Skip to main content

Micro-Delights


Some weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Skookum Tech Talk with topic "Micro Delights and the Rise of Craft".  Until that day, I had never heard the phrase micro-delight used in that context. Chris Paul, from LPL Financial (not the NBA), enlightened us. Micro delights are those little things that make our experience, online or otherwise, more pleasant and keep us returning for more. Have you ever begun to fill out a form on a website and all your data appears when you type the first letter of your name? Micro-delight! You know when you get a new iPhone and all you have to do is hold it next to your old one for the data to transfer? Yep, micro-delight! These little nuggets of convenience, have become the norm. If your app doesn't let me login with my google account, I don't trust it!

What does this mean for tech professionals? Details. Collectively, its the minor features of an application that set the tone for a user's overall experience. The CEO of QuikTrip, my former employer, said it best. "You only get one chance to get in someone's pocket." ... He was talking about the [then] new QT app.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accessibility Is For Everyone

  Years ago, I attended a virtual conference sponsored by Microsoft where accessibility was the topic.  The idea was that we will all require some level of enhanced accessibility at some point in our lives, so we should design and build things for our future selves. Prior to this I had only thought of ADA compliant designs as a "ToDo" for others, though still a priority. I keep this new perspective with me and welcome opportunities to evangelize.  I recently found a website that stood out to me as real champion for accessibility. This site allows the visitor to dial in whichever option(s) they need and to variable degrees. Typically we'd have to rely on the browser or perhaps the operating system itself to specify, or in better scenarios search the page for accessibility options. Kudos to nc.gov  for making this easy to find and easy to use.
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Do I Code?

I've been a paid technology professional for half a decade and this is not my first career. Why do I bother to learn new tech and torture myself with daunting task after daunting task? Well, the brain exercise is great and so is the ultimate sweet satisfaction of writing and deploying a thing that works. I love the alchemy of it all, to forge interactive material FROM NOTHING that can change how we behave is the closest thing to magic we have... other than real magic of course. The overwhelming truth here, is that I code to bring my ideas to life. I wanted to be able to communicate my "million dollar ideas" effectively and drive innovation. Here's an idea, what if we could harness the power of traffic, like wind or water? There may not be a pure software solution for that, but I feel like I need to put that one out there. The idea that motivated me to get into tech, though, is about connecting crowdfunding and publishing/royalty distribution. I called it SoundStock, n...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hot Java

In an effort to understand object oriented programming more deeply and learn a new programming language, I've decided to learn JAVA!!! Thank you to Congnizant for sponsoring a Java bootcamp with UNC Charlotte's continuing education program. Java helped me solidify a few concepts that were previously lost on me. Let's get into it, here are the four major Java OOP principles .  Abstraction is about hiding implementation details from the user while only sharing the functionality. For instance, we can mark a method as abstract and each child class that extends the  parent will have to provide it's own implementation. We also have the option to use interfaces with or without default methods. Next up is Encapsulation ,   or data hiding. When we create a class, we should make variables private from other classes and public getters and setters. Think of an ATM. There is a public interface that we interact with but private implementation behind the scenes that does all ...
Post a Comment
Read more