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The best part? Interviewing someone like Bill Scott about his company, Netflix, and then finding out three weeks before press time that he doesn’t work for Netflix anymore. Bill Scott. Yep. Fortunately, Scott’s career and influence doesn’t start and stop with Netflix, nor even with his current position at Meebo. He’s a published author, an in-demand UX lecturer, and a heck of a nice guy. He sat down with us at the end of a busy day to talk about the evolution of UX, bidding adieu to the scroll bar, and why happy employees make better products. And yes, he did give us a look under Netflix’s big red hood. Want Magazine: So, Bill. What’s your definition of User Experience? Bill Scott: I’ll cop out and give a couple. Because if you’re doing something that’s much more entertainment--an engaging game--then it’s much more about fun, defined in a sense of thrill and fear, and all those emotions, and you’re always climbing that ladder of challenge and success and challenge and success. "But there’s another kind of fun—[as applied to] productivity apps…if you can get the flow, and the tool becomes transparent and visible to you and there’s a transparency to it and you get your stuff done and you feel smarter, then that’s a good user experience. And then, in [Netflix’s] situation a good user experience is, you found a movie that you enjoyed that you didn’t know that you were going to enjoy. So…games: more directly fun. And then productivity apps are all the way out here, where it’s more like “I’m very invisible.” And [the Netflix UX] is a little bit more in-between. Let’s talk a bit about your job at Netflix. I was surprised to hear that there are in fact two UX departments in Netflix. One is User Interface Engineering (of which you’re the director), but there’s also a UX department, where you have a director of User Experience. Yes. Rochelle King is my counterpart. Wonderful person to work with. And [her] team is the actual UX design team. And my team is what a lot of people call the front-end engineers, the engineers that are actually putting the website together. So their skills range from, usually HTML, XML, CSS and Java script. Although I like to have people in the team that also have design sensibilities. So why is the author of Designing Web Interfaces heading up an Engineering department? It’s actually an interesting role, because User Experience is valued here highly at Netflix, and they like to hire people who bring a hybrid of skills. So while someone like myself could do the User Experience side, I do the User Engineering, that’s where I put my focus, but I can easily brainstorm with Rochelle. I don’t try to run the design team. She does a great job of that. When I was at Yahoo!, I was [the Ajax Evangelist], and so it involved both the design side and the engineering side. At first I was in the core design team, and then when I launched the Yahoo! pattern library, that was design assets. But then I went over and became engineering manager for a while for a product called Yahoo! for Teachers. So I’m kind of one of those odd birds that jump back and forth between engineering and design. And I like that. I enjoy the back and forth. Can one manufacture “want” into a product or service? I think you can…One can have the right motive in doing that…persuasive experience is what we would call it. If you understand human psychology…you can persuade a little bit better. For example, people want a big set of choices, [but] if the Paradox of Choice theory is correct, people are actually happier with fewer choices. If you know that generally things you put up first, people are going to have a higher take on, you can manufacture a little bit of want and desire there. You can say that something’s free—and that creates this good feeling. People are drawn to that. So there are certainly things you can do. A good book I would recommend to people is Susan Weinschenk’s book, Neuro Web Design, a very good book. She’s got some YouTube web videos also. And she talks about these things like fear of loss and other things like the paradox of choice and some experiments with that. I think it’s like most things in life, though. If you try too hard to do something, say, superficial like that, then it becomes too apparent and it falls apart…You could really try to manipulate people with the fear and scarcity and the last minute deal, [but] it goes overboard. Because you’re just focused on that. You’re a one-trick pony. How much importance do you think marketing and advertising have towards creating this kind of want and desire for a product? I think a lot. A lot of the success we have had [at Netflix] is because we have a great marketing group that’s got the Netflix brand out. The red envelope has been huge. It’s like this symbol of happiness people have when they get it. It’s huge for us now. Of course, you have to envision some day in the future, [Netflix will focus more on] streaming. And…we won’t have red envelopes, which will be a sad day. But yeah, it creates a tone. Our brand team, we don’t own red. Obviously. Nobody owns red. But we do have a red color that people do recognize as us, and we try to bring that forward. What