Design Thought Leader

People respond to software that doesn’t feel like software. The more analogue your software feels—the more depth and character, the more buttons feel like buttons and the click of a mouse gives a near-tactile response—the more immersive the experience. Let users forget that they’re dealing with code based on servers spread across continents and think only of the tool, the media, at hand. Build human software.

Luke Groesbeck
Co-Founder of JobAlchemist

Creative Good had a difficult time, like a lot of companies did, in 2001 when we laid off almost the entire company and were not doing so well.

I took some time off because I was in need of a sabbatical. When I came back from driving around the country for a few months, I had this germ of an idea, that I wanted to start a conference that was not about customer experience and business, which I knew would remain the consulting focus.

But I wanted a conference that was about good experience. Customer experience is important. I think it’s a good thing to help out companies be more effective and efficient in what they do. But really, customer experience work or user experience work, is a small subset of this much larger, much more diverse and interesting world of thought, ideas and people that I call ‘good experience.’

Again, business is part of it but so is art and so is urban design and so is performance and so is writing. There are any number of ways or places to find good experience in this world.

My idea behind Gel coming back from the road trip was look; if we can get people together who are passionate about good experience—no matter what their job is—then they’ll be able to take those patterns and those ideas back to whatever they do in their work or in their lives.

Of course I was hoping the user experience community would turn out because they would probably understand it immediately, better than most. I was surprised to see that a lot of people outside the user experience world started coming to the events also.

Mark Hurst
Creative Good and Good Experience Live (GEL) Conference

The ubiquity of cell phones and PDA devices allow for many more innovative and convenient solutions to the problem of providing way-finding clarity within spaces that are becoming more dynamic, fluid and multi-purpose. The iPhone and similar devices represent a massive untapped area of potential for communication designers. And as ‘experience’ seems to be an area of interest for the contemporary consumer, the physical act of using a PDA to access information while the user is located within hot zones and networked areas allows for a heightened brand experience through the simple touch of a button and lightning fast feedback. We propose that experience be taken much more seriously by companies, organizations and designers, as the dynamic that it fosters between user and content provider could greatly impact brand awareness and form tighter bonds between consumers and manufacturers. All in, mobility and access to information are maximized for the user, while unsightly public signage is minimized. And as an aid to architecture and public space, in order to allow it to be all that it is capable of, digital technologies and wireless devices should serve as the connection between places and people intent on finding them, networked together through constant communication and feedback.

Jayson Zaleski
Designer and Writer, Kolor

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house.

Peter Zumthor
Architect, Pritzker Prize Winner 2009