I love this quick animation from Apple on design. Specially the line “we start with the question: “What do we want people to feel?” Most design projects start with a different question:” what do we want it to do?” How do you feel, practically speaking, about the line: “there are a thousand ‘no’s’ for every ‘yes’?”

Great customer service is a powerful thing. When a brand that’s built on concepts such as “simple, easy, and powerful” delivers on its promise, there’s joy in the heart of the consumer and good will abounds for a long time. Today one of our Mac laptops at the office crashed. It’s a machine. It’s bound to happen sooner or later, but it always seems to happen at the most inopportune of times. However,  Mac’s customer support was stellar. I wish churches and Christian organizations would learn from Apple on how to deal with people in crisis. Our 3-year old Macbook’s hard drive crashed. I diagnosed it by the cow-like sound the poor drive made as it was trying unsuccessfully to spin. It needed to be fixed asap. One local vendor wanted $75 to “put us on the front of the line” for repairs. Instead I went to the Apple website,…

I’m convinced you cannot use focus groups to describe a ground breaking idea. I’m usually a fan of research, but not when it comes to introducing a cutting-edge idea or new product into the market. Focus groups might be a valid way to improve on an idea, or a help on choosing new features or services but they fail when they’re are asked to envision something completely new. This morning I read a comment on a blog that drove the point home: “I remember reading an article about the first-generation iPod and thinking: I can’t imagine ever needing one of these. Within months I had purchased one and I never went anywhere without it.” Innovators don’t ask permission. They bet on their instincts and create the experience we cannot live without. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs had decided to get validation from a focus group before building the first…

Yesterday Apple laid out a new subscription service and broad rules for digital content sold through the iPhone and iPad. Apple wants to make sure all app purchases and subscriptions, such as content from Amazon’s Kindle or Nextflix streaming, only happen inside the Apple Store, it also wants to make sure publishers’ subscriptions outside the Apple Store is never less than what’s offer within an app. But the most significant move might be Apple’s decision to allow customers the option to provide their name, email and zip code to the content providers, as oppose to require them to pass that information on. Running subscription restriction and pricing restrictions will create better margins and cement Apples’ dominance as a content provider. The fact that Apple is betting most of us will choose not to give our personal information to the content providers, (and who would?), is a total game changer. I…

We just launched our first iPhone/iPad app a couple of weeks ago. This is a media-rich app that allows the user to watch videos, listen to audio, read notes, share information as well as bookmark favorites for access later. The Met Church in Houston, TX was our pilot church– you can find it in the app store under “The Met Church.” This app works together with our online “Media Machine” which The Met uses. They upload media files only once and the Media Machine takes care of their website media, Podcasts as well as the iPhone/iPad apps. While it’s an easy process for our clients, it’s quite of feat of programming prowess for our team. Our challenge was not only creating the app, but making it interface with our existing platform and making it seamless for our clients using our back end we call TAG Tools. We’re a learning organization…