Audience Experience

If you were actively trying to confuse the medical community, you couldn't do much better than this!

In a city as crowded as NYC, finding a hidden quiet space is like gold. Here are a few I've found that make my life better. Grand Central's Biltmore Room has the old Track Announcement Board, in CHAULK!! On the other side of town, the Senior Engineer, Joe Kinney shows off the old electrical system of the New Yorker Hotel.  There is a secret (closed) tunnel to the subway under 34th street, which is decorated by lovely Aztec inspired tiles. You can find out the other secrets here!!  http://untappedcities.com/2016/09/13/the-top-10-secrets-of-the-new-yorker-hotel/

Freakonomics did a segment about "Sleep No More" and psychological manipulation of people/audiences, There is a long history in psychology of manipulating people/subjects. The Milgrim torture experiment. The Stanford prison experiment. Getting people to torture others. All of it is a bit of theater. A secondary consideration has only been about the researcher's specific manipulation in order to get spectacular results. Allowing the subjects in "control" to ham it up. 

I was sitting at a Conference table when I saw this in front of me. In case you can't see it clearly, there is a built in phone/power jack built into the center of the table. There is a metallic flap to both cover & protect the connections, and to reduce the visual clutter in the surface of the table. However, the phone line has been CUT to accommodate the placement of the phone on the table.  Also, a surge protector with additional outlets has been plugged in. Presumably because there were not enough or they were not easily accessible for placement. The chord does not allow the plate to close properly. The phone line and the chord must be bent properly and do not easily fit into the gap of the plate.  In fact, the plate encourages more damage to both. Better design required, perhaps?

Giant corporations are often compared to giant ships, difficult to steer & even harder to change course quickly. For instance, old telephony & new telephony are competing. The first needs to prove the worth of their old technology (wired lines), while the new can jump ahead and offer many new digital features without having the costs of infrastructure to deal with. As far as the audience/customer is concerned, they just need their service to work. They don't care why things don't work, or about the layers of difficulty you have to deal with to fix it.

There is nothing worse than the idea of your own money getting lost. The process of claiming funds, albeit fax free, is frustrating to begin with, spending $500 on band-aids is even worse. It is easy to have the sense that you are always having your money wasted on things, and the more accounts it gets tied up in, the more likely you'll be locked out at the wrong moment. It is all about how you make people feel.. Not the actual words you use. It is all about how the system makes people feel, not the amount of work it takes.

If a theater has an audience, then a video game has a player.  And if a book has a reader, a piece of software has a user. The company I'm working for has put a piece of software out into the world. Something complex, many moving parts, difficult to understand at the best of moments.  And I am one of the few people seeking out the response of the audience/player/user/customer. No longer are metrics measured in dollars, they are measured in engagement. Usefulness. And abandon rates.