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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Land ho! Sail ho!

I gotta say, the 1st half of 2011 passed so fast I don't quite remember what happened... Well OK I do remember but maybe it's not that spectacular.

Not memorable.

But I intend to make the 2nd half a lot more exciting, and to prove the point, we actually headed East

to Bukit Gambang, Pahang for a Retreat, all 12 of us. And it was a hoot!

We reviewed our strategy and to-do-list and made a collective promise to push for the next 5 months to deliver on our Product Development aka Nimbus or XTOPIA in the Cloud. It is a 3-tiered software se

rvices model that, when we get it shipped, will transform XIMNET from a project-focused company to a software services global setup.

Sure, we dream BIG.

And yes, we've also promised to ACT BIG TIME to achieve our goals.

During the trip, we tinkled with our Design Direction with a user-focused philosophy that will outline our UX Manifesto, sharpened our Marketing Focus with Mobile offerings, and most of all, laid the foundation for our R&D to transform the company, as mentioned above.

And over the next 5 months, Deborah & I will be a lot more diligent in posting our thoughts and journey snippets and you will see that we will be sharing the highs and lows of this ambitious journey.

And I will be working on publishing 3 eBooks to be shared with you.

More details to come...

And here's for a wildly exciting 5 months before we wrap for the year with wine and Christmas holidays.

I will end with a group photo of the team at Bukit Gambang. Here you go.

Read More

XIMNET picks up speed on its Mobile Web business strategy!

XIMNET Malaysia signals its move into Mobile Web business by launching a Mobile Site at http://mobile.ximnet.com.my/

Read More

Web Design & The Chief Alchemist?

I've been asked many times, in meeting rooms, sales presentations, wedding dinners, old boys gatherings, why do I carry this rather unusual title?

"CHIEF ALCHEMIST"?

Why indeed?

There's the long answer and the short answer thing.

So for this post, I will get to the short answer, which might be more relevant within this context.

Whichever ways you see it, the Internet is fertile ground for innovation. When I first got interested in web design circa 1996, I knew that the value of the web was not in any new fangled, multi-million inventions coming out of research labs within the guts of the Silicon Valley. The value of the web will be on how we put existing stuffs together to produce something valuable.

You throw text, images, videos and a bunch of codes together, stir them with imagination and make it do things for people in never before imagined scenarios or those areas that are blatantly under-served and bingo! you've opened NEW DOORS into this brave new, connected world of ours.

Look at GOOGLE.

Look at FACEBOOK.

Or YOUTUBE, for that matter.

Great ideas, YES! But really, it's always been there, those materials. You mine them out, connect them, slice & dice 'em, and whooosh, GOLD!

That's alchemy. Making gold out of ordinary things.

For us at XIMNET, we look at your content, your context with eyes of possibilities. That's our thing, OUR CREED, if you don't choke on that kind of words.

And we've done this for more than a decade. I am proud to say this without any sense of irony, we've got to be one of the top web design company. In Malaysia at least, if not in the region.

And we've seen promising competitors flamed out in the lean years after the 7 fat years, watched some losing their ways, gazing starry eyed, hallucinating under the desert skies, and witnessed some new ones sprouting like tiny mushrooms after last night's rain. (OK, I'll be honest, there's one I like a lot, web warriors, kindred spirits)

But we, we've been tested thoroughly in the crucible of fire. And for that reason alone, we dare to say we know what's its worth, this web thing.

I will whisper to you... it's about results...

Yes, it's all about delivering results my friends. And we've gotten the rituals and chants down pat. And a dash of love to work it too, but that's for another day.

So there, that's my passion, transforming everyday things into gold over the Internet. And if you don't mind, I want to get back to my lab. :-)

Have fun, my friends!

Chief Alchemist.

Read More