Banks, Toasters, and Surface
Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes, and if you could depict our economy on a canvas, it would be a wide array of needs and those looking to fulfill them in a wide variety of ways. One local bank is actually giving toasters away with new accounts, and while its easy to dismiss this as a '50's thing out of step with our information age, upon more reflection it actually has an attraction for a significant market segment who actually wants to walk into a branch and (gasp) talk with another human as they open an account, or make a deposit/withdrawal.
These folks dont want automatic deposit, an outdoor steel teller, or "dial 1 for x and 2 for y" when they use the telephone. They want a different Experience when banking, and its important to keep in mind who we choose to serve when considering how to best enable their Experience when we serve them.
So when looking at the bright shiny new things, and certainly Surface http://www.microsoft.com/surface is the newest and shiniest, think about the ways to make folks Experiences better through this. Rather than just diplaying content and creating a medium for computer interaction to see folders and ads, how about identifying what is being viewed to a service agent who can come over, offer assistance on that specific item, and help add context to the static display? To coin a new term, lets focus on Re-personalizing the experience, instead of De-personalizing it.
