Any place has its pros and cons, but one thing to admire about Paris is its insistence on high quality in things like food and wine. Standards, even top down, can be helpful! (Bottom-up has its place, too... the trick is to know when to apply each.)

What if I told you there was an industry that was committed to, even obsessed with, customer-centric business? An industry that conducts trade shows all about understanding the customer - meeting customers' desires - measuring success - and continually improving their operations? Wouldn't you want to learn from that industry?

This was the introduction I gave on-stage to Natasha Schull, a speaker at last week's Gel 2008 conference (see the recap). She's based at MIT and studies the "gaming industry" - specifically, the companies that design slot machines for use in Las Vegas, among other places.

While Schull's research is primarily sociological, it's strongly relevant to anyone who works in any experiential field - design, user experience, customer-centered business, you name it. In fact I'm not sure why other conferences aren't banging down her door to speak: she has uncovered a side of our business that most people aren't remotely aware of - or perhaps would rather not know about.

Now, I should note that "some of my best friends go to Vegas." I'm not writing a polemic against gambling. Plenty of people have good clean fun at the slots, at the tables, everything in moderation, ya ya ya. OK? No offense meant.

But the thing is, as Natasha points out, the language of the slot machine industry belies its ultimate aims. There's a term bandied about at the trade shows: "extinction." We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on.

What's extinction? That's the moment that the customer - the gambler sitting at the slot machine - runs out of money. The wallet, or credit card, is now "extinct." Mission accomplished. (Now, if we could just achieve that a little bit quicker with an improved design...)

So the customer experience is really important: what games do customers want to play? What sounds will they best respond to? What physical interface is easiest to use? (Turns out push buttons are much easier than pull-handles.) By constantly studying customers and delivering what they want - in the short term, at least - the industry continually pursues a faster time to extinction.

Anyone who does customer-centered work should give this some thought. What's more important, the ends or the means? You may be the greatest user researcher in the world, but what if you're asked to apply those skills to an end you don't believe in?

This is part of the reason I write Good Experience and run Gel: to challenge people to look beyond their own narrow disciplines and fields, and past the methods, to consider the wider world. Good experience, in the end, is mostly about the outcomes we want to achieve, and the spirit we bring to our work.

Enjoy the recap.

-Mark

Sorting used to require noodling around with arrows, like the ones you see below (on the right)...

But now you can click and drag todos up and down the list. Just go into Your Account, then Choose Sorting Options, to make this choice:

Once you choose drag-and-drop and click Update, the arrows will disappear and you're good to go. You can drag todos up or down the list.

(iPhone users still need to use the arrows, since the dragging doesn't yet work with the iPhone browser. We're working on it.)

If you haven't tried Gootodo, sign up for a trial account to see how easy it is to use. Just forward your action-item emails to today or a day in the future (@gootodo.com) and you can then delete the emails from the inbox. It's a radically simple way to keep the inbox empty, and maintain a pruned, focused todo list.

Here's the Gel 2008 recap. Lots of good photos and comments.

Whitney Hess took excellent notes on the Friday sessions - "connect", "twist", "make", and "success" - as well as her Day 1 experiences .

Also don't miss the Gel '08 title animation.

The event went very well, I thought. Thanks to everyone - speakers, Day 1 hosts, attendees, volunteers, and staff - for making it happen.

people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t. ...

you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman.

My Gel 2008 conference (Gel stands for Good Experience Live) takes place tomorrow and Friday in New York. I hope people come away with some good experiences to "always have."

(If you're attending, log in to see your itinerary.)

If you want to attend next year, you can sign up for Gel 2009.

Over at TechCrunch, yet another technology journalist admits that he can't manage his incoming bitstreams:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.

He's exactly right in his diagnosis of the problem: too many bits, from too many bitstreams.

But as for the solution... if you've been following my recent posts, you know exactly what he writes next: the Technology Wish. Here it comes, the very next paragraph:

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do.

In other words, "I have too much technology - so, please, let's create more technology!"

He should read Bit Literacy instead.

(TechCrunch is the #1 technology website in the world, or close to it... this is the voice of the technology industry - being strangled by incoming information and waiting in vain for a tool to solve the problem.)

