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But in the ten years since that ground-breaking design, he’s gone on to high-profile positions at Frog Design, a variety of independent projects, and most recently, Director of User-Centered design at Cisco. Ratzlaff stands about 6’4”, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes that convey intensity even during polite conversation. It’s easy to imagine losing an argument to him. His long track record illustrates his success in getting testy engineers and egotistical designers to play nicely at some of this industry’s most successful companies. And in his three-years-and-counting at Cisco, they’ve gone from a company that focused more on ship dates than user experience, to one that recently won a design award for their WebEx Meeting Center. He gave us a couple of hours of his day to chat about User Experience, how to make a product desirable, and how to teach a 65,000-person company to appreciate user-centered design. When it comes to the concept of User Experience, Cordell takes a very broad view of usability—well, maybe not broad so much as expansive. “I think it encompasses the entire relationship that a person has with the device or product or application that they’re using. That includes the functionality of the device. It includes the physical relationship between the person and the product. And it includes the emotional relationship. “It also encompasses every touch point between the person and the product. From the time somebody’s aware of a need that they have for a product, to the research that they do to understand what product is going to meet that need, to the purchasing process, to the use process, to the upgrade and disposal process.” Coming from the product side of design, Cordell agrees with us here at WantMag that desire can be engineered into a product. It starts with discovering the desire(s) of the audience. “I think it goes back to doing the research. And I think a lot of the emotional connection that people have with products goes back to satisfying--in many cases, satisfying a need that they didn’t even know that they had.” “But if you can surprise people in a way that unexpectedly delights them, it creates a tremendous bond between a person and a product.” Having the resources of a Cisco at one’s disposal certainly helps. “I have a couple of researches on my team who spend a lot of their time out in the wild with our customers, or people who would like to be our customers, really understanding. In our case, we’re building communication, collaboration products. So we’re understanding how people work together. “We spend a lot of time just watching people in their environment and looking for ways that we can help them work together better. A lot of times, we draw insights based on what we see that would cover a need that people themselves don’t even realize. And that spurs ideas for how we could build either an entire product or a feature for a product that would help them accomplish what they wanted to do.” As Jakob Nielsen and other UX experts expressed in our interviews, simply asking people what they want isn’t enough. Instead, Ratzlaff advises, “Watch them.” “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a lot of times people won’t tell you what they want, for a couple of reasons. One thing is they don’t want to. They may be embarrassed. But a lot of times, they just can’t articulate what they want. It doesn’t even register to them. They’re used to doing something the same way…so they don’t think that there’s any other way to do it.” Ratzlaff says that his chosen philosophy for making a desirable product doesn’t sync with that of most companies’ product design strategies. He believes most companies look at what they can do with their existing technology, then build the interface and experience on top of that. “But…if you look at companies like Nintendo, or companies like Apple, what they’re doing is they’re looking at what the experience should be. And in many cases, the technology doesn’t exist to support that. That’s where they really innovate. And that’s where you can really gain market leadership.” Cordell provided a great example of when research uncovered those unrealized needs. In his pre-Cisco days, while developing an online travel reservation site, Ratzlaff’s team discovered some unusual behavior, universal among those with a specific job title: Executive Assistants. Research revealed that his particular group would check flights, then write all the information down—despite having the information onscreen. Why this unusual behavior? “They weren’t necessarily the decision maker for the trip,” Ratzlaff revealed. “They would have to write [all the flight options] on a tablet. Once they had done all of their research, they would go to the person that they were making the reservations for, and they would show all the options. The person would look through it. And they would decide, ‘This is the one I want.’ Then [the assistant] would go back to the site and actually book the ticket. “It’s essentially putting a human into the loop…you’ve got information in digital form, and you’re asking a human to translate it into another format. What we call that is ‘human middleware.’ And once you start looking for that, you start seeing it every place.” Once Ratzlaff and this team identified this audience of power users, they were able to create a clipboard function that met the needs of this audience. We asked Ratzlaff if emotion played a role in the purchase of a product. He suggested it plays a bigger role than most people think—even with Enterprise products. “I think the larger the purchase, the more emotion plays a role. You would think that would be the opposite. Think at the corporate level. You’re spending millions of dollars for something. You would think that people would be rational. They would run through all the numbers and make a decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s a corporate IT expenditure, or if it’s you purchasing a home. “So, back to the days when I was working in the design agency. We would get…in some cases CEOs, and need to explain to them why they should be spending a million dollars on this design project.…You could go in and with all the ROI analyses, all the justification based on the Excel spreadsheets you came up with. And a lot of times…even if you could justify it, people would question the numbers. “But if you went in with just an amazing demo, of ‘Here’s what your product would look like. This is the way that your customers would react to this product,’ And you could hook them with that, [the numbers] wouldn’t matter. You could always find some way to justify the financials…And again, that wasn’t just talking about buying a toaster oven. This was making a major expenditure. “So I have found that approach just to be much more successful; appealing to somebody’s emotion rather than appealing to their logic.” Successful insights like these brought Ratzlaff to the attention of Cisco in 2006. After working for more design- and usability-driven organizations, he saw an opportunity to work for a company that was just discovering the need for user-centric design. According to Ratzlaff, that need had been conveyed to Cisco by its customers, in the form of user feedback and lost sales. Advances in technology brought down the cost of VOIP and telephony products—Cisco’s stock-in-trade. Increased productivity—achieved by making their products more usable—became the last value-add a company of its size could offer. But they were being “out-UXed” in certain markets by Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other companies who’d been in the usability game—largely for consumer audiences—longer. “So,” Ratzlaff continued, “The opportunity for me was, ‘Come in here and tell us how to do it—with all of the resources that we have available.’