is the Interaction Designer’s job: to influence conversion or extended use? What is the interaction designer’s job, whether it’s an engineer, whether it’s a designer? Is it to make a product desirable for adoption--to influence purchaser adoption? Or is it to make it consistently enjoyable over use? There’s kind of a tension between pure design, aesthetics, and business concerns it seems like you’re kind of getting at there. Really, at the end of the day, you can blend the two together. What we try to find is the intersection point between what’s a good user experience and also what helps the business. Between conversions and reuse. There’s some things you can [do], surface certain things in the site…People tend to enjoy it more if you can find hidden gems and things that are more of a treasure. We don’t have hard data on that, but we have a pretty good hunch based on some data. Then it’s a good experience--and it’s not bad for business either. BS: From a designer, the challenge you know in hiring a design team at pretty much any web company that’s going to be successful, they can’t just be about design. The team as a whole has to be thinking about the business. But I think [this is] one of the challenges in the design team, and I work with Rochelle on this. When she hires, I interview the designers too and I’m part of her process. You have to find designers and engineers who enjoy living in constraints. Some designers want all the freedom, and they want to be artists really and not designers. Designers have to design for solutions. And so you have to mentally prepare people in a team to say, this is actually fun. This is a challenge. Here are the constraints that you have. Yeah, you want to fill this experience, but to win at this game, these business metrics need to move. And it’s an objective. It can be read wrong. It can be misused. But it’s an objective measure, and you can go against that. But how does that affect the quality of the product and/or service that we’re talking about here? It affects it because happy people design happy products. I heard this one company recently where they were telling me the product managers were cussing out the designers and just lambasting the engineers. This is in the valley here. What a bunch of nonsense. We all have to go home, and we have families, and live civilly. It affects our work. But if you have teams that, if the reward structure of the whole organization is around moving the business forward, everybody gets the value of that. People that enjoy their work are going to be more creative. I just believe that. That book Driven that just came out recently talks about motivation of creatives. It’s not about the stick-and-carrot approach. It’s really about being driven by the desire to create. Now, we temper that because we have the numbers that drive the business. It sounds like what you’re saying is that having a cohesive team or teams is the best way to create a product that people want. I think it’s a strong ingredient. I think without that ingredient, you can fall apart pretty quickly. It certainly wouldn’t stand on its own if we didn’t have the [shared] passion towards simplicity, to not just add a bunch of features. No feature is actually sacred. It can be taken away if it’s not something that’s valuable. A resource that’s not really helping our members. The objective is of the measures, business measures…web analytics is a really important part of it. Well, it’s only one piece of the puzzle, I should say, but very important. Do you see the field of UX evolving past the point we’re at now? Yeah. I really do. We’re definitely at a change point. For the last 26 years, we’ve had the mouse, we’ve had a lot of things that go with that. It’s interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. My first introduction to the mouse and the scroll bar was a Mac in 1984…and I was ecstatic that I could actually scroll back and forth and see my Mac Basic program and not just roll off the window. I could actually scroll back and forth. And I thought it was quite appropriate that if anybody took the scroll bar away from me, it would be Apple because they gave it to me to begin with. I guess 26 years seemed kind of poetic. They giveth, and finally they taketh away. [Now], you just flick with your finger. We’re at kind of one of those watershed moments. Just like the iPhone ushered in a lot of stuff, I think the iPad will too. If it’s not the iPad itself that just takes off and sells zillions of units, it will definitely be devices like that. And I think because it changes the game around the input device. I’m not saying touch takes over everything. But certainly as we move that way, it begins to change a lot of the way we think about things. And if you design an interface, you would never design an interface with a lot of scrolled areas, because the scrollbar can get to be really ugly. Visually dense. But you can actually have lots of sliding panels in a touch space. And, so, it just changes a bunch of things around. The physicality. The iPad’s going to [change things] a lot. Whenever you change the assumptions like that, it’s great for all of us, because we rethink things. And even if we don’t end up