I love great food, and nothing tops off great food like great service. In fact, great food can easily go bland in the mouth if the people serving you treat you with contempt or disregard.
But it’s not just food, is it? Really it’s relevant to any service industry or team with an organisation. It’s actually relevant to us.
Which is why I was fascinate that someone has dissected hospitality and come up with a Hospitality Quotient (I guess similar to IQ and the more recent Emotional Quotient – EQ).
Here are the emotional skills Danny Meyer says contributes to a high HQ:
- optimism and kindness
- curiosity about learning [BC: don’t we love the curiosity word!]
- an exceptional work ethic
- a high degree of empathy
- self-awareness and integrity
The other little gem from the post is this great spin on the old “the customer is always right”—> “The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard.” I know that’s often the perfect frame of mind as we take stakeholders along the design journey, unfolding the value of our user-centred approach.
Sites redesign and launch. We go “oh! ah!” at the pretty bits. File the really clever bits away for future designs of our own. But sometimes we miss the really impressive stuff.
apple.com has resisted the Jakob approved convention of having search in the top right of each page for years, so when a search box appeared there in their new global navigation header, I thought they were just playing catch-up.
But then I used it. Yeah, I know: useful search on a website. Sure. Whatever.
Oh wow! Just like their Mac desktop Spotlight tool, only for the web. It’s really beautiful. You’ve gotta try. The pictures, the categorisation, the responsiveness, the direct links to the store, the full results page. Search for an Apple product, technology, or even a movie.
Here’s a wonderful (and witty) 20min video from TED by Sir Ken Robinson about encouraging creativity in the young (and the not so young).
Children aren’t frightened about being wrong. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. We stigmatise mistakes. We are educating people out of their creativity capacities.
Creativity is defined as original ideas that have value.
Web-based office apps have been growing in momentum. People are starting to respond to their ubiquitous access and built-in collaboration and sharing.
But they have always looked underwhelming and seemed like sad Office cutdowns.
Buzzwords (acquired by Adobe this week) is the first to raise my pulse. It’s Flash-based and quite beautiful to look at. But it goes beyond that. They have started to improve the word processor in little, appreciated ways. For example, when you highlight some text, a subtle comments icon appears out in the right margin for you to quickly add a comment, so the functionality isn’t hidden.
But the best way to experience it is to play yourself. They are currently in preview/beta and you have to request to get an invite to join. I only had to wait a day.
Find out more, see screenshots and get access to the preview.
Catalog Choice is a US site that contacts US catalog merchants on your behalf and gets them to stop sending you catalogs. For free.
It’s a really nice example of a simple online product design, which good use of AJAX transitions for smoothness and a simple registration process.
Mark Coleran is a visual designer doing great motion graphics, particular for futuristic user interfaces for film, such as The Island.