…It wasn’t necessarily an opportunity to come in and design great products, but an opportunity to change the culture. Because I think in order to design great products, you need to have the culture in place.” Central to that culture change was a dispelling of the myth of the “Enterprise” user. “There is no such thing.” Ratzlaff insists. “We’re all people. When we walk in the door in the morning at work, our expectations, our skills, our values don’t change…At the end of the day, we go home to our Sony PlayStations, and our iPhones, and our Nintendo Wii’s. And we should expect to have the same types of great experience with the tools that we use at work as we do at home.” This change in thinking also comes from the simple fact that, until recently, only enterprises could afford technology. “It used to be [that] the most reliable, the most feature-rich, the best products, always came out first in business. And then eventually, as the cost came down, that technology found its way into the consumer market…Now what you’re seeing is more and more companies focusing their innovation on the consumer market—first.” In an era when people carry around between 1-3 computers on their person (phone, MP3 player, tablet/e-reader, laptop), the expectations for usable, enjoyable technology have been raised higher. So, Cisco had a clear and present need for a sharper focus on UX. Changing the culture of a $9.8 billion company? Not easy. “Yeah…” Ratzlaff offered, thinking about his first weeks at Cisco. “So one of the things that happened when I got here was, there were a number of reactions within the company. One was, ‘We hired this guy. He’s going to focus on user experience and problem solved. We’ll just go back to doing things the way we used to do.’” So, okay, tough climb. As Ratzlaff discovered, sometimes drastic measures must be taken. “Anytime you are attempting to go through a culture change,” He explained, “There’s a point where you almost have to whack somebody on a head with a 2x4 just to get their attention. Just the inertia of doing things, particularly in a large company, over and over again, is very hard to change. “One of the first things I did was look at all the different products that were going on. And I noticed that there had been a lot of great work being done. A lot of great research. I started thumbing through the design specs. ‘This all looks great.’” Okay, more promising… “Then I’d look at the products, and [think], ‘What happened here?’” Uh-oh. “Something went missing from the time somebody designed this to the time it actually got out in the market place.” As with any number of Enterprise products, features were often scrapped to guarantee on-time shipment—usability occasionally being one of those. Ratzlaff decided to take a stand on one particular product rollout. “One of the products I started looking at…at the tail end [of its production process]…was a very simple product. It basically allowed our customers to change the desktop pattern and ringtones on their phones. Not an earth-shaking product, not something that every mobile device manufacturer doesn’t have for their products as well. “But I looked at this, and this was [complex enough to be] designed for an IT manager. It was really bad. It was embarrassing…It was the typical story you hear a lot in companies: “’We’ve got this event coming up, we want to announce this…We don’t have enough resources to do it right. We’re just trying to get along. We’ll fix it in the next phase.’ “[At Cisco], you always shipped your products on time. You went through the process. And then it went out. And then you dealt with it later. I looked at this and I said, ‘No. We can’t go out this way.’” Ratzlaff sat down with the General Manager of that particular business unit and convinced him to kill the project—despite the fact that the product was mere months from shipping. “We killed the project.” He told us. “We made a big announcement, sent a note out to the entire organization, saying, ‘We killed this project because it wasn’t good enough. We’re going to start over with a different team and get it.’ As expected, a decisive move like that helped him draw a distinct line in the sand regarding Cisco’s UX. “We looked at this as a great opportunity to really send a message to the whole organization that we’re serious about user experience.” “It wasn’t a big revenue impact to us.” Ratzlaff recalled. “But it certainly had a big impact in terms of getting people’s attention.” The lesson learned: “Anytime you’re going [to a new company], find an opportunity like that as soon as you can, and take advantage of it. Don’t let it go. Don’t wait too long. Because things just start going along and then you just become part of the normal process, normal way of doing things.” Cut to 2009, when Cisco won Best Of Show at the MacWorld Expo for their WebEx Meeting Center suite. “Going from when I started here at Cisco…winning a Best Of Show award at MacWorld, was even more than I thought we could accomplish. But I think it’s a great testament to some of the things that have changed here.” The story behind the Meeting Center’s iPhone app is a triumph of the kind of culture change Ratlzaff strives for at Cisco—not least of which because, as per Ratzlaff’s definition of UX, it started with research. Their studies showed that more and more people were taking conference calls from remote locations—mostly via mobile phone. What’s more, most of the people on mobiles were going not just from one location to another, but from one device to another. “Maybe they’re driving into work,” Ratzlaff suggested. “They get into their office, and now they’ve got a nice, high audio quality desk phone sitting on their desk, but they’re participating in a conference call on their mobile device. They want to move the call from their mobile device to their desk phone. The only way to do that is you’ve got to disconnect from one device and call back in…It was disruptive to the meeting…It’s a hassle for the person that’s doing it.” Given that, as a WebEx conference call, the audio was handled over IP, and that the system recognized all the devices, Ratzlaff and his team saw an opportunity to improve that user experience. “We figured, ‘There’s got to be a better way to make that seamless.’” He explained. “We have smart engineers who figured out a way to do that.” And figure they did, but not with the solution you’d expect. “We could have done a way where you’ve got a button on your phone. And when you’re ready to switch the call, you go through a menu, and move the device over, move the call from one device. You have to locate the other device. Which works, but it’s still kind of clunky.” (Spoiler alert: The WebEx app lets you shake your iPhone at the desk phone to transfer the call.) “[WebEx knows] your mobile device, [and] your desk phone. Through Bluetooth …and the iPhone’s accelerometer, you can just shake your mobile phone at your desk phone…the audio can go to your desk phone, the video can go to your PC, so now you’ve got all it up here on a nice, large monitor. “So there was really no interface at all, other than the shaking of the phone. It’s reducing that gesture to its lowest or simplest form.” Interface-less call transfer: it ain’t the Polio vaccine--but did the Polio vaccine surprise or delight thousands of enterprise customers? No one looked at the nurse sticking a needle in their arm and said, “Cool.” “When people ask, ‘How did you do that? It’s like magic,’ Ratzlaff recalls. “That’s a good gauge of when you’ve hit the mark.” The “cool factor” of such an intuitive interaction is a given. But what’s equally impressive on Ratzlaff’s part is the way he managed to push this little innovation through the challenging Cisco culture. “We defined what we wanted the experience to be first,” he sums up. “And then figured out how to build the technology to accomplish that.” As if it were that simple. “We built a prototype. It was actually a Flash prototype, just to get the idea across: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if people could do this?’