think carrie, think!

Not so much work related

After Sprint made it into the news this past Tuesday, it comes as no surprise that a flurry of articles about customer service surfaced quickly after. All the more research material for me, I guess. Amongst the articles I found MeasuredUp, a site dedicated to customer reviews on customer service and brand experience (although I wonder why they split those two entities up). Apparently many businesses, after reading some of the reviews, have been proactively fixing some of their problems.

If only there were better service quality metrics. Yet another topic I have started thinking and reading about but have had no time to fully explore.

While I’m on the topic of customer experience… here’s a pretty amusing clip of a classic customer service example. It’s Ed Horrell calling Northwest Airlines, wondering why flight attendants get testy when you don’t have the exact change for a cocktail:

A little more work related

Mary Jo Bitner is coming to give a talk tomorrow, concerning her research on self-service technologies. It’ll be interesting to hear why she’s pushing this idea so much, considering the fact that the majority of the services world considers self-service technology to be the reason why customer service is going down the drain.

I am lucky that my mentor is the one organizing her visit. I will get to have lunch with her and Mary Jo, and will have some time to show Mary Jo some of the work I’ve been doing here at IBM. Should be pretty good, getting some feedback from a leader and founder of services marketing.

Yesterday after work, while waiting for the shuttle to the train station:

Me: “Let’s do some food and wine at the park this weekend, if it doesn’t rain. It’ll sort of be like my birthday celebration”
Nods and smiles of agreement
Ning, fellow intern: “Sounds good… when is your birthday?”
Me: “Soon.”
Ning: “When, like, next week?”
Me: “Actually, it’s today.”

So, another year has passed. I didn’t do much yesterday, but it was nice that way. It being, what, 36C outside. I did, however, get treated to a nice birthday dinner by my mom at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze. It was fantastic. Although I may now be celebrity-chef-ed out, after having gone to Bobby Flay’s Bar American two weeks ago, and Mesa Grill just last week. But Maze was an entirely different experience, being modeled by Ramsay’s delicate small-plate, tapas style Asian-influenced French dishes, whereas Bobby Flay’s restaurants were all-out Mexican feasts. On my birthday dinner menu (for my own sake of remembering, if anything):

• Salad of globe artichoke, chickpeas, green beans, truffle dressing
• Carpaccio of tuna and swordfish with lime and cucumber marinade, soya dressing
• Gilthead bream with native lobster risotto, lemongrass and Thai basil
• Madagascan vanilla rice pudding, raspberry and lemon thyme jam, mascarpone and pecan ice cream

Yum. Happy Birthday to me indeed. Thanks to everyone who sent their well wishes my way :)

This past Friday, I sat in on one of our weekly Stanford Video Seminar series. They’re basically seminars given by various people invited by Stanford, and broadcast online. Someone in our building thought it would be neat to bring some design spice into this IBM computer science mix (thank goodness), so every Friday, he reserves a room and plays a seminar on some design topic.

So the video lecture I sat in on was entitled “Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience”. It was given by CMU’s very own Tina Blaine (from the ETC). While I learned nothing new from the lecture, she had an exhaustive list of neat musical interface examples covering various domains (single user, multi-player, etc).

Even though I didn’t learn anything new in terms of musical interfaces, some interesting things were brought up and worth thinking about, even if not in the realm of music:

• How does one design for multi-player environments? More specifically, how do you make sure players know the impact they’re having on the environment? If you’re one of 100 involved in an interactive piece, how do you know if your actions are actually having an effect?
• How do you engage interaction and experience in a public space? Thinkwell Design & Production’s The Show (at The Pier at Caesars in Atlantic City) does a great job of this. They’re famous for an intense, five minute fountain show, but when the show isn’t in progress, the fountain becomes an “operator free, interactive” fountain. A fountain that plays games with people, how cool is that. An example of one of the games is Paint the Fountain: “When guests step into a spot of colored light on the floor, the fountain changes to that color and shoots into the air. The more people clustered in the colored light, the taller the fountain plumes. When all the colored light zones reach their maximum, a quick show payoff is performed.” Simple, but it does the trick.

And a partial list of some of the more interesting of her musical interface examples:

Pandora [not so much the music engine, but the Music Genome Project is what's interesting here]
MusicLens [a very neat, though not thorough, way to visualize and search music by type]
GlassEngine [this wasn't mentioned in the talk, but it's related to MusicLens - another great way to search music by type. and a shamless plug for IBM]
DigiWall [an interactive climbing wall using lights and sounds]
Midiball [a "showtoy": a five foot floating balloon with midi triggers, used to get a concert audience to make music by throwing it around]
BeatBugs [cute, handheld percussive instruments, can connect to a network to form a social group of BeatBugs]
AudioPad [a composition and performance instrument, tracking objects on a table for output]
Music Table
Electroplankton [an interactive music and art video game made for the Nintendo DS. Not so much a game as a demonstration of the power of the built-in microphone and the touchscreen of the DS]
PLORK (Princeton Laptop Orchestra)

New toy numero uno

While the iPhone was bought by half-million+ Americans and ogled by the rest of the world, I sat in my NY apartment holding in my grubby little hands, a small yellow package. Inside was a new phone. No, not a product of the Red Delicious variety, but instead, a white Sony Ericsson w200a. Yes, it’s an old model and there are tons of phones out there better than this one, but it’s fairly pretty, and most importantly, it was free. So while the world was salivating over neat interactions, pretty interfaces, and AT&T problems, I was just happy not to be carrying a bulky brick of a phone any longer.

Okay fine my old phone wasn’t actually that bad. It made and received calls perfectly fine (50% of the time). But it was a drag to carry around. And it took me half a year just to get used to how to do things (and Nokia is usually pretty good about their interfaces). So yay for new, small, and free phones.

New toy numero dos

(My very lame attempt at learning Spanish. One of possibly 2401029 things on my summer to-do list. Fine. More like my lifetime to-do list.)

My sister got me a white Nintendo DS for my birthday. Of all the Nintendo products, the DS is definitely my favourite. Yes, the Wii is cool, but until they fix the interactions so that it actually maps to what you’re doing more precisely, I won’t drool over it. The DS actually has all its interactions pretty near perfect, and is a significant enough change from its previous counterparts that it’s worth getting. After all, I did get one for both my mom and my sister as gifts. Actually, I think 50% of my extended family has one. Maybe it’s just a Chan family thing.

Okay, enough about new toys. Happy Silly American day!

Took this test. Summary of results:

My type: ENFJ

(Strength of preferences in % – I have yet to figure out what that means)
Extraverted: 11
Intuitive: 75
Feeling: 12
Judging: 22

Type profiles described here and here. Apparently I fit into the category of the Teacher Idealist. Interesting.