How Virgin America’s customer experience turns “boring to better”

Virgin America is my favorite domestic airline, in part because of the way it treats an overlooked part of the flying experience: the safety demonstration. This is the video they show before every flight.

Note just three elements of the experience:

• Design: The video is visually appealing, created as what appears to be a hand-drawn cartoon.

• Humor: It contains real-life actual humor throughout, to keep passengers engaged. (Don’t miss the nun packing up the Linksys router, and the matador sitting next to the bull.)

• Common sense: My favorite moment of the video is where the narrator says, “For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this…” In other words: we acknowledge that most of you already know this, but we gotta read it anyway. Virgin America comes across as a human organization willing to exercise common sense on behalf of the passenger.

Compare this to the safety videos shown on most other airlines: bland staging, “flight attendants” who are probably just hired actors going through the motions, narration straight out of an FAA safety document. No creativity, no joy. Mainly boredom.

Most airlines look at the safety video and say, “It’s a chore we gotta get through.” Virgin America says, “Here’s an opportunity to create a good experience.” The difference in attitude toward that one detail – just one moment in the entire travel experience – speaks volumes about the commitment to customer experience.

YouTube is now getting flooded with videos of pets playing with an iPad. Here’s one of many. Enjoy!

<< View Iggy using an iPad >>

Usually companies don’t point out their usability issues and problems, but Microsoft’s manager of Office programs, Jennifer Michelstein decided to try using a game to help train users (See Jennifer’s post).

Here’s CNET’s post on the interesting strategy.

Here’s Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero game.

What do you think of this strategy???

<< View the Presentation >>

<< View the Video >>

Why are so many things broken? In this entertaining talk – one of the favorites of Gel 2006 – Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them.

Watch the Video

Worth a read on Slate (Aricle by Michael Agger).

Here is a cellular phone that *really* can multitask! The Sumsing Turbo 3000 Xi mobile phone!

View the video!

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations.

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

“Who hasn’t felt like doing that?” said a police spokesman.

While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.