This is my brand-new CueCat barcode wand, which I bought from LibraryThing. I wanded in a handful of books, thoroughly enjoying myself.
Part of the joy of LibraryThing is the communal nature of the experience. When I add a book to LibraryThing, I can immediately see who else in LibraryThing owns this book, how they rated the book, what they said about it, and what else they’re reading. I’m entering a book into a database; I suppose I could use a spreadsheet. But I’m enjoying myself, and contributing to the enjoyment of others.
So I’m thinking about next week’s talk not so much in terms of widgets and gizmos, but in terms of what’s new for the user experience.
In what new ways do you bring joy to the user experience? What’s really hot? (What’s really not?)
Posted on this day, other years:
- California it is! - 2009
- Writing for the Web: Best Online Examples Sought - 2007
- Five Minute Review: EndNote Version 8 - 2004
And I threw my CueCat out several years ago because it didn’t really seem to be very useful. This sounds like a wonderful application for it. Bummer!!!
I’ve used a lot of barcode wands in my day, and I have to say “you get what you pay for.” Cuecat coughed up a few hairballs while I was working… it wouldn’t read the codes or it copied them in twice, creating duplicate records (though bravo LT for telling me about those dupes). Plus I had to hold the cat upside-down, as I’m left-handed… though after a while I remembered I could wand backwards.
But for the price and convenience, it works pretty well! I had close to 200 books wanded in by the time Letterman came on… not bad for about two hours’ work.
Definitely, definitely talk about what gizmos and widgets do to make services better, more transparent, delight the user, etc. There’s way too much focus in Libraryland on the named technologies and way too little on why they matter and what benefits they bring. It’s a problem with a parallel in Sales. Sales people often focus on “feature, feature, oh, and another feature.” The customer wants to hear “benefit, benefit, and by the way, a great benefit!”
I agree. I was thinking how CueCat was reasonably priced and cute–and how that affected my willingness to use it.