User-Centric, Technology that Really Works for You and Me

Imagine if your work life were like this:

• You are up to the activity.
• You are able to concentrate on the activity.
• The activity has clear goals.
• The activity has direct feedback.
• You feel that you control the activity.
• Our worries and concerns disappear.
• Our subjective experience of time is altered.
• The time you spend with your users has a more positive atmosphere.

More confident? Creative?

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22, is known for his well-documented observations, research, and personal observations on the concept of "Flow." According to him, there is common and universal agreement that when there isn't a high correlation between the challenge (the height of the mountain, depth of the dive) and the ability to meet that challenge, fun is something we're definitely not having.

Cool! I've always enjoyed wishing people a happy new year like this: may your new year be the perfect combination of joy and challenge. Maybe I should start saying "challenge and ability?"

Friday morning, some of the DIDX and Techistan team, as well as others in the IP communications and media industry who were attending PTC, will attend a bloggers' breakfast with the topic of discussion "User-Centric Technologies." We'll share more details next week.

Some web sites to check out on user-centric anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/post-agile-useability-process
http://webmonkeyswithlaserbeams.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/user-centric-development/ ***
http://www.usercentric.com/news/2009/01/21/whats-driving-mini-cooper-not-user-experience
http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2010/01/consumer-centric-communications.html
http://www.slideshare.net/missrogue/vrm-the-citizencentric-future-of-communications
http://auds.org/node/6

and of course, everything at http://www.usercentric.com/

(User Centric's growth has earned a spot on Inc. Magazine's Top 5000 fastest-growing firms for the last two years.)
... browse some of our team's other blogs at http://blogs.didx.net/ and http://blog.tmcnet.com/monetizing-ip-communications/. Find out how to get your telephone company to offer phone numbers from around the world. You're welcome to comment, contribute, and collaborate any time.