where we thought we would end up by doing that, even if it’s not the iPad, the thing that changes the world, it certainly starts changing the direction. So these are really interesting times. Because we’re getting interfaces into lots of places they haven’t been. Mobile space, even phones. Are you talking strictly about gestural interfaces? I’m talking about gestural, the natural user interfaces, but I’m also talking about even on the TV--it’s left-right-up-down, so that’s not a great interface yet. BS: It’s interesting. The secret sauce to the user experience here is two things that people don’t think of. Well, one of them they probably do. One of them that most people don’t think of [is that] the goodness of the user experience has more to do with the service than the site. Because if you become a member of Netflix, and you get a movie that you enjoy, you have love in your heart for Netflix. And it’s true! When I first came to Netflix…and I started going out and speaking, I got a lot more love. I got love [when I would speak] for Yahoo!…but I got a lot more gushing [with Netflix]. And it was like, okay, wait a minute. I know the warts of our site, so I’m like, “It’s not perfect or anything. There’s things that can be better.” But because the service is good, the whole experience is good, then it transfers some goodness to the site, even if it may not be there. So that’s one. The other is, the devotion to the analytical side of usability. I come from the Alan Cooper kind of world, not quite as extreme as Alan. I don’t believe that. “Good design is self-evident,” he would say. One of the things that drew me to Netflix was because I was always a design-by-hunch kind of guy, I had a knack for design. I wanted to bring [numbers] into it. Around here, our metrics' are simply around acquisition—membership. getting people in. But, thinking of the member side, how do you measure retention? You can’t, until it’s too late. So you measure it by leading indicators. Those leading indicators can be things like consumption. You can know if somebody added something. And now you can [measure] plays [of streaming media]. And so we’ve got metrics around that. And then there’s also “taste input”—star rating. If you rate something, that’s an important metric. And those things all tie together. Because when you get into the consumer world, most people out there are not like us. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Google video, “What is a browser?” If you haven’t, check it out. The Google Chrome team goes out and surveys people in Times Square, and I think it’s 8% of the people surveyed that day could articulate what a browser is. “Oh, it’s Google, it’s search, it’s whatever.” And that’s who we’re building websites for. [amazonshowcase_15315b42fd4325e6dbaa128e6e1bf020]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Bill Scott: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(329) "We talk with the former Director of User Experience Engineering at Netflix about the nuts and bolts of Netflix’s UX department(s!) and reveal their “secret sauce.” Bill also explains to us why “Happy people design happy products,” and shows us how favorite online app lets him stay close to his granddaughter in Alaska." 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The best part? Interviewing someone like Bill Scott about his company, Netflix, and then finding out three weeks before press time that he doesn’t work for Netflix anymore. Bill Scott. Yep. Fortunately, Scott’s career and influence doesn’t start and stop with Netflix, nor even with his current position at Meebo. He’s a published author, an in-demand UX lecturer, and a heck of a nice guy. He sat down with us at the end of a busy day to talk about the evolution of UX, bidding adieu to the scroll bar, and why happy employees make better products. And yes, he did give us a look under Netflix’s big red hood. Want Magazine: So, Bill. What’s your definition of User Experience? Bill Scott: I’ll cop out and give a couple. Because if you’re doing something that’s much more entertainment--an engaging game--then it’s much more about fun, defined in a sense of thrill and fear, and all those emotions, and you’re always climbing that ladder of challenge and success and challenge and success. "But there’s another kind of fun—[as applied to] productivity apps…if you can get the flow, and the tool becomes transparent and visible to you and there’s a transparency to it and you get your stuff done and you feel smarter, then that’s a good user experience. And then, in [Netflix’s] situation a good user experience is, you found a movie that you enjoyed that you didn’t know that you were going to enjoy. So…games: more directly fun. And then productivity apps are all the way out here, where it’s more like “I’m very invisible.” And [the Netflix UX] is a little bit more in-between. Let’s talk a bit about your job at Netflix. I was surprised to hear that there are in fact two UX departments in Netflix. One is User Interface Engineering (of which you’re the director), but there’s also a UX department, where you have a director of User Experience. Yes. Rochelle King is my counterpart. Wonderful person to work with. And [her] team