoughts to start off 2007
Jan 10, 2007
As we start a new year, here are some thoughts about good experience - both the topic and this newsletter.
Whether you're a designer, a teacher, an executive, a product manager, or a stay-at-home parent, good experience is part of your work and life.
You may create a product or experience for someone else; and you certainly experience things daily - in stores and banks, in public spaces, in your neighborhood, and while using any technology.
It's helpful to have a sense of experience, of any type, and what makes it good or not. This helps you create better (if you're a creator), and it sharpens your senses to find and appreciate the best experiences in all contexts.
As a newsletter, Good Experience is intended as food for thought, to help you gain more awareness about experience. Whether by meeting the people and companies who create good experiences, or by learning the methods of how to create better, you can (I believe) work better, and live better, by diving in to these resources.
I wrote a lot of short pieces over the holidays, and I found that they coalesced around three themes that will be pertinent this year.
- Companies and investing in good customer experience: the business world continues to be a rich source of case studies about what to do, and (at least as often) what not to do, when creating experiences.
- Place: The experience of place affects everyone - whether in one's neighborhood, city, or country. The changes now going on in my Manhattan neighborhood, in particular, have me thinking about what constitutes a good "place" experience.
- Bit literacy: 2007 is the year that I will publish my first book - called "Bit Literacy" - about the set of skills that people need to learn in the digital era. Bit literate users can overcome the problems of bit overload and work more productively, while living with less stress. This is essential to a good experience in any digital technology today.
Here are several recent pieces that fit into those three themes:
1. Companies and investing in good customer experience
Creative Good is ten years old
Profile of BlueNile.com, customer-centered e-tailer
Universal design in architecture
2. Place
3. Bit literacy
Reviewing the new Microsoft Office
Bill Gates on the hundred dollar laptop
Picture of an old linotype machine
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Enjoy, and happy new year.
-Mark Hurst
P.S. Here are the year-start columns from 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003.
Hello Mark. First my congratulations on a very interesting and informative
site! Then my special thanks for the linotype picture. During my
electrical apprenticeship in the 1940's here in New Zealand some of my
work involved these ingenious machines. There was another similar machine
but I cannot remember the name of it now, (could have been an Intertype?).
At the Government Printing Office where I was working at the time we had a
bank of these units, and some very skilled operators who were very much in
demand at this time. As mentioned in your article all newspapers were
equipped with these machines, and the demand for typesetters was also very
high. Sadly most of these craftsmen have gone, but there is still the odd
typesetter around in small local printshops. The evolution of the whole
printing process through the ages I find to be quite intriguing, from
Gutenberg's original concept of moveable type to the present offset
printing process and variations thereof. But the Merganthaler Linotype was certainly the mainstay of the printing industry for the greater part of the 20th century. Thanks again for triggering some good memories. Neil Kerr.
From reading the ge newsletter over the past 18 months or so, I've come to think that we are all (co-)creators of experiences, both our own and those of people around us. Our choices directly influence the quality of experience we, and others in the experience chain, have. I think it's a Liberty Mutual commercial that shows the contagion of random acts of kindness. I've known something as small as eye-contact and a smile from a stranger on the street to lift my mood and thereby positively change both how I experienced the rest of my day and how I interacted with other people. Good experiences propagate, like ripples in a pond.
Mark,
Thank you for your insights and service -- and the thought-provoking discussion that ensues as a result. I happened upon this site after writing an article for my employer about how to tame the technology that interferes with our work life (and personal life). Had I found it before, I would have mentioned your site and article about bit literacy and letting go. I like the visual. It's fun to imagine all the bits floating away from us!
My tips are more generic but if more of us talk about taming the technology that binds us, perhaps we can create a happier, more innovative and more productive workforce. I agree with Elise when she says that good experience trickles through all of us -- and to one another.
I believe that good experiences (and less bit stress) at work can only positively impact the other areas of our life as well. I look forward to reading your book.