Text-to-List

Now that it's the holiday season, I spend a lot of time thinking about holiday presents. But I often get an idea when I'm not trolling for one. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was at my father's house on a quiet weekend. I suggested to his girlfriend and my niece that we break out the Scrabble and have a game. Great idea, but there was no Scrabble. Normally a discovery like this would prompt a search for a replacement activity. In November, it suggested a gift opportunity. So I made a mental note to remember 'Scrabble' to add to my holiday shopping list, which incidentally is an Excel spreadsheet with a column devoted to each giftee, using annotations like bold and italics to show purchased/received or ordered status.

The following weekend I took a getaway with my fiancee to St. Michaels, Maryland, a precious little town on the Chesapeake. One morning we hit the local shops, a context that generated a handful of gift ideas for her. Most weren't  things in the stores I could buy on the spot, so I had to remember them. Absent a pen and paper, but not my mobile phone, I sent myself text messages to my email address listing the items.

Incidentally, on the same trip I sent myself text messages to my email address listing other 'ideas' for this very site.

Good ideas come very often from observing how people use and modify existing products. I remember reading a case study in school once about product development at Whirlpool. They saw that their customers were buying gallon jugs of milk and jamming them into the shelves on the doors of their refrigerators, often bending or breaking the little shelf guardrail. Other customers were buying 3 or 4 half-gallons of milk to line them up along the door shelf, when a full gallon wouldn't fit. Whirlpool designers promptly increased the depth of the shelves on the fridge doors to accommodate the fatter gallon milk jugs, and then began marketing this feature expressly.

I'd like to find a way for my text messages to go straight to lists that are actually actionable and manageable, instead of to an inbox that I then paste into Excel (itself not a list management tool without some modification on my part). So imagine a website or widget that is pre-designed to take in lists - holiday shopping, grocery shopping, to-do, whatever - all the things we keep in our brain and try to remember, ultimately stressing us out with their insistent overwhelm. When we're at our computers, modifying each list should be easy (why I think a widget would be better than a site - you could drop it right onto a personal homepage or if it's an O/S widget right onto your desktop or dashboard). They should be shareable with multiple people having the ability to modify them.

And there should also be alternate means of adding to each list - SMS certainly, but also dynamic or recurring events, such as regular searches of retail or shopping comparison sites that add 'Buy iPod - $50 off this week at Radio Shack' or 'Transfer money from checking to savings' every month to cover the recurring payments in your online bill pay, or 'New product that meets your criteria now available at eBay'.

Not that I need more excuses to buy things. Maybe seeing all in one place everything I think I ought to buy, right next to everything I ought to do, will result in me contributing more to the economy as a producer than a consumer.