Why We Fail by Victor Lombardi

Author:Victor Lombardi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media, LLC
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.2

Viewing a list of students for a particular high school on Classmates.com.

When people found an old classmate they wanted to contact, they would have to buy a subscription to the service to send a message through the website. The subscription price in 2002 was $36 per year.

The Experience

The experience of using Classmates could be highly emotional. As David Evans, a former employee, wrote,

I remember sitting next to participants in usability interviews as they found their city, school, and friends’ names. Their emotion was real when they said, “Wow they’re in here?” referring to either a person or school that had once meant a lot to them. That emotion is critical to the success of an online venture. It’s similar to what game developers have to see in their playtests; what they call “fiero” the Italian word for fist-pumping triumph. For Classmates, it was the flush of time travel, the rush of memories activated. Without that emotion, no social media or gaming venture can succeed.

Other people I interviewed while working there grew up in rural areas whose graduating classes of no more than 20 had scattered to the wind, or more accurately, migrated to the cities. Lost. Or would be except for this site. Those participants called Classmates an “essential service” in helping them to stitch together their frayed communities.3

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.