Convenience versus experience: Craving the ritual.

I have been drooling over espresso machines for years, but I could never justify buying one.  When I finally decided to go for it, I had the hard choice of deciding which one.  There were so many choices, but most of them involved putting in a pod or just pushing a button.  

The busy on-the-run part of me loved this, but the coffee lover in me wanted something with a bit more craft and ritual.  

Three months later, I am still in love with my little barista machine, which is fully manual. Come to think of it, I also drive a manual car, and still prefer taking notes in an old fashioned Moleskine.  

It's not that I am against tech, far from it. But I have noticed that with new technologies taking over all sorts of tasks, I have started to miss certain rituals; certain tactile experiences. I do most of my reading on the iPad, but when I get ahold of a real newspaper, it feels different.  It feels more like an occasion to be savored. 

This has me thinking a lot about the balance between convenience  and experience; ritual versus automation; analogue verses digital.  I find myself always excited about the latest tech and gadgets, but more and more drawn to things that integrate a tactility or a richer experience.

I can't be alone in this craving, and I am seeing more and more amazing products and technology that combine convenience and tech with craftsmanship, ritual and tactile experience. 

For example, my Breville Espresso machine, Lapka's new environmental sensors, or Quirky's Nimbus.

I think I am confusing a few different trends here, but I can't help but think that in our rush to use technology to make our lives more convenient we have lost a bit of joy and appreciation for experiences.  I am excited to see how new frontiers in technology are addressing this and blending, or balancing, the two concepts. 

Are there other examples of this?  Do you find yourself craving some of the old ways?  Are convenience and experience mutually exclusive? 

The power of designing in a foreign language.

We recently began a design project with a company based in Saudi Arabia.  The open innovation community is going to be in Arabic, so we decided to design it all in Arabic and fill it in with Arabic filler text.

What happened next was fascinating.

 Because our brains were not registering the words, we looked at the first round of designs through an entirely different lens. Instead of copy and buttons and calls to actions, we saw the designs only by colors, shapes, icons and images.

Our early designs would require some explaining to anyone we showed them to, but after some time and fiddling, we could show someone the design in Arabic and they could navigate it. They could explain what they thought was going on and it was right. They could pick out where they should add comments, what the various galleries of content being presented.

I think if we had done this same process in English or even Lorem Ipsum, we would have relied on the text too heavily. When we were forced to use basic icons, shapes, colors and visual queues as the only means of communication, and our awesome partners at Young & Hungry we were forced to simplify.

I think even when we have English community sites to design, we might start the process with Arabic, or Chinese or some other language with different characters to define a more pure and usable UX before we start adding copy.

Try it sometime.

Be lazy to build smarter.

Today we met for a brainstorm about how to increase conversions on our off the shelf tool.

We identified a few potential problems that might be causing the low conversion rate. All the usual suspects were on the list including weak or confusing calls to action, confusing pricing and too many steps to sign up.

We began thinking of all the ways we could fix each of these issues and soon had 10-20 ideas we were confident would help.

Next, we tried something different. Instead of prioritizing each of these ideas by its potential benefit vs. resource investment, we held a second brainstorm around each of the ideas we had outlined. We came up with ideas about how we could learn whether or not any given idea would make a positive impact on conversion rate with the minimum amount of work possible.  How could we learn the laziest way possible.

Soon we had creative ideas for how we could turn a several day development project into a simple test on our site that may not be the ideal user experience, but would answer the question of whether or not we should invest time down the road.

Next time your in a brainstorm or prioritizing what to work on next, demand that your team be as lazy as possible. With the right guardrails seeing your product through the lens of laziness can spark amazing ideas for testing complex solutions in really easy ways.

Go forth and be lazy!