is the actual UX design team. And my team is what a lot of people call the front-end engineers, the engineers that are actually putting the website together. So their skills range from, usually HTML, XML, CSS and Java script. Although I like to have people in the team that also have design sensibilities. So why is the author of Designing Web Interfaces heading up an Engineering department? It’s actually an interesting role, because User Experience is valued here highly at Netflix, and they like to hire people who bring a hybrid of skills. So while someone like myself could do the User Experience side, I do the User Engineering, that’s where I put my focus, but I can easily brainstorm with Rochelle. I don’t try to run the design team. She does a great job of that. When I was at Yahoo!, I was [the Ajax Evangelist], and so it involved both the design side and the engineering side. At first I was in the core design team, and then when I launched the Yahoo! pattern library, that was design assets. But then I went over and became engineering manager for a while for a product called Yahoo! for Teachers. So I’m kind of one of those odd birds that jump back and forth between engineering and design. And I like that. I enjoy the back and forth. Can one manufacture “want” into a product or service? I think you can…One can have the right motive in doing that…persuasive experience is what we would call it. If you understand human psychology…you can persuade a little bit better. For example, people want a big set of choices, [but] if the Paradox of Choice theory is correct, people are actually happier with fewer choices. If you know that generally things you put up first, people are going to have a higher take on, you can manufacture a little bit of want and desire there. You can say that something’s free—and that creates this good feeling. People are drawn to that. So there are certainly things you can do. A good book I would recommend to people is Susan Weinschenk’s book, Neuro Web Design, a very good book. She’s got some YouTube web videos also. And she talks about these things like fear of loss and other things like the paradox of choice and some experiments with that. I think it’s like most things in life, though. If you try too hard to do something, say, superficial like that, then it becomes too apparent and it falls apart…You could really try to manipulate people with the fear and scarcity and the last minute deal, [but] it goes overboard. Because you’re just focused on that. You’re a one-trick pony. How much importance do you think marketing and advertising have towards creating this kind of want and desire for a product? I think a lot. A lot of the success we have had [at Netflix] is because we have a great marketing group that’s got the Netflix brand out. The red envelope has been huge. It’s like this symbol of happiness people have when they get it. It’s huge for us now. Of course, you have to envision some day in the future, [Netflix will focus more on] streaming. And…we won’t have red envelopes, which will be a sad day. But yeah, it creates a tone. Our brand team, we don’t own red. Obviously. Nobody owns red. But we do have a red color that people do recognize as us, and we try to bring that forward. What is the Interaction Designer’s job: to influence conversion or extended use? What is the interaction designer’s job, whether it’s an engineer, whether it’s a designer? Is it to make a product desirable for adoption--to influence purchaser adoption? Or is it to make it consistently enjoyable over use? There’s kind of a tension between pure design, aesthetics, and business concerns it seems like you’re kind of getting at there. Really, at the end of the day, you can blend the two together. What we try to find is the intersection point between what’s a good user experience and also what helps the business. Between conversions and reuse. There’s some things you can [do], surface certain things in the site…People tend to enjoy it more if you can find hidden gems and things that are more of a treasure. We don’t have hard data on that, but we have a pretty good hunch based on some data. Then it’s a good experience--and it’s not bad for business either. BS: From a designer, the challenge you know in hiring a design team at pretty much any web company that’s going to be successful, they can’t just be about design. The team as a whole has to be thinking about the business. But I think [this is] one of the challenges in the design team, and I work with Rochelle on this. When she hires, I interview the designers too and I’m part of her process. You have to find designers and engineers who enjoy living in constraints. Some designers want all the freedom, and they want to be artists really and not designers. Designers have to design for solutions. And so you have to mentally prepare people in a team to say, this is actually fun. This is a challenge. Here are the constraints that you have. Yeah, you want to fill this experience, but to win at this game, these business metrics need to move. And it’s an objective. It can be read wrong. It can be misused. But it’s an objective measure, and you can go against that. But how does that affect the quality of the product