…I remember showing that at a fairly large meeting…I remember hearing people in the back, engineers in the back room laughing, ‘That’s science fiction. There’s no way you can do that.’” “But we had a couple of engineers who saw that and took that as a challenge to make it work. So three weeks after we showed that, I had two engineers in my office saying, ‘You remember that demo you showed? We actually got it working.’” Inspiring innovation in engineers: That’s one way to change a company’s culture. “The technology for doing that was really, really hard, and required some really smart people to figure it out. But it was the type of thing where…we defined what we wanted the experience to be first, and then figured out how to build the technology to accomplish that.” “I think the truth is, just coming up with ideas for how things should work, that’s the easy part. It’s actually the execution part [that’s difficult]…Apple gets a lot of props for great design, but I think where they make that happen is in having really smart engineers that can figure out how to do that.” Which isn’t to say that Ratzlaff doesn’t still have his work cut out for him. “It is becoming easier,” he says about the culture shift at Cisco, “But that job is never done.” With an award under their belts, a design department that has gone from 2 to 30 employees in three years, and a solid set of values about what makes products usable, he’s well on his way." ["post_title"]=> string(36) "Cordell Ratzlaff: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(340) "The designer of the Mac OSX system interface and the current Director of User Centered Design for Cisco tells us how to determine consumer desire for a product. He also shares his advice on how to change company culture to appreciate UX, and shares the sweetest words a Design director can ever hear: "How did you do that? It's like magic."" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(16) "cordell-ratzlaff" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:52:18" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:52:18" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=14" ["menu_order"]=> int(2) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "28" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } ["comments"]=> NULL ["comment_count"]=> int(0) ["current_comment"]=> int(-1) ["comment"]=> NULL ["found_posts"]=> string(1) "3" ["max_num_pages"]=> float(1) ["max_num_comment_pages"]=> int(0) ["is_single"]=> bool(false) ["is_preview"]=> bool(false) ["is_page"]=> bool(false) ["is_archive"]=> bool(true) ["is_date"]=> bool(false) ["is_year"]=> bool(false) ["is_month"]=> bool(false) ["is_day"]=> bool(false) ["is_time"]=> bool(false) ["is_author"]=> bool(false) ["is_category"]=> bool(false) ["is_tag"]=> bool(true) ["is_tax"]=> bool(false) ["is_search"]=> bool(false) ["is_feed"]=> bool(false) ["is_comment_feed"]=> bool(false) ["is_trackback"]=> bool(false) ["is_home"]=> bool(false) ["is_404"]=> bool(false) ["is_comments_popup"]=> bool(false) ["is_admin"]=> bool(false) ["is_attachment"]=> bool(false) ["is_singular"]=> bool(false) ["is_robots"]=> bool(false) ["is_posts_page"]=> bool(false) ["is_paged"]=> bool(false) ["query"]=> array(1) { ["tag"]=> string(3) "wii" } ["posts"]=> &array(3) { [0]=> object(stdClass)#323 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(31) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 00:00:53" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 07:00:53" ["post_content"]=> string(19183) "If all Cordell Ratzlaff had done was design the interface for Apple’s OSX, he’d still have a place in the pantheon of UX luminaries. But in the ten years since that ground-breaking design, he’s gone on to high-profile positions at Frog Design, a variety of independent projects, and most recently, Director of User-Centered design at Cisco. Ratzlaff stands about 6’4”, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes that convey intensity even during polite conversation. It’s easy to imagine losing an argument to him. His long track record illustrates his success in getting testy engineers and egotistical designers to play nicely at some of this industry’s most successful companies. And in his three-years-and-counting at Cisco, they’ve gone from a company that focused more on ship dates than user experience, to one that recently won a design award for their WebEx Meeting Center. He gave us a couple of hours of his day to chat about User Experience, how to make a product desirable, and how to teach a 65,000-person company to appreciate user-centered design. When it comes to the concept of User Experience, Cordell takes a very broad view of usability—well, maybe not broad so much as expansive. “I think it encompasses the entire relationship that a person has with the device or product or application that they’re using. That includes the functionality of the device. It includes the physical relationship between the person and the product. And it includes the emotional relationship. “It also encompasses every touch point between the person and the product. From the time somebody’s aware of a need that they have for a product, to the research that they do to understand what product is going to meet that need, to the purchasing process, to the use process, to the upgrade and disposal process.” Coming from the product side of design, Cordell agrees with us here at WantMag that desire can be engineered into a product. It starts with discovering the desire(s) of the audience. “I think it goes back to doing the research. And I think a lot of the emotional connection that people have with products goes back to satisfying--in many cases, satisfying a need that they didn’t even know that they had.” “But if you can surprise people in a way that unexpectedly delights them, it creates a tremendous bond between a person and a product.” Having the resources of a Cisco at one’s disposal certainly helps. “I have a couple of researches on my team who spend a lot of their time out in the wild with our customers, or people who would like to be our customers, really understanding. In our case, we’re building communication, collaboration products. So we’re understanding how people work together. “We spend a lot of time just watching people in their environment and looking for ways that we can help them work together better. A lot of times, we draw insights based on what we see that would cover a need that people themselves