Infusing Play Into Mundane Tasks

Article written by Leo Babauta, featured in Design Taxi.

When I write about loving every moment and loving what you do, people often ask, “What about when you have to do something you don’t like?”

You can’t always enjoy what you’re doing, right? Actually, you can. You just have to remember what it’s like to be a child.

• Sing as you do chores
• Use dishwashing as a form of mindfulness practice
• Make a game of computer tasks—see how fast you can get your inbox to empty (set a timer)
• Give yourself points for checking off your tasks, and see how many points you can get each day
• Skip instead of walk
• Imagine you are in a movie when you walk into a meeting
• Give yourself challenges
• Make bets with friends when it comes to doing things you don’t normally like doing
• Play music, dance around
• Do a victory dance after you do anything good
• Annoy your co-workers by calling them Jeeves
• Only text people in Spanish
• Play games to learn things
• When you send an email, make fax noises
• When you have to clean something, give a play-by-play of your actions with a Howard Cossell voice
• Imagine that your co-workers are robots, or vampires (Bella?)
• Talk to your computer, and give it a name
• Pretend you’ve never been anywhere before, and that everywhere is new
• Anytime you do something, ask, “What would Dwight Schrute Do?” (WWDSD?)
• Try to rhyme your emails or tweets

Sure, there are things we have to do every day that we might think are boring: household chores, errands, routine tasks at work, being in a meeting that’s makes you want to pound your head on the table. But those are only boring because we’ve chosen to make them boring.

Though I don’t want to tell you how to play, by request, here are a few quick examples: OK, those weren’t all great, but I’m sure you could think of better ones once you get into the right mindset. We’ve had the play pounded out of us, from years of schooling and work. Bring the play back, by watching a kid and seeing how amazing life is for them.

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The Alchemists Are Back!

It's been awhile 'cos boy, it's been a busy 2011. We rocked & we rolled. We'll let the list speak for itself.

For 2012, it's sailing on to the open seas to discover new horizons as well as to revisit some of our commitments.

Image credit: Mark Lloyd, Panerai Cowes Regatta 2010

For starters, we're making a renewed commitment to post monthly. This time it's going back to basics, rediscovering the one theme that makes our work so much fun: Customer Experience Design.

Why Customer Experience Design?

Someone once said, "Designing a product is designing a relationship." Every product and service is designed for our clients with that in mind. Every channel made available to customers creates an experience of a brand. Customer Experience Design is the stuff that makes designing interfaces, software and processes so exciting. But most importantly with social media and the proliferation of smartphones, the digital gap between customers and businesses is growing smaller every minute. The Internet is far richer and denser than it was before with so many tools and platforms available. It would be foolish to not optimize our digital channels for a richer customer experience.

The entire experience from landing on the website to filling out that form and receiving that email creates a series of moments. Moments of truths. These moments can make or break that relationship. It could mean customers and prospects giving that opportunity or heading to a competitor.

Connecting The Dots

How does XiMnet fit into this picture? After all, we're only a digital agency.

In truth, we too are that customer. We're customers and users of many products and services out there. As we interact with them, we learn that our own behaviours and responses are quite the same as our own clients' customers. We experience first hand the brilliance and pitfalls when using the various digital touchpoints out there: social networks like Twitter and Facebook, e-commerce websites like Amazon, corporate websites, email newsletters and so on and so forth . It makes us work even harder to design better solutions by piecing together these insights to create that lasting relationship on the digital front.

So in the next 12 months, we will share our insights and observations of customer experience designs. Good and bad ones.

Want to join us in our journey? Subscribe to our blog's RSS feed.

Or if you've seen or experienced great or bad experiences, drop us a comment. We'd love to hear from you.

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