and/or service that we’re talking about here? It affects it because happy people design happy products. I heard this one company recently where they were telling me the product managers were cussing out the designers and just lambasting the engineers. This is in the valley here. What a bunch of nonsense. We all have to go home, and we have families, and live civilly. It affects our work. But if you have teams that, if the reward structure of the whole organization is around moving the business forward, everybody gets the value of that. People that enjoy their work are going to be more creative. I just believe that. That book Driven that just came out recently talks about motivation of creatives. It’s not about the stick-and-carrot approach. It’s really about being driven by the desire to create. Now, we temper that because we have the numbers that drive the business. It sounds like what you’re saying is that having a cohesive team or teams is the best way to create a product that people want. I think it’s a strong ingredient. I think without that ingredient, you can fall apart pretty quickly. It certainly wouldn’t stand on its own if we didn’t have the [shared] passion towards simplicity, to not just add a bunch of features. No feature is actually sacred. It can be taken away if it’s not something that’s valuable. A resource that’s not really helping our members. The objective is of the measures, business measures…web analytics is a really important part of it. Well, it’s only one piece of the puzzle, I should say, but very important. Do you see the field of UX evolving past the point we’re at now? Yeah. I really do. We’re definitely at a change point. For the last 26 years, we’ve had the mouse, we’ve had a lot of things that go with that. It’s interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. My first introduction to the mouse and the scroll bar was a Mac in 1984…and I was ecstatic that I could actually scroll back and forth and see my Mac Basic program and not just roll off the window. I could actually scroll back and forth. And I thought it was quite appropriate that if anybody took the scroll bar away from me, it would be Apple because they gave it to me to begin with. I guess 26 years seemed kind of poetic. They giveth, and finally they taketh away. [Now], you just flick with your finger. We’re at kind of one of those watershed moments. Just like the iPhone ushered in a lot of stuff, I think the iPad will too. If it’s not the iPad itself that just takes off and sells zillions of units, it will definitely be devices like that. And I think because it changes the game around the input device. I’m not saying touch takes over everything. But certainly as we move that way, it begins to change a lot of the way we think about things. And if you design an interface, you would never design an interface with a lot of scrolled areas, because the scrollbar can get to be really ugly. Visually dense. But you can actually have lots of sliding panels in a touch space. And, so, it just changes a bunch of things around. The physicality. The iPad’s going to [change things] a lot. Whenever you change the assumptions like that, it’s great for all of us, because we rethink things. And even if we don’t end up where we thought we would end up by doing that, even if it’s not the iPad, the thing that changes the world, it certainly starts changing the direction. So these are really interesting times. Because we’re getting interfaces into lots of places they haven’t been. Mobile space, even phones. Are you talking strictly about gestural interfaces? I’m talking about gestural, the natural user interfaces, but I’m also talking about even on the TV--it’s left-right-up-down, so that’s not a great interface yet. BS: It’s interesting. The secret sauce to the user experience here is two things that people don’t think of. Well, one of them they probably do. One of them that most people don’t think of [is that] the goodness of the user experience has more to do with the service than the site. Because if you become a member of Netflix, and you get a movie that you enjoy, you have love in your heart for Netflix. And it’s true! When I first came to Netflix…and I started going out and speaking, I got a lot more love. I got love [when I would speak] for Yahoo!…but I got a lot more gushing [with Netflix]. And it was like, okay, wait a minute. I know the warts of our site, so I’m like, “It’s not perfect or anything. There’s things that can be better.” But because the service is good, the whole experience is good, then it transfers some goodness to the site, even if it may not be there. So that’s one. The other is, the devotion to the analytical side of usability. I come from the Alan Cooper kind of world, not quite as extreme as Alan. I don’t believe that. “Good design is self-evident,” he would say. One of the things that drew me to Netflix was because I was always a design-by-hunch kind of guy, I had a knack for design. I wanted to bring [numbers] into it. Around here, our metrics' are simply around acquisition—membership. getting people in. But, thinking of the member side, how do you measure retention? You can’t, until it’s too late. So you measure it by leading indicators. Those leading indicators can be things like consumption. You can know if somebody added something. And now you can [measure] plays [of streaming media]. And so we’ve got metrics around that. And then there’s also “taste input”—star rating. If you rate something, that’s an important metric. And those things all tie together. Because when you get into the consumer world, most people out there are not like us. