Iterate Weekly - Issue 60
This week we're improving the UX of music festivals, using keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, validating the authenticity of our cheese, changing our Airbnb habits, and reliving our Senior Year!
Welcome to issue 60 of Iterate Weekly!
Just a reminder that you can always reply to this email or leave a comment on the web version. I read all of them, and I appreciate the feedback, questions, and insights from all of you.
Let’s jump into this week’s stories.
🤖 Tech
Improving the UX of Music Festivals
Music festivals aren’t what they used to be. They are no longer a place for people to just gather and listen to music. They are full-fledged, curated, multi-media, multi-sensory, interactive experiences. It’s no longer sufficient to just have a website or even an app for your festival.
Snap and Live Nation are combining forces to rethink the UX of the modern music festival.
Debuting at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Snap is unleashing new Augmented Reality lenses that are aimed to improve the festival experience for music fans. They’re touting these features as a “Playbill of the 21st Century”. Essentially, they will act as a guide to give you vital information about the experience along with more whimsical, fun, flourishes to enhance the user experience.
The two companies are planning to coordinate at over a dozen upcoming events and this could be a real game-changer for regular festival goers. It seems like the majority of those attending these festivals are already pointing their phones to take photos and videos of everything, why not overlay some AR elements too?
There are obviously tons of usage for AR in a festival environment. I’m particularly excited for the ability to use the app to quickly track down your friends. Gone are the days of calling someone and asking them to raise their hand so you could see them through the crowd. Snap’s “FriendFind AR” feature will create a virtual beacon to indicate where your friend is, and also give you an arrow and countdown of how many feet are between you and your lost buddy.
Let’s hope they use this first round of festivals it iron out the inevitable kinks in the software. My guess is by next Summer’s festival season, an AR app will be as ubiquitous as glow sticks, colorful headbands, or any other festival garb.
Are you excited to enhance your festival experience with AR?
🎓 Education/Productivity
Are You Using Keyboard Shortcuts for email?
Keyboard shortcuts can be huge time savers, but far too many people actually bake them into their daily workflows.
The article is pretty self-explanatory but I love the way Thompson talks about the “zen-like flow-state” of using keyboard shortcuts. It’s so true. Something may only take a few clicks of your trackpad, but it feels infinitely smoother when you’re just flying through commands using your fingers on the keyboard.
I don’t think we need to memorize all of these but I’m sure there are a few low-hanging fruit that could make your daily email slog far more enjoyable. The “#” as a delete key was a great tip for me personally.
How often are you using keyboard shortcuts these days? Which are your favorites?
♻️ Health & Environment
Check to See if Your Cheese Has a Micro-Chip!
Who knew that the cheese industry was so intense?
Specifically we’re talking about Parmigiano-Reggiano here. And like many other culinary delights (champagne, asiago, Vermont maple syrup?) these foods are only accurate if their place of origin is accurate.
You can’t just dump any white powder in a plastic can and say that it’s proper Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese! And if you think this is just another one of my silly stories, the fraudulent cheese market is rumored to be worth $2.08 billion!
Still, the idea is pretty hard to wrap your head around. There are computer chips inside the cheese and we’re eating them? I’ll leave it to the professionals at the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano to properly explain:
"The innovation combines food-safe Casein labels with the p-Chip micro transponder — a blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital 'twin' for physical items,” says the Consortium. “This scannable new food tag is smaller than a grain of salt and highly durable, delivering next-generation visibility and traceability."
So there you have it. Micro transponders used to be high-tech items that were rare and expensive. Now they’re just seasoning our cheese…
🛍 Grab Bag
Airbnb’s Redesign Changes How You Search
I was a pretty big Airbnb user in their early days. My apartment in San Francisco was one of the first few dozen listings in the app. I went to the original Airbnb headquarters in SF several times to be part of UI feedback and tested new features before they rolled out to other hosts. I even wrote a book about my experience.
All of this seems relevant as the Airbnb app is on the verge of its biggest design overhaul in a decade.
But this isn’t just a facelift for the brand. We’re talking about rethinking the way that people search for accommodations. The experience will no longer center around the location search bar. Instead of telling Airbnb where you want to go you will tell it a bit about the type of place that you typically like to travel to.
Airbnb has whittled this down to 56 different categories of stays that you may be looking for. There are activities like “skiing” or “surfing” and also physical characteristics of the place you may book like “barns” or “houseboats”. The hope is to inspire people to travel to new locations that they likely wouldn’t have found if they had to type that listing’s city into the search bar.
CEO Brian Chesky believes that the pandemic caused a fundamental shift in the way people travel. With more people working remotely, longer term stays are far more common than they used to be. And proximity to major cities isn’t as important for some travelers as they used to be. Airbnb is betting on the fact that people want to enjoy these experiences in a more location-agnostic manner. Chesky explains:
“Historically, if you want to go wine tasting, you have to type in, like, Sonoma, or France . . . and now you can just click on vineyards and realize there’s actually vineyards all over the world,” says Chesky. “I’ve always had this idea in my head that we can also point demand to where we have supply and have a much more aspirational . . . way to travel. But the problem was before the pandemic, [travel] was so habitual.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this shift for the company. Although, I will admit that I don’t host on the platform anymore and haven’t used it to book accommodations since before the pandemic. I’ll give Chesky the benefit of the doubt as he’s made some shrewd moves over the years to keep Airbnb in the position its in today (revenue was up 70% in the past year).
I’ll play around with the new version of the app to see how I like it before I pass judgment.
Do we think that people are really more interested in how they’re traveling rather than where they’re traveling?
💬 Quote of the Week
“There are only two greats in the world, me and Britain”
- Muhammed Ali
🎥 Content Recommendation
Senior Year
Sometimes we just need a silly movie that makes us laugh right?
That’s why I’m recommending “Senior Year” which recently debuted on Netflix.
The premise sounds totally ridiculous. A high school cheerleader takes a tumble when her teammates (cheermates?) intentionally don’t catch her after getting tossed high in the air. She goes into a coma for 20 years and then awakens in the body of a 37-year old but her mind still feels like a teenager.
Naturally she goes back to school to finish her (wait for it) …Senior Year.
You will enjoy this film much more if you attended high school in the late 90s. It has the music, the slang, the cultural reference points, essentially everything you need to relive the magic of pre-Y2K America.
This isn’t high-brow cinema but Rebel Wilson does a great job of capturing the essence of the time-period, the always funny Chris Parnell is perfect in the role of a widowed Dad, and even Alicia Silverstone steals a scene that feels like an extension of Clueless.
It’s well worth checking out!
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
Gmail keyboard shortcuts are the best!