At BASIK, we have always thought of ourselves as “reluctant digital enthusiasts”. We love to build things, so no surprise that we are fascinated by digital technology. But we also grow a bit wary whenever we hear about the transformative and disruptive nature of the internet, minus any critical reflection. Is change ever purely a positive event?
It was the recent book review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” in The New York Times that got me thinking about this in a new light. This quote in particular caught my attention:
“What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”
This, and the entire article (and no doubt the book) can be read as a challenge to us, and by us I mean all of the web designers and programmers currently out there. And this in turn got me thinking about another article I had read just days before, again in the Times. In this case it was a short interview with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. In the article Hsieh mentions the company’s “10 core values”. So I went and checked them out online. They were easy enough to find.
Core value number one: Deliver WOW Through Service. Sounds good, right? This quality of “doing something above and beyond the expected” and “having an emotional impact on the receiver” is certainly something we try and embrace in our own work. It’s not a new idea; Tom Peter’s even wrote a book about wow. So what’s the problem?
Here is the thing: what might be wrong with “wow” is that it focuses not just on the short term, but on the immediate. We aim for maximum impact, for the quick hit. Boom. Wow! Mission accomplished.
I wonder if our focus on creating these singularly ecstatic, short-burst moments isn’t a problem, perhaps even a mistake. Are we, as designers, stoking the fires of intensely immediate gratification, and if so, what happens next?
As we continue to shift from a world of thirty second tv spots to one of platforms for interaction, we need to look again at this whole wow phenomenon. Maybe what we need is a longer, slower wow. A long wow. An approach that looks beyond the initial impression. What might a Total Return on Long Wow, or TROLW, look like? Would it be better than just the ROI on wow? I think it could, but it will probably take me a while to decide for sure.
