Lynda Resnick is the billionaire marketer who brought us Pom (the pomegranate juice in the strangely shaped bottle), Fiji bottled water, and other well-known brands. In the recent New Yorker article "Pomegranate Princess," she reveals her "secret" for consistently delivering products that customers want:

People say, 'She's a marketing genius, she just gets it' ... I really don't. I came up with this epiphany the other day: being a great marketer is synonymous with being a great friend. In other words, you have to listen. ... You don't have to be a genius. ... you have to see what people are watching. You have to listen to conversations. You have to pay attention.

You have to listen. You have to pay attention. That's pretty low-tech advice for high-tech marketers and product managers. And yet I can't think of a better foundation for customer-centered work. LISTEN.

Echoing this theme is another recent New Yorker piece, on sleight-of-hand magicians and their craft. One well-known practitioner, Jamy Ian Swiss, wrote that

magic was, in his words, "an experiment in empathy" - a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way the minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets outreasoned. ...

...the magician [must] imagine an audience to experience his effects: "From the very start, the moment a magician looks into his practice mirror, he is envisioning an alien awareness - a mind other than his own, perceiving an illusion that he is creating but cannot actually experience for himself." Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway ...

Empathy - the driving force behind good listening - is the number one requirement for anyone who wants to create a good experience. Not a long list of methods, not a scholarly knowledge of one's niche field - but empathy. Anyone can learn a method; but people who can listen, can pay attention, can see the experience from someone else's perspective, are rare and valuable.

Writing a book, for example, requires the author to constantly read and re-read the text from the perspective of the readers: will this make sense to them? Not to me, the author, but to someone who's coming at this fresh?

Creating a website, or application, or any sort of product, requires the developer to consider: what will the user think of this? Not me, the developer, but someone who's not me.

It's a difficult skill, and some people are better than others, but it can be developed. Listen. Pay attention. Think about the experience from someone else's perspective. That's the basis of creating good experience.

- - -

References:

• "Pomegranate Princess: Lynda Resnick's eye for a product," by Amanda Fortini, New Yorker, March 31, 2008.

• "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

Any place has its pros and cons, but one thing to admire about Paris is its insistence on high quality in things like food and wine. Standards, even top down, can be helpful! (Bottom-up has its place, too... the trick is to know when to apply each.)

What if I told you there was an industry that was committed to, even obsessed with, customer-centric business? An industry that conducts trade shows all about understanding the customer - meeting customers' desires - measuring success - and continually improving their operations? Wouldn't you want to learn from that industry?

This was the introduction I gave on-stage to Natasha Schull, a speaker at last week's Gel 2008 conference (see the recap). She's based at MIT and studies the "gaming industry" - specifically, the companies that design slot machines for use in Las Vegas, among other places.

While Schull's research is primarily sociological, it's strongly relevant to anyone who works in any experiential field - design, user experience, customer-centered business, you name it. In fact I'm not sure why other conferences aren't banging down her door to speak: she has uncovered a side of our business that most people aren't remotely aware of - or perhaps would rather not know about.

Now, I should note that "some of my best friends go to Vegas." I'm not writing a polemic against gambling. Plenty of people have good clean fun at the slots, at the tables, everything in moderation, ya ya ya. OK? No offense meant.

But the thing is, as Natasha points out, the language of the slot machine industry belies its ultimate aims. There's a term bandied about at the trade shows: "extinction." We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on.

What's extinction? That's the moment that the customer - the gambler sitting at the slot machine - runs out of money. The wallet, or credit card, is now "extinct." Mission accomplished. (Now, if we could just achieve that a little bit quicker with an improved design...)

So the customer experience is really important: what games do customers want to play? What sounds will they best respond to? What physical interface is easiest to use? (Turns out push buttons are much easier than pull-handles.) By constantly studying customers and delivering what they want - in the short term, at least - the industry continually pursues a faster time to extinction.

Anyone who does customer-centered work should give this some thought. What's more important, the ends or the means? You may be the greatest user researcher in the world, but what if you're asked to apply those skills to an end you don't believe in?

This is part of the reason I write Good Experience and run Gel: to challenge people to look beyond their own narrow disciplines and fields, and past the methods, to consider the wider world. Good experience, in the end, is mostly about the outcomes we want to achieve, and the spirit we bring to our work.

Enjoy the recap.

-Mark

Sorting used to require noodling around with arrows, like the ones you see below (on the right)...

But now you can click and drag todos up and down the list. Just go into Your Account, then Choose Sorting Options, to make this choice:

Once you choose drag-and-drop and click Update, the arrows will disappear and you're good to go. You can drag todos up or down the list.

(iPhone users still need to use the arrows, since the dragging doesn't yet work with the iPhone browser. We're working on it.)

If you haven't tried Gootodo, sign up for a trial account to see how easy it is to use. Just forward your action-item emails to today or a day in the future (@gootodo.com) and you can then delete the emails from the inbox. It's a radically simple way to keep the inbox empty, and maintain a pruned, focused todo list.

Here's the Gel 2008 recap. Lots of good photos and comments.

Whitney Hess took excellent notes on the Friday sessions - "connect", "twist", "make", and "success" - as well as her Day 1 experiences .

Also don't miss the Gel '08 title animation.

The event went very well, I thought. Thanks to everyone - speakers, Day 1 hosts, attendees, volunteers, and staff - for making it happen.

people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t. ...

you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman.

My Gel 2008 conference (Gel stands for Good Experience Live) takes place tomorrow and Friday in New York. I hope people come away with some good experiences to "always have."

(If you're attending, log in to see your itinerary.)

If you want to attend next year, you can sign up for Gel 2009.

Over at TechCrunch, yet another technology journalist admits that he can't manage his incoming bitstreams:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.

He's exactly right in his diagnosis of the problem: too many bits, from too many bitstreams.

But as for the solution... if you've been following my recent posts, you know exactly what he writes next: the Technology Wish. Here it comes, the very next paragraph:

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do.

In other words, "I have too much technology - so, please, let's create more technology!"

He should read Bit Literacy instead.

(TechCrunch is the #1 technology website in the world, or close to it... this is the voice of the technology industry - being strangled by incoming information and waiting in vain for a tool to solve the problem.)

See also:

• The journalist's Technology Wish

• A geek who can't use email

WSJ on ease-of-use in corporate software:

... more business-software firms aim to simplify their products by mimicking the look and feel of familiar Web sites. ... Employees "just don't want to be bothered" with training courses...

Online software offered by Salesforce.com Inc., which boasts 1.1 million subscribers to its sales-management service, "was basically a replica of the Amazon.com user interface," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said.

(tx, phil)