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Google video, “What is a browser?” If you haven’t, check it out. The Google Chrome team goes out and surveys people in Times Square, and I think it’s 8% of the people surveyed that day could articulate what a browser is. “Oh, it’s Google, it’s search, it’s whatever.” And that’s who we’re building websites for. [amazonshowcase_15315b42fd4325e6dbaa128e6e1bf020]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Bill Scott: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(329) "We talk with the former Director of User Experience Engineering at Netflix about the nuts and bolts of Netflix’s UX department(s!) and reveal their “secret sauce.” Bill also explains to us why “Happy people design happy products,” and shows us how favorite online app lets him stay close to his granddaughter in Alaska." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "bill-scott" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:54:33" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:54:33" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=22" ["menu_order"]=> int(5) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "32" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#322 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(273) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 00:00:45" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 07:00:45" ["post_content"]=> string(8787) "From Tivo to Porsche to an ice cream scoop, The UX luminaries of Want Magazine_001 make no bones about the products and services they love. Take a look at what surprises and delights the experts about both the usual suspects and some unexpected choices. Dan Saffer, Founder/Principal, Kicker Studio: TiVo is a perennial favorite of mine. It used to just be the box with the service; now it’s a whole website that you can work with, and I know they’re planning a more mobile presence. They care so much about the user experience. Something like TiVo, which seems so simple, actually has just a ton of complexity hidden under the hood that they’ve really simplified for you. Peter Merholz, President, Adaptive Path: TiVo still delivers the best DVR television experience. When I moved houses, I got a new Direct TV DVR--and I hate it because it’s not TiVo. Bill Scott, VP, Product Engineering, Meebo I’ve become a real fan of Twitter. it forces people to curate in a very short manner, 140 characters. I actually don’t even use Google Reader now. I just have the right people I follow. Luke Wroblewski, author, Site Seeing, Designing Web Forms I no longer go through hundreds of news articles or feeds or thousands of blog posts. I follow a couple of people that are doing that in different batches. Stuff is just coming to me as these people deem it relevant. Cordell Ratzlaff, Director of User-Centered Design, Cisco I think the Nintendo Wii is a big product. It’s a great experience. Nintendo…made a decision to focus on casual gamers rather than hard core gamers. So they went away from higher performing consoles, higher resolution graphics, and focused on fun. You don’t necessarily need all that processing power. You don’t need the high quality graphics. And you can still have fun. But I think [the Wii’s real breakthrough] is turning people’s entire bodies into an input device. You don’t necessarily realize you’ve got a controller. Doing something with your body, you’re affecting something on your video screen…with no wires in between…which is part of that magic. Dan Saffer The Wii for us is still an amazing experience. When 85-year-old grannies, 15-year-olds, my daughter who’s 9, can all play the same game--and they’re doing gestures in space, which ten years ago was something you would only see in an academic lab somewhere--that’s just thrilling. It’s really opened the door to people saying, “Wow, we can use this elsewhere.” Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group I own a Porsche and I just always delight to have an excuse to drive it. I just came back from a conference that was up in the redwoods, just north of San Francisco…it was kind of in the foothills and so there were narrow, winding roads. We deliberately came back home not on the main highway, but on a small, winding road…It’s an old car--10 years old--but it’s just so much fun. Carl Liu, Founder, Newtive Creations: A simply awesome product. It is a breakthrough innovation, not only the sleek product itself, but also the creative thinking of business model. It elevates user experience to a higher level from hardware device and software service to its online back-end resources. It engages the user deeply to its resource data, and broadly applies to other Apple products. The UX on the iPhone is amazing in that it runs the applications and keeps the internet working