peterme.com

"Ah, Shit." Or, "Hell, Yeah!"

I don't quite know what to feel.

I just got back from my trip to Europe, and in my pile of mail is an announcement of the Nielsen/Norman Group User Experience World Tour.

And I see listed, on the main event, that Don Norman is giving a talk called "Expectation Design". And I think, "Huh, is this like what I've been going on and on about with Explicit Design? Where I write "Through my work, what I've observed is that the web is all about managing expectations. Setting expectations, and then fulfilling them. That's it. You do that right, and you're golden."

Well, the blurb for Don's talk suggests it might:

Expectation Design: The Next Frontier
Don Norman
Good designers already know how to make products attractive (visceral design) and how to appeal to self- and brand-image (reflective design). Good behavioral designers know how to make products usable and understandable--indeed, that's the focus of most of this conference. It's time now to turn our attention to pleasure and fun. Here, the challenge for designers is behavioral design, where expectations drive emotions. This is where hope and fear, and satisfaction and anger reside. Deliver on positive expectations and people experience pleasure. Deliver something different than expected, but equally satisfying, and people have fun. Fail to deliver, or leave people feeling out of control, and you get a wide range of negative emotions.

Expectation-driven design marks a new dimension for our discipline and provides a new framework for design. It shifts the emphasis from pure function to an emphasis on designs that both function well and offer people pleasure, enjoyment, a sense of accomplishment, and yes, even fun.

So I can either feel good that I've hit upon something real, something that others are thinking about, including luminaries like Don, or I can mope that my meme will be carried away by the far more popular Donster.

Hmmm.

The Plight of Masculinity

So, there I was, in Europe for the last three weeks.

And pretty much from the moment we got there, the Euro 2004 football tournament was underway.

Now, in the states, I can't be bothered with soccer. It goes too slow, and I don't know anything about the teams, the players, the rivalries, the matchups.

But, because I have a surfeit of testosterone, or that pesky Y chromosome, or something, I couldn't help but follow the tournament. This was definitely influenced by the fact that *everywhere we went*, the populace was caught up in the excitement. So now I know what a rivalry the Dutch have with the Germans. How exciting it was for Portugal to beat Spain. The drama of the Scandinavian tie and the Italian's complaints. I'm actually enjoying that England was thwarted in the quarterfinals.

My best experience was watching the Netherlands - Latvia game at a bar in A'dam, with a crowd decked out in orange, and witnessing not just the Netherlands winning (which was relatively anti-climactic, since Latvia stunk up the place), but also Germany losing -- which meant Holland could move on to the quarterfinals. People went apeshit.

See? I'm all caught up in it. And now I can't watch it anymore, because it's only available on expensive pay channels, and I wouldn't know where to go to see it, and so I get my fix by reading the website. And tomorrow, Holland plays Sweden. Maybe I'll find a Scandinavian bar somewhere to watch it.

Pity the poor male.

Cultural Hegemony

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Peter Merholz, drinking Starbucks, in from of Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain.

Jeff Veen in Amsterdam

So, my three week European sojourn is nearly over (I'm at the airport in Amsterdam), and I'll write about it in due time.

Until then there's this photo:

That's Jeff Veen, on the back of some Dutchman's bike. Jeff went racing after him (and I went racing after Jeff to snap this photo) as we were heading down the gracht, and then leapt onto the little rack in the back, and rode for a block or two.