Cheese, perfume and IKEA…

When did I start to like cheese?

I remember as a kid that I hated cheese. Now I absolutely love it! I can now have all kinds of cheese that as a kid I would make funny faces  due to the smell!  Blue cheese, smelly, even those that you need a spoon to scoop it out because its almost liquid.  Hmmm…

Ok I’m back.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Somewhere between the age of 16 and 25 I lost the fear and the yuck factor and today I eat all kinds of cheese. It doesn’t help that I live in France now, as my consumption has doubled or trippled.  I think at some point your tastes changes I guess.

It is the same thing with cologne or perfume. After continued use the perfume or cologne that you smelled at the store starts losing its properties.  Even if you buy a new bottle, you just don’t smell it the same.  The signals that your nose send to your brain start being filtered.  Somehow your brain starts putting them aside as a normal odor or something.

But why am I talking about cheese and perfume?

Because when we build software we need to keep it fresh and long lasting, constantly attacking your taste buds if you will. We need to mix the pleasant fragrance of perfumes but make it last as long as cheese in a way that it will constantly keep users motivated, interested and coming back for more.

And this is where IKEA comes in.  IKEA’s annual lineup change of funny named furniture keeps bringing back customers.  They constantly change the “maze” (the corridor clearly marked with arrows of the path to follow so that you explore the full store).  You explore corners where all of a sudden you enter a bedroom or a kitchen or a living room, and it looks like it could be yours.  Just buy their stuff and it will be.  It brings shopping excitement and all you are doing is writing things down on a piece of a paper with a 3 centimeters pencil.  But its fresh! and Exciting!  And a family outing many times ending at the restaurant…

I have been criticized (positively in my opinion) of never doing the same thing twice. Although that is not altogether true, I think that at times I get tired of the same thing over and over again.  The perfume loses its fragrance, or I get too used to it and am no longer excited by it.  And if I lose interest or excitement, there is a good chance that other people have too!  I mean this is why we can change desktop background pictures right?

The user interface is the only way for a human being to interact with the application.  It should be beautiful, easy, awesome, fast, intuitive, cool, surprising and long lasting – all at the same time.  This is why we continuously keep improving our user interface and soon we will have a brand new one, that is more beautiful and easier than ever.  Behind this interface we have our own IKEA expert, Johan, a swede that makes things awesome!

Johan joined the ClicData team a few months back and together with the clients, our marketing and sales, research and engineering team, he is transforming ClicData.  And it will be tasty like French cheese and smells wonderfully for a long time.  Ok, enough with the analogies…

It will be awesome.