The previous 2 posts about the car industry have shown how manufacturers quickly move towards adding intangible values to their products when the basic needs of a product are satisfied. The HoN model was used as an useful way to think about these issues.
If you read for instance NO LOGO [1] by N. Klein, it shows how once products become commodities (i.e. sports shoes) the next level where revenue can be generated is to exploit the brand experience via “Brand Education” and big marketing budgets. Nothing new here,pProducts these days are expected to have more than just a functional life and engage with their users in different ways.
When can see now a clear example of these type of movement within the software industry and how “Experience” or “User Experience” buzzwords are becoming more and more common. Microsoft, with their soon-to-be-release Windows Vista, moves from providing a functional product (i.e. Windows 2000) to promise a whole new user experience with the upcoming Vista release.
The also soon-to-be-released Microsoft Sparkle gives also some clues about how teams are form to tackle the new user experience at Microsoft. As I described previously on this post, things are changing in the way of multidisciplinary teams are built as the current approach to usability and user experience is not as efficient it should be.
source channel9.msdn.com
For the Sparkle team, they brought a designer to the programming team, but not as a designer in the sense of coming to design some buttons and going away and back again to create a tool bar and so on, but as a person fully integrated in the development team, a desigmer "in residence" within the Dev team. (The video is well worth it watching but if you are in a hurry the is almost right at the begining)
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=34528
Also from channel9, some more demos of Avalon:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115387
[1] No Logo. Naomi Klein, 2000. Flamingo. HarperCollins Publisers.
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