don’t even realize. And that spurs ideas for how we could build either an entire product or a feature for a product that would help them accomplish what they wanted to do.” As Jakob Nielsen and other UX experts expressed in our interviews, simply asking people what they want isn’t enough. Instead, Ratzlaff advises, “Watch them.” “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a lot of times people won’t tell you what they want, for a couple of reasons. One thing is they don’t want to. They may be embarrassed. But a lot of times, they just can’t articulate what they want. It doesn’t even register to them. They’re used to doing something the same way…so they don’t think that there’s any other way to do it.” Ratzlaff says that his chosen philosophy for making a desirable product doesn’t sync with that of most companies’ product design strategies. He believes most companies look at what they can do with their existing technology, then build the interface and experience on top of that. “But…if you look at companies like Nintendo, or companies like Apple, what they’re doing is they’re looking at what the experience should be. And in many cases, the technology doesn’t exist to support that. That’s where they really innovate. And that’s where you can really gain market leadership.” Cordell provided a great example of when research uncovered those unrealized needs. In his pre-Cisco days, while developing an online travel reservation site, Ratzlaff’s team discovered some unusual behavior, universal among those with a specific job title: Executive Assistants. Research revealed that his particular group would check flights, then write all the information down—despite having the information onscreen. Why this unusual behavior? “They weren’t necessarily the decision maker for the trip,” Ratzlaff revealed. “They would have to write [all the flight options] on a tablet. Once they had done all of their research, they would go to the person that they were making the reservations for, and they would show all the options. The person would look through it. And they would decide, ‘This is the one I want.’ Then [the assistant] would go back to the site and actually book the ticket. “It’s essentially putting a human into the loop…you’ve got information in digital form, and you’re asking a human to translate it into another format. What we call that is ‘human middleware.’ And once you start looking for that, you start seeing it every place.” Once Ratzlaff and this team identified this audience of power users, they were able to create a clipboard function that met the needs of this audience. We asked Ratzlaff if emotion played a role in the purchase of a product. He suggested it plays a bigger role than most people think—even with Enterprise products. “I think the larger the purchase, the more emotion plays a role. You would think that would be the opposite. Think at the corporate level. You’re spending millions of dollars for something. You would think that people would be rational. They would run through all the numbers and make a decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s a corporate IT expenditure, or if it’s you purchasing a home. “So, back to the days when I was working in the design agency. We would get…in some cases CEOs, and need to explain to them why they should be spending a million dollars on this design project.…You could go in and with all the ROI analyses, all the justification based on the Excel spreadsheets you came up with. And a lot of times…even if you could justify it, people would question the numbers. “But if you went in with just an amazing demo, of ‘Here’s what your product would look like. This is the way that your customers would react to this product,’ And you could hook them with that, [the numbers] wouldn’t matter. You could always find some way to justify the financials…And again, that wasn’t just talking about buying a toaster oven. This was making a major expenditure. “So I have found that approach just to be much more successful; appealing to somebody’s emotion rather than appealing to their logic.” Successful insights like these brought Ratzlaff to the attention of Cisco in 2006. After working for more design- and usability-driven organizations, he saw an opportunity to work for a company that was just discovering the need for user-centric design. According to Ratzlaff, that need had been conveyed to Cisco by its customers, in the form of user feedback and lost sales. Advances in technology brought down the cost of VOIP and telephony products—Cisco’s stock-in-trade. Increased productivity—achieved by making their products more usable—became the last value-add a company of its size could offer. But they were being “out-UXed” in certain markets by Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other companies who’d been in the usability game—largely for consumer audiences—longer. “So,” Ratzlaff continued, “The opportunity for me was, ‘Come in here and tell us how to do it—with all of the resources that we have available.’…It wasn’t necessarily an opportunity to come in and design great products, but an opportunity to change the culture. Because I think in order to design great products, you need to have the culture in place.” Central to that culture change was a dispelling of the myth of the “Enterprise” user. “There is no such thing.” Ratzlaff insists. “We’re all people. When we walk in the door in the morning at work, our expectations, our skills, our values don’t change…At the end of the day, we go home to our Sony PlayStations, and our iPhones, and our Nintendo Wii’s. And we should expect to have the same types of great experience with the tools that we use at work as we do at home.” This change in thinking also comes from the simple fact that, until recently, only enterprises could afford technology. “It used to be [that] the most reliable, the most feature-rich, the best products, always came out first in business. And then eventually, as the cost came down, that technology found its way into the consumer market…Now what you’re seeing is more and more companies focusing their innovation on the consumer market—first.” In an era when people carry around between 1-3 computers on their person (phone, MP3 player, tablet/e-reader, laptop), the expectations for usable, enjoyable technology have been raised higher. So, Cisco had a clear and present need for a sharper focus on UX. Changing the culture of a $9.8 billion company? Not easy. “Yeah…” Ratzlaff offered, thinking about his first weeks at Cisco. “So one of the things that happened when I got here was, there were a number of reactions within the company. One was, ‘We hired this guy. He’s going to focus on user experience and problem solved. We’ll just go back to doing things the way we used to do.’” So, okay, tough climb. As Ratzlaff discovered, sometimes drastic measures must be taken. “Anytime you are attempting to go through a culture change,” He explained, “There’s a point where you almost have to whack somebody on a head with a 2x4 just to get their attention. Just the inertia of doing things, particularly in a large company, over and over again, is very hard to change. “One of the first things I did was look at all the different products that were going on. And I noticed that there had been a lot of great work being done. A lot of great research. I started thumbing through the design specs. ‘This all looks great.’” Okay, more promising… “Then I’d look at the products, and [think], ‘What happened here?’” Uh-oh. “Something went missing from the time somebody designed this to the time it actually got out in the market place.” As with any number of Enterprise products, features were often scrapped to guarantee on-time shipment—usability occasionally being one of those. Ratzlaff decided to take a stand on one particular product rollout. “One of the products I started looking at…at the tail end [of its production process]…was a very simple product. It basically allowed our customers to change the desktop pattern and ringtones on their phones. Not an earth-shaking product, not something that every mobile device manufacturer doesn’t have for their products as well. “But I looked at this, and this was [complex enough to be] designed for an IT manager. It was really bad. It was embarrassing…It was the typical story you hear a lot in companies: “’We’ve got this event coming up, we want to announce this…We don’t have enough resources to do it right. We’re just trying to get along. We’ll fix it in the next phase.’ “[At Cisco], you always shipped your products on time. You went through the process. And then it went out. And then you dealt with it later. I looked at this and I said, ‘No. We can’t go out this way.’” Ratzlaff sat down with the General Manager of that particular business unit and convinced him to kill the project—despite the fact that the product was mere months from shipping. “We killed the project.” He told us. “We made a big announcement, sent a note out to the entire organization, saying, ‘We killed this project because it wasn’t good enough. We’re going to start over with a different team and get it.’ As expected, a decisive move like that helped him draw a distinct line in the sand regarding Cisco’s UX. “We looked at this as a great opportunity to really send a message to the whole organization that we’re serious about user experience.” “It wasn’t a big revenue impact to us.” Ratzlaff recalled. “But it certainly had a big impact in terms of getting people’s attention.” The lesson learned: “Anytime you’re going [to a new company], find an opportunity like that as soon as you can, and take advantage of it. Don’t let it go. Don’t wait too long. Because things just start going along and then you just become part of the normal process, normal way of doing things.” Cut to 2009, when Cisco won Best Of Show at the MacWorld Expo for their WebEx Meeting Center suite. “Going from when I started here at Cisco…winning a Best Of Show award at MacWorld, was even more than I thought we could accomplish. But I think it’s a great testament to some of the things that have changed here.” The story behind the Meeting Center’s iPhone app is a triumph of the kind of culture change Ratlzaff strives for at Cisco—not least of which because, as per Ratzlaff’s definition of UX, it started with research. Their studies showed that more and more people were taking conference calls from remote locations—mostly via mobile phone. What’s more, most of the people on mobiles were going not just from one location to another, but from one device to another. “Maybe they’re driving into work,” Ratzlaff suggested. “They get into their office, and now they’ve got a nice, high audio quality desk phone sitting on their desk, but they’re participating in a conference call on their mobile device. They want to move the call from their mobile device to their desk phone. The only way to do that is you’ve got to disconnect from one device and call back in…It was disruptive to the meeting…It’s a hassle for the person that’s doing it.” Given that, as a WebEx conference call, the audio was handled over IP, and that the system recognized all the devices, Ratzlaff and his team saw an opportunity to improve that user experience. “We figured, ‘There’s got to be a better way to make that seamless.’” He explained. “We have smart engineers who figured out a way to do that.” And figure they did, but not with the solution you’d expect. “We could have done a way where you’ve got a button on your phone. And when you’re ready to switch the call, you go through a menu, and move the device over, move the call from one device. You have to locate the other device. Which works, but it’s still kind of clunky.” (Spoiler alert: The WebEx app lets you shake your iPhone at the desk phone to transfer the call.) “[WebEx knows] your mobile device, [and] your desk phone. Through Bluetooth …and the iPhone’s accelerometer, you can just shake your mobile phone at your desk phone…the audio can go to your desk phone, the video can go to your PC, so now you’ve got all it up here on a nice, large monitor. “So there was really no interface at all, other than the shaking of the phone. It’s reducing that gesture to its lowest or simplest form.” Interface-less call transfer: it ain’t the Polio vaccine--but did the Polio vaccine surprise or delight thousands of enterprise customers? No one looked at the nurse sticking a needle in their arm and said, “Cool.” “When people ask, ‘How did you do that? It’s like magic,’ Ratzlaff recalls. “That’s a good gauge of when you’ve hit the mark.” The “cool factor” of such an intuitive interaction is a given. But what’s equally impressive on Ratzlaff’s part is the way he managed to push this little innovation through the challenging Cisco culture. “We defined what we wanted the experience to be first,” he sums up. “And then figured out how to build the technology to accomplish that.” As if it were that simple. “We built a prototype. It was actually a Flash prototype, just to get the idea across: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if people could do this?’…I remember showing that at a fairly large meeting…I remember hearing people in the back, engineers in the back room laughing, ‘That’s science fiction. There’s no way you can do that.’” “But we had a couple of engineers who saw that and took that as a challenge to make it work. So three weeks after we showed that, I had two engineers in my office saying, ‘You remember that demo you showed? We actually got it working.’” Inspiring innovation in engineers: That’s one way to change a company’s culture. “The technology for doing that was really, really hard, and required some really smart people to figure it out. But it was the type of thing where…we defined what we wanted the experience to be first, and then figured out how to build the technology to accomplish that.” “I think the truth is, just coming up with ideas for how things should work, that’s the easy part. It’s actually the execution part [that’s difficult]…Apple gets a lot of props for great design, but I think where they make that happen is in having really smart engineers that can figure out how to do that.” Which isn’t to say that Ratzlaff doesn’t still have his work cut out for him. “It is becoming easier,” he says about the culture shift at Cisco, “But that job is never done.” With an award under their belts, a design department that has gone from 2 to 30 employees in three years, and a solid set of values about what makes products usable, he’s well on his way." ["post_title"]=> string(36) "Cordell Ratzlaff: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(340) "The designer of the Mac OSX system interface and the current Director of User Centered Design for Cisco tells us how to determine consumer desire for a product. He also shares his advice on how to change company culture to appreciate UX, and shares the sweetest words a Design director can ever hear: "How did you do that? It's like magic."" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(16) "cordell-ratzlaff" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:52:18" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:52:18" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=14" ["menu_order"]=> int(2) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "28" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#322 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(167) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-10 00:41:30" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-10 07:41:30" ["post_content"]=> string(22589) "Dan Saffer is a man with strong opinions, varied interests, and quite possibly, a distaste for the term “User Experience.” Mind you, Saffer is far from “anti-usability.” His track record as an Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path, a founder/principal of design consultancy Kicker Studio, and the writer of Designing Gestural Interfaces, should put paid to that. He merely feels the term, when applied to an industry, bites off more than it can chew. We traveled to SF’s South Park neighborhood to interview him in Kicker Studio’s echo-rich, dog-friendly loft offices. It was late on a Friday, he’d had a crazy week and casually nursed a glass of Bourbon as we talked about UX, robotics, magazines on tablets, and how good usability should help us forget that computers are everywhere. Want Magazine: Beyond the textbook definition, what is user experience to you? Dan Saffer: What is User Experience? Well, there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about it...User Experience for me is kind of the overall picture, what used to be called “creative direction” is now called User Experience, because it contains everything from architecture to industrial design to visual design to interactive design to sound design. A very kind of holistic umbrella term that encompasses all of those things under it. All those disciplines to me are in service to an overall experience. To me there aren’t very many actual user experience designers. There are people who are doing different disciplines sometimes at different times under this user experience banner. It sounds like what you’re talking about is it’s a much bigger tent than it used to be--so big that you don’t find people that have a skill set that encompasses it anymore. I think that’s definitely true. It’s very hard to be very good at disparate fields like architecture and content strategy. There’s a pretty broad range of skill sets in there depending on the kind of product that you’re building. If it’s an interactive product, for instance, you may have an industrial designer, you may have service designers, sound designers, all kinds of things, or if it’s a website, you may have visual designers, architects, content strategists, copy writers, all those people. So it can be very different people working at very different kinds of ways, all under User Experience. DS: The next big wave after touch and gesture is probably going to be robotics. That’s my guess, anyway. What are you seeing at the consumer level currently that is interesting? Currently the one that’s really out that people just adore is Roomba. That’s the one that everyone loves, everyone names them, puts stickers on them, talks to them. They really think of them as being family members. And it’s just a really kind of fascinating item. Certainly there are other cultures, Japan, Korea, that are far, far ahead of us. Korea has a whole department of robotics, like a Ministry of Robotics or something, where they want to put robots in everyone’s home by, I think it was like 2015…Because they are facing, as we are here, a glut of people who are becoming old, who are becoming elders. And in order to care for them, they see robotics as a real solution to that. An automated solution. Right—do small automated tasks that are difficult, or can help provide things like security and communication…and mobility tasks that become difficult for people as they get older. So I think there’s a real growth market there that’s untapped. We were just at CES last month, and there was a really amazing, this robot seal that they had there. It was mostly for autistic kids. And it was really beautiful. I thought it was going to be really creepy, but it was actually this really great seal that they could hold, and it purred and it felt warm. As you stroked its fur, it had touch sensors so that it really woke up and responded in a very kind of real way, and they say that it’s really great for kids with autism. That they really start to respond to it. And for elder care. People who just need comfort. DS: If something’s not usable, it’s eventually not going to be desirable, certainly not for the kinds of tools that I make. For jewelry or something, all that matters is that it’s desirable, but for interactive products, eventually if it’s not useful, you’re not going to want it, eventually. It’s going to go away. But how do you create that desire is a really tricky and hard question. And some of it is about creating products with personality. What is the personality of the product, and how does that personality manifest itself? And is that something I want, as a consumer, in my life? Does this somehow reflect me or who I want to be? Or is it simply appealing, something that I want to spend time with? That was what was so great about the site Mint, was that it had this really conversational tone. It had a kind of friendly, appealing, easy to understand, jargon-free persona about it that was just refreshing when it came time to think about financial service. So it was like, “Oh, this is something new, something that I would want to spend time doing…” Other banking sites may be more useful or usable, but they’re certainly not more desirable, because it feels like spending time with them is spending time doing work. It’s a chore. To slog through them and put in your data and all those kinds of things. It’s not a pleasurable experience. How much importance would you put on marketing and advertising towards achieving product infatuation? Marketing and advertising plays a huge part…And as much as we try to, as designers, there’s this reflexive, “Oh, God. Marketing and advertising.” A lot of times it is a core component of what we’re trying to do. I think one of Apple’s secret weapons over the years has been its marketing and advertising. There’s no way that Apple would have had the success that it had with the iPod and the iPhone and stuff like that without its advertising partners. It doesn’t matter really how usable or useful something is if no one’s using it! If no one can find it, or no one’s heard about it, you can have the greatest product in the world, and it may not matter. Sites like social media sites are a perfect example of this: Unless you have enough people to populate it, it just withers on the vine. You could create the next Facebook that is so much better (and some would argue that that wouldn’t be very hard to do). But if you don’t have that core group of people, then it just doesn’t matter. And I think that’s where marketing and advertising can play that key part. Now, certainly, designers can make it easier on them by creating products that are beautiful and display their functions in a beautiful way and are approachable and all those good things that we really strive to do. A lot of what we do here at Kicker