Category: experience design

The article Customer Experience: Smells Like Memories talks a little about how scent – and the way it’s labelled – can make a big difference on the particular experience you’re trying to present.

[daring fireball] Cigarette Book Packaging – tiny (classic) books placed in custom-designed cigarette packets.

A Wired article that talks about some of the challenges involved in getting search right.

This article provides a good introduction to the ideas behind experience design.

In a social media course I attended yesterday, we had a look at This X Factor / Daryl Markham audition clip, or a slightly abridged version of it. It seemed a well put together reality piece, but when I was rewatching it while working on another monitor, I noticed how much the swelling music, and the person running at the end felt – staged? What do you think: tugging too much at the heartstrings, or is that the point?

A week or more ago I had a craving for Pho soup, so I checked Helen’s blog for ideas and found an early review of this Pho place. When there’s a baby to factor in, spontaneous restaurant meals are a little harder to come by, and so I opted for takeaway.

When I saw the effort put into the takeaway presentation at An Restaurant (a place in Bankstown that sells only Pho noodle soup), I thought a blog post was in order.

Normally when you open up a takeaway bag, you’re at a loss as to which meal is which. If you’re lucky, someone will have scrawled a vague description of one or two of the dishes on their lids, but that’s as far as it goes.

Here’s an unboxing of the Pho. First, at the top of the bag is a bag containing bean sprouts, basil and chilli.

Remove that bag, and you can see the takeaway spoon and chopsticks, a printed set of instructions in two languages, and the first of the sauces.

Here are the instructions up close.

Under the instructions are the meat-noodles-and-greens packs, and some more sauces.

Oh, and the soup containers are sealed, and then bagged to avoid any liquid spill. Here’s the entire contents.

Follow the instructions (microwaving the relevant ingredients in order, so that everything is safe to eat, and you’re ready to enjoy the Pho soup at home.

What’s the best takeaway experience you’ve ever had?

When you’re trying to work out how the next online community site will work, you might like to use these 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences as a part of your plan.

37 signals shows off the new “Smart” pasting at The New Yorker site. When you copy something to the clipboard, the URL of the article, and a “read more” link are appended to the excerpt.

In general I like the idea of having this option, but I would prefer to be able to permanently disable the feature if it’s causing me problems.

With such sites seeking to monetize everything they can, I think we’ll see more features like this: I would expect, sadly, that they’ll be used more for copy-protection purposes than to help users share content.

Designing to delight the information seeker – there’s not much information available on this presentation, but I really liked the title as a goal to aim for in information design.

[ Daring Fireball ] Ever wondered who designs those fictional interfaces for movies? Check this portfolio: the work of Mark Coleran