fluidly. Also, the operational speed and interaction response of the software far exceeds competing products. Peter Merholz: I am a die-hard iPhone user. I can’t say it’s changed my life, but it’s one of those where I don’t know if I could live without it now that it’s embedded in my life. Oddly enough, not for the phone capabilities. Mostly for the podcasting capabilities. Peter Merholz: The Southwest experience is just head and shoulders above the experience that you get on those other airlines. I end up flying a lot, and it's the only major airline that doesn’t piss me off. Bill Scott: A really neat site. It’s a great example of physicality and emotional connection. There’s a bookshelf...looks like the Apple’s iPad bookshelf. It’s got these beautiful children’s books. They’re perfectly rendered. You click one of them. It pops up, and you actually read the story to your kids or grand-kids. The pages turn beautifully. And you get to [record yourself reading it via] your webcam. You’ve got your picture in the corner, and you sit there and…record it and you give a link to it. I read one of the books to my granddaughter Cassandra up in Alaska. just the emotional connection of this. And it’s [a video of] me in the corner…and I’m reading, with all my expressions. And it’s like, “Cassandra, this is really cool. Look at the mouse there. Isn’t that mouse funny?” So it’s like you’ve read to them, and now it’s been recorded, and it’s this wonderful experience. Now she asks for it, because she wants to hear me read. Because she gets on the computer, and it’s this beautiful book. She can turn the pages. She can jump ahead, and I’m reading on that page. She can go back, and I’m reading on that page. She’s building a relationship with me, even though I’m not there. Cordell Ratzlaff: About 20 years ago, my wife and I were down in Carmel, California, one of my favorite places. And we bought this ice cream scoop. It has a nice, clean Danish design. But one of the features of the scoop is it’s got antifreeze in the handle. So your body warmth actually warms up the scoop, which makes it easier to scoop frozen ice cream out. It’s a very simple device. There’s this connection between the device and your body. There’s no moving parts in this ice cream scoop. It works on the physical level. It feels good in your hand. You can feel the scoop warming up in your hand as you hold it. It works great for scooping out ice cream. But there’s also this emotional connection to it, too. Because every time I pull that out of the drawer, I think, “That was a great trip we took down to Carmel. And pretty soon, I’m going to eat ice cream, too.” Carl Liu: A new breakthrough collaboration and communication tool. It provides real-time editing and document viewing, including text, photos, videos and maps. The issues of remote collaboration have existed for many years. We all have seen and experienced their issues, but there were no good solutions. I feel it can hugely enhance the efficiency of communication, and improve the quality of work. Peter Merholz: Google Maps started with driving directions. Then they did transit directions. Then they did walking directions. Just today, they launched bicycling directions. They just keep innovating in ways that are awesome and amazing and unparalleled on the web. Google Maps is one of those things where they anticipate what you’re going to need from it, and they deliver it before you’ve articulated that need. It’s just amazing how rapidly they release interesting new stuff. And they’ve been able to do it in a way that it doesn’t feel like feature creep or bloat. They do it in a way that really feels coherent and germane within that mapping experience. Luke Wroblewski: The things that I like have connections to my real life; they apply to things like the birth of my son. My wife and I were in the hospital with our first child, the night before she [went into] labor. We’re sitting in the hospital. There’s a period of time where not a lot is happening. So I pulled my laptop. I called up Netflix and I started streaming The Office. Here it is, two in the morning, during what could be an intense, emotional thing…and we’re watching these funny shows, instantly coming to us. That creates a personal connection to that service, because that thing was there for you in that kind of moment…this service there that helped us through that." ["post_title"]=> string(38) "Delight Box: Products the UX Pros Love" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(218) "Want Magazine 001 collected some of the leading lights in product, interface, and usability design. To each one of them, we posed this question: what products and services do YOU love to use? Here's what they told us. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(11) "delight-box" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 01:58:08" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 08:58:08" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(39) "http://wantmag.com/2010/05/delight-box/" ["menu_order"]=> int(11) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "4" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } } }

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