are new technology [projects]. People come to us and say, “We’ve got this [brand new technology]. What can you do with this? What is the product here?” And so some of that is figuring out: what is going to make people want this thing? What’s going to drive it? And for us [our priority is], what’s the personality of it? How is that going to make people want to even think about adopting it? How am I going to try this for the first time? With new products, especially with things like touch screens and gestures, which we do a lot of, there’s this hesitation, like, “Am I going to break this thing? I’m afraid to try it because I’m going to look stupid doing it.” But [our job is] really to make [people think], “No, it’s really fine. Just try it. It’ll be okay.” That’s really important with new technologies in particular. Because people come to it with expectations that may or may not be met and how you’re able to meet those expectations and hopefully exceed them. Or, when the expectations aren’t met how, do you fail in a way that’s not off-putting? Failure is really a chance to product personality. Flickr does a great job of this. When something doesn’t work, it tells you why. It offers a suggestion, like, “Hey have you tried this?” There are ways that failure can be a place to show personality. Is the interaction designer’s job to influence initial adoption, and purchase, or is their job to make the user experience enjoyable for the long run? It’s definitely some of both. Alan Cooper has a great thing about this, where he says, we spend way too much time on those initial moments when people first start using it, and then we neglect all the people, once they get past that, when they’re intermediate or advanced. It’s like we’ve given them no tools, and then the product seems too simplistic for them. So it’s a hard balance to strike. How do you give enough meat for intermediate users, which is where most people end up being, while not being too intimidating for someone coming at the site for the first time? You have to build up a product knowledge that leads people as rapidly as you can into being intermediates. But you still have to design those [adoption] hooks into the service. I think one of the great things about Blogger back when it started 5 or 6 years ago;  it seemed just like this FTP service. “What is this thing?” And when Jeff Veen and some of the guys at Adaptive Path [took it on], they said, okay. It’s three things. And they really aligned it, you do one step, two step, three step. And they made it so very straightforward that all of a sudden adoption just took off. Because there was this three simple steps that led you into becoming a blogger. And I think that was brilliant. You can do those kinds of things that are basically little attractors…that really get people hooked in. And the history of that goes back ages and ages. Think about old video arcade [games]—they would tease you as you walked by the video game. It would be playing a little movie. And you’d be like, “Hey, that looks interesting. I can put a quarter in and start to shoot or move the joystick around.” That little attraction affordance to draw people in is an important piece to design. DS: Now certainly that’s not all you should design. Then you get into the meat of, “Okay, now you’re here, you’ve got all this. You have tasks that you need to do.”…No matter how entertaining it is, you still have to get stuff done. One of the things that interaction designers can do is what Brandon Schauer calls “The Long Wow,” where over time, you keep building in these things that you discover, not your first time using it, but your fiftieth time using it, your hundredth time using it. Those things that are really important over time, so you keep getting reinvested in the service, because they keep giving you something. They keep rewarding you for being a long time user. If you can think about them and really design them in from the beginning, It's a really great thing. I mean, obviously, some of that stuff comes after people have used the product for a long time…People start to suggest things: “Why don’t you have ‘x’?” Or, “This would be really helpful,”…which is of course it’s own danger. And then you start adding stuff, and the product can drift away from what it was originally done for. The “long wow” you just described is very similar to what makes a good multi-level game. Everything from the shelf appeal to the hooks that you’re talking about. I think there’s so much that interaction designers can learn from game designers. There’s always that idea of a reward. What am I leveling up to? Or, what am I resourcing here? In some cases it might be money. In some cases it’s time. In some cases it’s effort…It’s interesting. Because…the things game designers think about first are the emotion, and “What is the aesthetic appeal of this?” And then they say, “What are the game mechanics that can cause that?”…More thinking like a game designer, thinking, “What’s the aesthetic appeal? What’s the emotional appeal that we’re trying to do, and then how can we start to structure the product to achieve those goals?” Is an interesting way to start thinking about designing products. There’s a project that you guys have worked on recently, the Mag+ demo. That is something that we’re particularly interested in, especially because we’re a magazine entity, and we’re interested in moving to a format like that. Mag+ is a really interesting project. It’s with the magazine publisher Bonnier, who are Swedish and they do every kind of magazine you can think of, from cooking magazines to Field and Stream, to Photography, Popular Science…this pretty wide range of magazines. They worked with our friends in London, a company called BERG, and they did kind of a concept video of how magazines might work in this kind of new world of e-readers. But they didn’t want the [usual] kind of e-reader experience. And they didn’t want the .pdf experience. They really wanted to capture what it was like to read an actual magazine. Because magazines have evolved over the last 250 years, 300 years, something like that. Actually one of the first things I did when we got the product was actually go back and read the first magazine. Really? Yeah, that was the first thing. And surprisingly, there were a lot of the same things. There was still a table of contents, there was still an appendix. There were still lots of short articles, those kinds of things. So…our job was actually to take that concept and really prototype it and make it into something that would actually work. That would actually go ahead and would eventually be built and that had buy in from all the magazine’s editorial staffs at these magazines and from readers. That it was something people actually wanted to sit down and curl up and read these magazines like they would a normal magazine, a physical paper magazine right now. That’s why right now currently our walls in the studio are just covered with magazines that are torn all to bits. It looks like a magazine stand has exploded in here or something like that. But [we’re] looking at all the content types that we needed to support. Everything from table of contents to long articles to short articles to timelines to graphics to advertising to classified ads. All different kinds of content that we really had to support. And then we had to say, what are some of the--what’s it like to actually do page turning in this kind of digital world. Do we