[Sigia-l] Lynch Mob Wanted: Flight Booking Interface Behaviour

[Listera]

Anjali Arora, NYU:

> Can you expand on why you were underwhelmed, some more specifics of what
> proved disappointing: cloaked specifics if you like.

Sorry, I can't get into the specifics. But the reason I gave iTMS as an
example is precisely because the pre-iTMS digital music world reminds me of
the recent online travel/hospitality industry.

The universe of travel/hospitality services shouldn't be reduced to booking
tickets electronically or fact finding. The promise of cross-service
partnerships is enormous, yet largely unfilled, except for mindless
acquisitions.

The genius of iTMS was to cut through all that disparate small mindedness
and reverse engineer a pretty seamless user experience continuum that now
stands at 82% market share with nearly half a billion songs sold.

At one meeting with this company, various people were proudly showing me how
they solved certain (what appeared to be) challenging integration problems
to make some stuff easier for the user. Apparently my facial expressions
weren't sufficiently upbeat so the meeting leader asked me if they were
missing something. I wanted to answer but just couldn't find the words. So
we continued to discuss. About five minutes later it dawned on me what was
really missing, as I blurted it out: emotion. We were role playing about
travel, you know, new places, seeing new things, having fun and I was as
excited as a door knob.


Ziya
Nullius in Verba