Setting the Difference

I normally bring with me lunch to work but there was no leftovers from the night before so I was pressured in locating something worth eating in a town whose supply on meals is limited to bagels or high-priced Italian food, so I settled for the middled ground. I went with Chinese take-out but I stayed in.

Here I am sitting at the table waiting to be called up for my order when this random thought came to mind. Why do all Chinese take-out restaurants look the same? Regardless of your geographic location, the likelihood of you having visited one is very likely because they’ve become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. They’re practically in every other corner so I’m sure you can relate to the view I had.

As far as I know, each chain is independently owned so in essence, the owner has free range in deciding how they wish to adorn their business but I’m wondering if there’s an unwritten rule in sticking to dull colors, washed-out floors and uncomfortable seating to represent a place that serves delicious food. The mood just doesn’t compliment the food.

Where’s the Surprise

I’ve yet to come across one Chinese take-out that’s retracted from such decor. There really is no shock value in what you get when you visit any of the locations other than distinguishing to your friends that an order of fried chicken wings is cheaper here than there. Granted it is take-out so perhaps attention to furnishing seems inconsequential but I would think any subtle changes to an institutionalized eating establishment as this would trigger the customer to separate one experience from the other. 

I could count the times I’ve actually stayed and eaten at a one of these and the reason has more to do with the place not being very inviting to begin with. My whole take on this sudden thinking is that if every one in an industry fails to address a problem, as a business owner, why wouldn’t I want to grab it from the horns in solving it and using the competition as the point of difference. Why follow in line with the rest?  Add to the list of changes menu presentation and food delivery approach and people will notice.

Being Above the Rest

What’s so fantastic about being different you ask? Well, because not everyone is doing it. With good credit and determination, anyone can open up a chain store but what makes you distinctive is applying that extra effort and inventiveness to set a niche and being the best at it.

Yes my lunch was delicious but I could have walked 2 more blocks and the rating on my meal would have been the same. What could have been different was the setting in which it was served and this would have forever been the place that completely erased my perception of a typical Chinese take-out restaurant.

Perhaps I was too hungry and simply over thought this opinion but Seth Godin doesn’t fall to far from everything I considered: 

Differentiation means thinking very hard about the market and your competitors and somehow making yourself different. Any rational person spending a fair amount of time with perfect information will have no trouble figuring out why you’re different. You don’t create a purple cow by being different. You do it by creating something worth talking about!

2 years ago  /  0 notes

The Case for Effective Archives

The beauty of visiting bookstores is that there’s no set rules as to what you can do with the material as long as you don’t walk out not paying or destroy their property. You essentially escort yourself through long tranquil aisles, plucking out any title that seems intriguing, you peruse a couple pages and if any material is worth exploring more, you instinctively flip to the table of contents to examine what else the book has to offer.

With luck, the bookstore will have made a sale in view that everything you sought to look into was captivating enough to purchase the book. You committed yourself to it and this process is not too different when deciding to explore a blog.

Making them Explorable

When you develop a connection with an article on a blog, you feel compelled to review older entries through the Archives. A well designed Archives page is not only functional but also visually exciting and distinctive and when it’s not, the experience is just disappointing.

Consider the Archives page the table of contents of a book and if the reader is not able to locate relevant information that should provide an image of how the blog is organized, that alone makes it easy to lose interest and not buy the book as mentioned before.

There’s a reason behind the existence of so many great Wordpress plugins catered specifically for the Archives. The principal one being is that they are inherently plain and boring to look at so they require a little sprucing to make it easy to navigate and explore effectively.

Archives on Tumblr

One of the changes Tumblr made with version 5 was to enhance the quirky way in which the platform displayed its Archives and despite it’s refinement, it’s far from anything pleasing to go through especially if someone exceeds 60 or more post in a month.

Granted I use Tumblr and I love for the most part every feature that’s been released lately but can you see yourself going these cluster of boxes trying to find content worth reading? I don’t. There are distinguishing elements between each box to giving you a sense of what each is and what lies ahead before clicking on them but not to a point where it’s inviting to do so.

Simplistic & Attractive Archives

I probably should have taken the extra time to develop a mockup of how I envision the Tumblr Archives to look like but to give you a sense of what a simplistic and attractive archives page to me looks like, consider the following in no particular order:

• Ordered List: perfectly displays post titles and dates. As an added bonus, the presence of live search sweetens the deal.
• Justin Blanton: creator of WP plugin Smart Archives and he employs his quite nicely.
• Michael Mistretta: straightforward, intelligently organized along with sweet mini-icons to distinguish between a post and a link.

