Remembering MOM 3000 and playfulness on an intranet
A few weeks ago, Kevin Kearney whose a peer here at Avenue A | Razorfish, gave a talk on Playfulness in Interaction Design (PDF) to the Usability Professionals’ Association NY chapter.
The very first question at the end of the presentation was about introducing playfulness on intranets. This was surprising as Kevin hadn’t mentioned intranets at all during his presentation. As Kevin finished answering (saying that playfulness could be brought to intranets) another audience member chimed in mentioning MOM 3000. It made me think that MOM 3000 deserved a brief introduction over here.
So what is MOM 3000? It was the original Razorfish intranet. A much loved one well before its time. Why? Because it had a strong personality that we all loved. It wasn’t the most feature rich intranet and it probably wasn’t the most stable one too. But it had something special about it. Whether it was the Soup Can (which was a place where anyone in the company could add links) or the DHTML driven schedule (this was in 1999), MOM 3000 had charm.
When you design your next intranet, think about how you can establish an emotional connection with your audience. Just because an intranet is a business tool, it doesn’t mean it needs to be devoid of emotion. And nor does it need to be deadly serious either. An element of playfulness can give you those page views that you have been yearning for all year. The playfulness shouldn’t be gimmicky and it needs to be in harmony with your corporate culture but it could draw in more users than any single feature on your intranet.
The person who mentioned MOM 3000 in the UPA meeting left the company a few years ago but still remembers the intranet. Now that’s called establishing an emotional connection.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:59 am
In fact, you could argue that MOM 3000 helped many of us envision how a real “enterprise solution” could look and behave. Brilliant stuff. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.