Kelly Goto
Emily Cotler · Boom · 2012
In 2003, when tweeting was something only birds did, and websites were by and large built in tables (shudder), my friend and colleague Kelly Goto stood on the rooftop of her San Francisco Mission District loft and made the decision to redirect a significant slice of her company's resources into mobile design-except it wasn't called "mobile" at the time."Wireless" was the buzzword.Colleagues thought she was crazy.Cell phones were for talking.And besides, who really needed or wanted to be connected everywhere they went?History is laced with these kinds of foresight stories.Not obvious-from-the-get-go innovations like the light bulb, the birth control pill, or the printing press.Many brilliant ideas seemed ludicrous at the time.Like Fred Smith's famous C+ from Harvard Business School for his Fedex business plan, because how many people would pay extra for overnight shipping?Or Richard Sears' foolhardy belief that people would actually shop from a catalogue for things they couldn't see and inspect first.Or the preposterous suggestion put forth by Jobs and Wozniak that every household would someday have a personal computer.I mean, really.Pioneers.People who audaciously question accepted status quo thinking.Kelly Goto doesn't necessarily think of herself as a pioneer.Always an evangelist for immersive research methods, she is looking at how today's experiences with devices are moving quickly into touch, voice-activation, and other sensory levels of interaction that had not been designed for previously: the emotional side of the user experience."Understanding the triggers of emotion is a vitally important aspect of controlling an online experience," she points out."And if companies can utilize this thinking, they can better prioritize and plan to meet these needs."The implication is huge.This innovative approach to understanding audience may revolutionize the way we weigh demographics in favor of tapping how people feel.This may be new territory for online and mobile design, but it is not conventional wisdom . . .not yet.But neither