There is a hack that claims to display your Tumblr archives fancier but it falls short to me. Hopefully on Tumblr’s list of “things to improve for the platform”, the Archives is there somewhere.

2 years ago  /  2 notes

Regarding the Mac Tablet

I’m laying at the beach writing a rough draft to this entry not because I want to but because I can. Because there’s finally a device that has cemented for me what it means to handle minimal computer task effectively while not being in front of one. I’m referring to the iPhone.

Responding to an email is simple. Browsing the web is painless (depending on which model you own), social networking is entertaining and the gist is that the realization of feeling connected with what’s important even in the strangest of places is there.

The iPhone commercials says it best. You can practically do anything with the device without feeling limited to what it really is, a cell phone. Thankfully in part to the existent passion in the app development community and Mac addicts like myself that giggle in excitement with any rumors pertaining new products. Which brings me to the much talked about Mac Tablet.

Beautiful illustrations are everywhere from what some already envision this product to look like although I’ll admit I’m more charmed by the notion than the actual development of it and here’s why.

If the Mac Tablet does exist, it would more or less be considered Apple’s response to the electronic craze of netbooks and their strength lies in its amazing portability. The ability to do minimal stuff as mentioned before but without having the full CPU power. If I fancy for a full computer experience, why not just bring along my laptop instead of settling for second best?

Any task you can’t do on your iPhone or feel stronger doing on your computer, you’ll look forward to accomplishing it on your laptop, so there is a desire to get to it and complete what you have to.

Working on the iPhone leaves me wanting more from the limited the device has to offer. It makes me look forward to follow up on clipped feeds on NetNewsWire iPhone, on responding to emails that require attachments, on getting the full experience from a hilarious YouTube video or finalizing a draft as I’m doing now which I started on Simplenote.

My point is that what the iPhone contributes to me is merely chapters of an entire book I have awaiting for me at home, which is my laptop. If I want the whole book, I’ll bring it with me and by having a Mac Tablet in the mix, it’ll be like having a photocopied version of a book that I already own and have no interest in carrying when I can occupy myself with chapters on my iPhone until I get home to continue the real thing.

Sound confusing? I hope not. Needless to say I have no interest in a Mac Tablet because as Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog puts it, “Apple has already entered this market, albeit, incognito. Disguised as a cellular phone and MP3 player respectively, the iPhone and iPod touch are on the verge of being an ultramobile computing platform”.

I love being able to handle multiple small task on my iPhone and I can see that going away if I purchased a tablet. Or perhaps a tablet is what I need to remind me that phone calls are possible on my iPhone too since I exploit every other function but that one.

2 years ago  /  2 notes

Keeping the Kindle focus

I think it’s normal to expect every handheld device to have capability to explore the web with a full featured browser, to keep you entertained with classic games, to keep you connected with every social network there’s is to possibly join and these qualities are the ones a friend expected to get when he tinkered with my Kindle 2.

The concept is nothing different from what an iPhone would do and I found myself agreeing with what he expected for about a two seconds until I retracted my nod and rethought about why I bought the device.

Granted the Kindle does allow you to browser the web but it’s limited to text-based sites and uploading MP3s is openly possible but if that’s all you look forward in doing with the device, my question would be at what point would the reading take place? Obviously he isn’t much of a reader, hence the lack of priority in what the device is intended to do.

The Kindle is an amazing gadget with a first-class purpose to get you to fail to think about anything else but the book that you have in front of you. There is no little alert message telling you about Twitter replies you received, no minuscule envelope icon of new incoming mail or anything distracting that you can think of to get you away from reading. When you look at the screen, everything else really does become meaningless.

With all these rumors about Apple releasing a tablet for 2010, Amazon has little desire in feeling they need to redirect the Kindle to cater towards activities that take precedence while waiting on a crowded line. Any upgrades should only improve on the act of reading and any aesthetic changes wouldn’t be too shabby either.

Abhi over at Kindle Review points out what killer features the Kindle 3 would need to make it special:

• Speech To Text and Journalling.
• TouchScreen and Game Changing usability changes (think Swype for really good text input).
• ePub support and PDF Support.
• 3rd party Kindle App Store, with some solid Apps at launch (calendar, address book, calculator, to-do lists).
• A drastic jump in page turning speeds and screen resolution. This is actually rather unlikely.

It’s very easy to get distracted and the only device I own that does not make me go down that path is the Kindle. It’s the lack of what conventional handheld devices are inherently popular for that make this device special.

2 years ago  /  Notes