See also:

• The journalist's Technology Wish

• A geek who can't use email

WSJ on ease-of-use in corporate software:

... more business-software firms aim to simplify their products by mimicking the look and feel of familiar Web sites. ... Employees "just don't want to be bothered" with training courses...

Online software offered by Salesforce.com Inc., which boasts 1.1 million subscribers to its sales-management service, "was basically a replica of the Amazon.com user interface," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said.

(tx, phil)

Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, on bringing the newspaper experience online:

...we're trying to create something that's true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.

This means we pay a lot of attention to how someone uses our content online. That is, not just how they read it, but how they make use of it: how they might scan the page haphazardly rather than diligently reading from top to bottom; what parts of the page they look to first and last; what they expect to change from visit to visit; which visual cues are meaningful for them and which design flourishes they find useless.

(NYTimes.com was a finalist for our recent Copernican awards.)

Motivate your work experience: peppy muzak tunes!

(thanks, bb)

Randall Stross at the New York Times wrote yesterday that "e-mail has become the bane of some people’s professional lives" - including his own, since "the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire." Ack. Yet another techie who hasn't yet learned the easy, common-sense, and permanent solution to email overload.

The rest of the article is an entertaining look at prolific letter-writers from the past, like Mencken and Edison, and how they managed the vast numbers of incoming communications.

But after stating his problem of email overload, Stross writes what techie columnists always seem to say: the Technology Wish. Which is, the tools will save us. As Randall put it...

Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail.

Or as celebrity tech blogger Michael Arrington put it - as I quoted him recently in A geek who can't use email:

The long term answer to all of this isn't that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.

In other words: When, oh when, will the tools save us? Anything to let us keep our bad habits (and to give us a new gadget to write about).

A radically new material requires a new way of working. It happened with gunpowder, with steel, with paper - and it's happening again with bits. People need to change how they work to adapt to this new material. The old ways (of letting things pile up, and then complaining about it) don't apply.

Yes, tools are essential, and some tools are better than others - but the tech journalists are still missing the boat. They bear the responsibility for solving their problem. And it is possible, since email overload has already been solved. It's all in Bit Literacy.

Iris Bell sends in this cameraphone pic from a Sheraton lobby in New York.

See anything wrong with the lobby furniture?

The designers probably didn't have this use in mind... but by observing customers directly, it's pretty obvious how to improve the design.

Nice of Jay to include my game Go Robot in his list of design competition runners-up.

Play Go Robot here.

I just launched two new features in my todo list app, Gootodo: recurring todos and alpha sort. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback - these features are a direct result of your requests!

Recurring Todos

This was the number one most-requested Gootodo feature. Within "Your Account", users can click "Create Recurring Todo" to create a todo that occurs once a day, once a weekday, once a week, or once a month - up to 50 todos at once. The page is pretty self-explanatory:

Alphabetical Sorting

Users can now view todos alphabetically by name. In "Your Account", click "Change Sorting Options", and you'll see this high-tech interface:

Whenever you want, you can switch back to priority sorting, using the up-and-down arrows.

Alphabetical sorting allows you to organize your todo list by category or context - something a LOT of people asked for. Just name the todo with the category at the beginning of the name, and the alpha sort takes care of the rest.

For example, if you want to see all your "home" todos displayed together, name them as such:

home - do laundry
home - make dentist appt
home - prepare shopping list

If you want a category to appear at the bottom of the list, just start the name with "z", as in "z home - do laundry".

You can also start todo names with numbers, and they'll go to the top of the list. "0 walk the dog" would be at the top, followed by "1 cook breakfast", followed by todos with names - "address book update" - and so on.

Of course, if you prefer to sort your todos with the arrows, that's fine, too - whatever makes you most productive!

- - -

Finally, a note on the philosophy: As I write in my book Bit Literacy, it's essential to have all your todos on one list, not divided among several lists, thereby forcing you to wonder which list you should be looking at. On your one list - today's list in Gootodo - I think it's a fine idea to organize todos by context.

If you're not using it already, try it out: Gootodo.com.