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Inside the mind of a creator

With the imminent upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 of the now Multi-Award Winning Control Panel from txtNation, we are left asking the question – how is the system developed and how is it thought of.

Compelling Experiences
Gen Y users have grown up as “digital natives”, surrounded by compelling technology experiences. Surrounded everywhere, that is, except in business software. It is this very essence where txtNation hopes CP5 sets the new standard.

The foremost example of this compelling experience is video games. Compare gaming to what happens at the office - what business software product has loyal users that will sit for hours on end in front of a screen, endlessly and tirelessly engaged in what’s going on? There’s no reason why productivity software can’t engender this kind of loyalty and passion – it simply requires a different approach to software design, one that appeals to how the brains of today’s workers are wired.

txtNation Director, Michael Whelan hired several such designers developers to work on the recent upgrades to the software. "The wonderful thing about gaming is the level if interaction and design. There is always a intuitive approach," Whelan says.

With the most recent upgrade of the Client Control Panel, txtNation have added the following new main features:

Feedback
Director, Michael Whelan knew that in order for his services to work, it would take a very active approach to making it become a leading product! "There are parallels between the gaming community and your customer base. A clients contributions to the overall service are worthwhile and are often implemented."

Design
Well-designed games employ the simplest social exchange. You make a move, and something else happens. Consider Amazon's one-stop checkout process. You click once, and you've suddenly purchased something. Well Done! "We've done studies where one-step checkouts have approximately twice the volume of multi-step checkouts. It's more fun than going through many intermediate steps. It's almost obvious that the more fun a website is, the more people want to hang around that site."

Customisation
"Letting your user have some control over preferences (i.e. being able to personalize your MySpace page or Google homepage) increases their investment and creates barriers to exit. The more you let users try to exploit the system, the more interested they'll be in sticking around."

When business software becomes easy, intuitive and visual – by the gamer generation standards rather than those of vendors - we’ll see dramatic growth. “A lot of applications are designed to make things easy. Fun comes from challenge.” says Whelan.