SXSWi2008, Day 4: Closing Remarks

Title: Alternate Realities
Speaker: Jane McGonigal
Showed “The Lost Ring” - video preview of a game - you can find hundreds of screenshots of this video in flickr, looking for hidden clues
She focused on the game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness
Question - are you in the happiness business?
Our primary product soon will be happiness… (think [...]

SXSWi2008, Day 2: Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users

Kathy Sierra’s session, as you can expect was great. She’s a talented speaker, and has good stuff to say. She did, however, assume that most people in the audience had heard lots of her presentations in the past - so she went really fast, and at some of the points below simply said “you’ve heard [...]

No More Kicking

Remember my post from January, Kicking Users Out the Door? Interestingly, after my post (about worldcat.org and a poor user experience I had), I was contacted by two OCLC employees!
They realized that “Goodbye” was not the message they wanted to leave with customers, and asked me where I had seen it, what I was doing, [...]

A Better Experience Begins with Staff

From the MSN Money site (via Steven M. Cohen’s Shared Items in Google): “This unique in-store education event signals the company’s focus on transforming the Starbucks Experience for both customers and partners. Starbucks hopes any customers inconvenienced by the early closures will see this as an investment that will have long term benefits. For their [...]

Kicking Users Out the Door

When you request a book using OCLC’s Worldcat service, here’s what happens after you complete a request - you are presented with this message: “Your resource sharing request was sent successfully. Goodbye.”
What was that again?
Goodbye.
Is that REALLY the message OCLC wants to send after someone has requested a book through their service? Goodbye? What if [...]

Some Thoughts and Quotes about Authenticity

I’m reading Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine III (same guys that wrote The Experience Economy). I love this type of book - the focus is still on Pine and Gilmore’s favorite topic, that of the experience economy. But this time, they have narrowed that focus a bit, [...]

Information Tomorrow has finally arrived!

Cool beans! Rachel Singer Gordon’s newest book, Information Tomorrow: Reflections on Technology and the Future of Public and Academic Libraries, just came out. I know, because I received a copy in the mail today.
And why did I receive a copy? Because I wrote one of the chapters! My chapter is chapter 10, An Experience to [...]

Community and the Digital Experience

I’m knee-deep in wading through a bunch of articles and books on various aspects of experience design for the book I’m writing on digital experience planning, and I just had an epiphany today: I’m insane!
(No, wait - that’s not it…)
Ok - so I’ve been thinking about experience lately, both for my book and for the [...]

Bad United Airlines Customer Experience

This post starts out describing a bad customer service experience I had, then turns my whining into five things you should think about in your library.
First, for the story:I spoke at New York Public Library a few weeks ago. After my presentation, I decided to show up early at the airport, so I could work [...]

Adaptive Path and Second Life

This is cool. Adaptive Path, a company that focuses on building digital experiences, is apparently going to help Linden Labs improve the digital experience that is Second Life.
I find that to be an extremely interesting project. Usually, improving a digital experience means improving someone’s website, or a function of the website - not improve something [...]

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