Cooking something up
June 20, 2007
In the creation of anything, but particularly something functional like code or design, I’ve noticed that many of the best people within those fields don’t just train themselves to produce better, more elegant products – they train themselves to produce them faster. But unfortunately, not everyone balances care with speed – thus the term “gold plater” was invented to describe those people for whom a creative task is never elegant enough, and becoming faster is not a priority. They take forever to finish, and the output includes all kinds of stuff that you don’t need. I’ve been guilty of it myself, in everything from a coding task to a client presentation.
I like to cook and do it pretty frequently, and the interesting thing about cooking is it is a very “temporary” creative process. Time is of the essence, because temperature and freshness are so important, and you can’t fall too much in love with your creations because in half an hour someone is going to eat it and you won’t be able to stand there, admire it, and tinker with it any more. The end goal is very clearly not the food itself, but how delicious the person who eats it thinks it is. At work or even at home, a chef’s mindset can bring appropriate speed and focus to the thing you’re creating.
Obstructed customer experiences
June 19, 2007
Last Saturday I went to my first game of the year at Wrigley Field. I took Megan and her mom, and spent a couple of hours wheeling and dealing on Craig’s List in order to find three good lower deck tickets together. After I got the tickets I noticed that they featured a warning that the seats might be obstructed by one of the metal beams that support the upper deck.
Thankfully, when we got there we were far enough back that we could see perfectly well, although the beam in front of us blocked out first and second base from where I was sitting (I could lean to see around it ). However, I noticed that several rows down a gentleman was sitting in a seat directly behind the beam, not a foot from it.
I’ve often wondered why venues bother doing things like that. Sure you want to make a little more money, but why would you put a seat there? How angry is that person when he or she arrives at a seat he or she might have paid $60-$70 for and sees that it is up close and personal with the architecture? I think the same thing in movie theaters. I would ask for my money back if I entered a theater and the only seats left were in that useless front row.
It’s a cautionary tale for any business trying to provide a great, consistent experience for its customers. Every time you modify your customer service approach ask yourself if there is a chance that the change might put a particular type of customer behind an obstruction. If there is any doubt, just don’t do it.
Apple devastates beyond the desktop
June 18, 2007
Inside the marketing firm where I work, closerlook, we enjoy a healthy tension between the Mac (our Creative Team) and the PC (our Technology Team). The Mac induces a sort of serene creative zen in our designers, while the PC hums through coding and productivity tasks efficiently for our developers and managers. Of course, this seems to be the way it has always been in the working world.
But beyond the working world it’s no longer about the desktop, and that’s not where the real growth is anymore. Technology is portable, design is crucial, marketing is everything, and no one seems to be doing it like Apple. That thunder you hear in the distance, Motorola and Nokia, is the coming storm of iPhones (June 29th). Steve Jobs calmly debunks rumors of a weakness in his new phone’s scratch resistance and battery life today. Guess what, it actually is more scratch resistant and powers up longer than my current phone.
Oh, and Apple is going to design an onboard maintenance, communication, and navigation system for automobiles now, starting with this Mercedes Benz. Do you think that system won’t integrate seamlessly with your iPod or iPhone when it becomes widely available?
Put into the picture Apple’s competitive laptops, Apple TV, and the oh-so-subversive glue – iTunes, which bypasses Windows to network with other instances of itself – and you start to see the complete personal distributed device network to which Apple aspires. I don’t currently own Apple stock but I have encouraged everyone I know to buy some.
Guitar Hero will save rock n’ roll
June 18, 2007
During my first year in business school, I wrote a business plan for a company that would provide music education online. It was called Rockstart (pretty clever, eh?). I submitted the business plan into my business school’s New Venture Challenge, which is a fantastic class and competition at the school that ends up selecting 10 finalists who compete for $25K in funding. Music education in public schools has been in a sad state of decline for years, and it was my vision that Rockstart would revolutionize music education by teaching through performance of popular rock songs and making learning fun.
Performing music has been a vital part of my life, and has generated some of my best life lessons and friendships over the years. But having been through traditional education since the age of 5, I can see its weaknesses. Too often beginners are stuck doing rote exercises and playing music that doesn’t appeal to them. It’s not fun. Playing scales and slogging your way through Fur Elise have their places, but it’s those early experiences that shape how someone views musical performance. How many people play in their junior high band and quit because they are playing third clarinet on a Sousa march? How about playing rhythm guitar on Evenflow? Now we’re talking.
Rockstart didn’t even get selected into the class, much less the finals. I appealed, I made personal appointments with the faculty, I plead my case. I knew they were wrong. I remember one faculty member saying “There is something here that music education needs, but I don’t think it’s online music lessons.” Enamored with my idea, I still thought he was off . . . until now.
The thing that musical education needs is the console game Guitar Hero, which has been gaining wide acceptance as the new and fun party game for both serious and casual gamers. Why? Because Guitar Hero takes everything that is fun about performing music and throws out all the rest.
For those unfamiliar with it, Guitar Hero involves strapping on a little miniature guitar with five colored buttons on the neck and a little switch on the body. In the game, a simulation of the guitar neck is shown where colored “notes” float down from top to bottom. As each note hits the bottom of the virtual neck, the player is tasked with pushing down the appropriate colored button on the neck and “strumming” the switch. The game features popular rock songs from different eras, from Black Sabbath to Kansas to Rage Against the Machine. It has modes from beginner to expert, with expert actually being quite challenging as the “notes” rain down fast and furious.
Behind the virtual guitar neck on-screen are rock stars playing on stage which move when the players move, surrounded by a virtual crowd that gets wilder and screams louder the more notes a player hits accurately.
A guitar player myself, I found that though the little Guitar Hero guitar doesn’t exactly represent the real guitar, it does develop timing and manual dexterity in a realistic way. And were the game player able to upgrade their miniature guitar to another piece of hardware that represented more closely a real guitar they might quickly notice that they could learn to play the real thing pretty easily.
But until that is here, legions of young gamers are plugging away at classic rock songs (there are no top 40 hiphop songs in Guitar Hero), becoming enamored with the experience of the crowd going wild for you after you bang out a killer riff. And the essence of rock n’ roll lives on.
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