still have to have a physical page turn? How can you tell when you’re done reading an article?...We really wanted to keep some of the structure of magazines. And so some of that was finding out what that structure was. One of our mandates was that it didn’t feel like a piece of software. It wasn’t something that you booted up and had to download and read this whole thing. It wasn’t a chore. It was a magazine. It was something that you’re going to flip through as you’re killing time, or you just want a little bit of information, you want to immerse yourself in it. You don’t want to think about all the parts of it, or how do I then flip a page, how do I do all these…You just want to read the magazine. It’s really kind of a fascinating project. How do you turn something that was previously, I don’t want to say dumb, but without the digital intelligence, and how do you turn that into something with a kind of intelligence—but not ruin the experience? How do you translate the experience in a way that doesn’t feel wrong, that doesn’t feel like work, it doesn’t feel like I’m reading a .pdf. So that’s been the real challenge with it. And we’re just finishing up prototyping right now. So I imagine by the time people hear this… Bonnier will have released it. What’s the next step for it? Would Bonnier offer it as hardware? Would they offer it as an app for the iPad, or… I think they’re figuring that out. My guess is, from what I know…that it’s something that will be delivered on various platforms as some kind of pay in service. That being said, there certainly could be [opportunities] where they could sell their own reader…maybe there [should be] a special Bon Air reader…that’s customized for magazine reading specifically. That maybe has things like, it can get wet! We found that an amazing number of people read in the bathtub. I read an interview where you said that you wrote Designing Gestural Interfaces because at the time, there was no substantial resource on this particular subject. Right. Because I started writing it, probably…two-and-a-half, three years ago…Prior to that I had mostly done web work. But I suddenly started finding myself doing a lot more touch screen work…So I started trying to research the subject, and was finding it very difficult to get good solid information about it…just the basic stuff. Like, how big should the touch target be on the screen for someone to reasonably tap. And I couldn’t find it. So I said, “There’s clearly this hole in the market.” And I just set about writing the book. Because I knew that if I didn’t write it, someone else would. DS: It’s an interesting time because we’re definitely in an interaction revolution…A lot of the paradigms that we’ve used for 40 years now, things like cut-and-paste, we still have them around. The laptop’s not going anywhere quite yet. But now we have this new language on top of it that is the language of gestures and the language of touch. So projects like Mag+, a couple of years ago, would have been totally different. You would have had buttons on the side like you did on the early version of the Kindle. And that’s how you would be flipping pages. You couldn’t just swipe and flip a page. You just, it wasn’t going to happen. And now it just seems like a natural thing. I mean, granted, touch screens have been around for almost 40 years at this point, but it’s really taken that long for the technology and the market to mature to the point where—getting back to that desirability thing—where people really want them. They see the value in it and can then say, “Wow. I want that in my stuff.” And now we’ve almost gone overboard with it. Now it’s like, “Let’s put touch screens in everything. Your toilet now has a touch screen on it.” Someone actually called me about having a touch screen in a shower. The less said about it the better. But it’s interesting to think you can have computing power in places where you never had it before. And that’s both good and bad, of course. Why does my shower have to be invaded by my email? It doesn’t. I like that five minutes in the shower where I don’t have to think about anything. DS: [With touch-screens], there is this kind of like, “As soon as I’m touching it, I’m already doing something. Oh wow. I didn’t have to click on it. I’m touching it. Now something’s happening.” Which is both good and bad. There is definitely this odd fear factor, and it’s kind of a physiological one. Some research figured out that people are actually afraid of being electrocuted as they touch electrical objects. It’s like a fight-or-flight thing. And getting people over that is a major concern. Which is why that really nice slide to unlock thing on the iPhone is really nice. It’s this really simple thing like, “If I can do that…” “Oh! It unlocks!” and “Oh, there’s some other stuff here I can touch…” Do you think that in this heyday of touch screens, with the iPad coming out, with Microsoft Surface, is this heralding a new era in user experience? Yeah. It is an interesting turning point in time. Because all of a sudden, computing power is so cheap it can be disseminated everywhere. It’s on surfaces, on walls, on tables. It’s in our pockets. We’re just surrounded by it all the time. And user experience and interaction design is playing a big role in that introduction of this new technology, what we can do with it, and how it can hopefully make our lives better—and not make our lives suddenly overburdened or crushed by information. All those things that really could happen. We could lose all of our privacy. We could lose all these things that we now take for granted, but could easily be taken away from us, thanks to the technology that we’re trying to get people to buy. So it’s an interesting time. And really, I kind of see user experience people being on the front line of keeping technology, and what it can do for us, really making it for human beings. And I think that the good that we can do for the world, is really make this stuff useful, usable, desirable, and not overburden us—and treat us with the dignity and respect that we should get as human beings. It’s kind of a hard thing to [realize] when you’re in the middle of a project, and you’re cranking out these deliverables and doing your wire frames or your site map, your CAD drawings…But this stuff goes out in the world and it makes a huge difference to people. That’s why I do it, really. [amazonshowcase_e6f1276dc91277bc9743cd1ebe7f1b44]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Dan Saffer: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(393) "The co-founder of Kicker Studio explains to us that “User Experience” isn’t a discipline, so much as a big tent. We talk about his work on the Mag+ project and he reveals some tricks-of-the-trade about how to get “the long wow” with a product. We delve into how you can engineer desire into a product by infusing it with personality--especially when it fails. Oh, and we talk robots." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "dan-saffer" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:55:06" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:55:06" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(10) "1205982061" ["menu_order"]=> int(6) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "42" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [2]=> object(stdClass)#321 (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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