It was nice to see Portland, OR host last evenings talk:
Jared Spool Presents: Mobile & UX – Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm – Portland, OR
Last night at the UoO building in Old Town.
We’ll post Links to his Deck when it’s available (Now available Here).
He’s been giving this talk for the past year, and a video is here: http://vimeo.com/25547105
While there were 4x elements in Spool’s presentation that create this “perfect storm,” the over-riding metaphor for much of the presentation was a SIX FLAGS v. DISNEYLAND: ”activity” v. “experience” paradigm.
Basically, SIX FLAGS offers a pretty straight forward activity-based flow, while DISNEY’s design encourages a more “experiential” flow for the End User. The parallel was basically how online web sites are data/feature driven, while mobile (when successful) is more experience driven.
The natural extension of this, while not discussed, seems to us to be how a DISNEY-experience is “personal,” while a SIX FLAGS-activity laden day is more generic (everyone has nearly the same experience).
One slide in the presentation Deck were pictures of the origami towels that magically appear in someone’s “resort room” at the end of the day — sometimes surrounded by the visitor’s children’s toys (Toy Story with Origami towels).
The illusion is that this is a deeply personalized, memorable touch (even if 20,000 other rooms are nearly the same), in part, by adding the visitor’s toys to the tableau does make it “personal.”
Let’s extend this to “mobile thinking and UX.”
Mobile is a far more “personal” engagement format than “online.”
It’s in someone’s pocket, purse or bag. It’s in someone’s hand. It’s a one-to-one EXTREME CLOSE UP engagement.
It’s not just “experiential.”
It’s personal.
And, the UX, along with the programming, needs to fulfill “personal” engagement — Whether that is through deeply complex algorithms or smoke-and-mirrors fancy tricks (User’s will suspend disbelief and go along for the ride if you do it well), “personalization” of mobile experiences is what delivers:
Delight.
Which was another theme of the evening.
The contentAI studios conversational mobile platform is predicated on personalizing each and every engagement. Sometimes deeply, sometimes lightly. But, it’s been a Prime Directive in the development of the platform since our focus went to Mobile, nearly 2 years ago.
We’ve been thinking about personalized mobile experiences for a long time. Which is why the idea of putting someone’s children’s toys around a bunch of origami creature shaped towels, resonated so deeply.
