User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

with all this hyperpersonalization, with all the crew around you knowing what you’re interested in, what you did today, and what you’ll do tomorrow, the key would be making people feel the personalization as a luxury—and not as a creeping incursion. If it’s your birthday, a crew member should be socially savvy enough not to say, “Hey, I see it’s your birthday!”—thereby alerting you that you are, in a real sense, being monitored. Instead, they would tune their appeal. They might ask, “Are you celebrating a special occasion with us?” In doing so, they would open a conversational path that might seem like a lucky opening for freebies or better service, but which had been quietly engineered all along. “Yes, we’ve invested in technology,” said Swartz. “But we’re spending countless hours rewriting procedures and role descriptions … If I want to share a glass of wine at sunset, I won’t have to interrupt the moment to make eye contact with a waiter. It will find me. But the crew bringing the wine has to be trained to let me have that moment as well.”