Travel Thing 3: The polar opposite of singing 'Happy Birthday' at work.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 12:39AM If you've read Travel Thing 1 and Travel Thing 2, you now know all about the elements of my Copenhagen trip that drove me nuts. Guess what? The bitchfest is over. Thing 3 is something lovely.
When I got out of the evil cab, it was still gray and drizzling outside. I found myself at a cobblestone entry-way with two brass containers - they kind of looked like spittoons, actually - each with a fairly big flame coming out of the top. In the rain, these fires were welcoming and totally fit with the age of the architecture.
The conference was held at the Mogens Dahl Institute in Copenhagen: "In a newly redecorated stables from the early 1900 hundred, the Danish conductor Mogens Dahl has designed an institute dedicated to concerts, lectures, chorus activities and musical experiences." I didn't take any pictures while I was there, but I found some online:
Figure 1: The cobbles and windows of the Mogens Dahl institute, day and night views. Day shot: Erik Refner, on aok. Night shot: mogensdahl
Inside the entryway, there was a large cobbled patio and a wall of floor to ceiling windows on the right. Behind the windows was the conference area. The room - essentially, the
majority of the building - used to be a barn. Now it is a whitewashed open space, with a balcony wrapping around the 2nd floor, and an A-frame ceiling that reaches up at least 30 feet at its peak. The room was furnished with rows of chairs, a small stage and screen, and a piano.
Figure 2: On the left, the interior of the Mogens Dahl Institut. On the right, the same space filled with people, as it was during the conference. Photo credits: musikbibliotek and mogensdahl
The facility is actually a concert hall. Benjamin Gundgaard, who created the conference, let me in on a little secret: we were going to start the conference with a song.
A song.
Think of the last conference you went to. Can you even IMAGINE 'starting with a song'? How horrifying, right? It brings visions of the dreaded coworkers-singing-sad-version-of-happy-birthday-to-you-at-work. Ugh. I hate that. For some reason, I go into anaphylactic shock any time anyone bursts into song in an office setting.
The director of the Mogens Dahl Institute took the stage and said that, because this is a musical place, starting with the song was a custom he was going to insist on. He went to sit at the piano at the back of the room. Apparently, in Denmark, it used to be the custom to start meetings with a song. I got the impression that it's certainly not as widespread a custom as perhaps it once was, but the other conference attendees greeted the surprise with only a small titter. Everyone got song sheets. (thank god, they were in Danish. I was exempt).
Prepped for my typical reaction (somewhere between gritting my teeth and vomiting), I figured the only professional thing to do was avert my eyes and go to my happy place. So I looked out of the wall of windows onto the cobbled courtyard. And then something totally surprising happened. I loved it.
The piano sounded great in the space, and then, a few bars later, everyone in the audience chimed in. Not with the pathetic warbles that say 'well, I'm trying, but clearly I find this as ridiculous as you do, which is a good thing, because I'm positive I would sound like crap anyways and who needs that embarrassment.' No. this was real singing. There were sopranos and altos and basses and other things I don't know the names of. The whole room vibrated with it, this crystal clear song in Danish. Turns out I found a brand new happy place.
So, what does this have to do with user experiences?
Well, perhaps nothing. But perhaps a lot. Let's see what kinds of lingo we can relate to the experience:
Delight. I was totally delighted. Which makes me think that maybe the element of surprise - and the layers of surprise - add to delight. First I was surprised that we were doing a song at all (the idea of which I like quite a lot actually. The thing I dread is what the singing usually sounds like). And then I was totally surprised at the willingness of the audience to participate. And then, whammo, I was totally surprised by the fact that I suddenly found myself listening to something completely lovely. I wonder, can delight happen without surprise? If you buy something online and find yourself 'delighted', isn't a large measure of that delight related to your surprise? If you expect something, can you really feel true 'delight' when it happens? And if you do, isn't it because deep down you really expected something to go wrong?
Newness. If there is nothing new under the sun, then maybe the way to give people the feeling of 'newness' and 'freshness' is to bring back something they've forgotten about. Lord knows the song thing threw me off balance completely. And maybe you have to be unbalanced to enjoy things. (Yup, I'm going to leave that sentence just as it is.) How does this relate to online customer experience?
Never underestimate the level of disappointment or discomfort your users expect.
We're all too used to being made to feel stupid by new technologies. It's going to take quite a lot to make that deep, bone-level dread go away. One way to make your site seem new and fresh is to surprise the hell out of people by making the experience less torturous than they predict it will be.
Art. Things that are beautiful are…valuable. And surprising. And delightful. Think you've got the perfect site? I bet you a million bucks you can find someone who can make it more beautiful. And I bet you another million that person will NOT be a coder, marketer, biz dev person, or anyone else stuck in the current organization.
all things fabulous
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