I’ve been listening to Pandora a lot recently, and am really impressed with the site’s features and interface. If you haven’t used the site, it’s a music player that recommends songs based on other artists and songs that you rate, similar to Yahoo’s Launch. The different thing about Pandora is that, instead of using other people’s ratings to recommend music like Launch does, Pandora uses data from the Music Genome Project to recommend songs that have similar characteristics to those that you rated as good.

While Launch will tell you it is playing Marah because you rated Bruce Springsteen 4 stars out of 5, Pandora will explain a song choice through something like this:

“We’re playing this song because it has basic rock song structures, folk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, acoustic rhythm piano and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.”

The other day I was listening and Pandora played a few tracks off live albums, which got me thinking about the current paradigm for live album track delienation and how digital music has changed how we listen. When breaking up the tracks on a live music CD, it is custom to put any extraneous talking, non-musical crowd interaction and song introductions at the end of the previous track. This way, if a user skips to a particuar song, they get right to the song, yet the user who listens to the entire CD gets a smooth, complete experience. The digital age, however, brings us iPod’s “Shuffle Songs”, Pandora, Launch and even mix CDs. It’s a strange experience to hear a song, then another minute of talking, interaction or story that is probably not even related to that song before the “mix” moves on to the next track.

The solution, it seems, would be to break out any stories and such into a seperate track, so they aren’t lumped with other unrelated songs. This, of course, opens the door to those short talking tracks to show up on these mixes as well (I’ve actually heard a few “intros” on Launch in the past), which probably isn’t the best experience, unless of course you are Matt Nathanson.

I was looking over my credit card bill today and I noticed a charge from “CC of COATESVILLE” on a day that I did not use my credit card. Not having any idea what this was, I was a bit freaked out. Did somebody nick my card and charge a game of golf in C’ville to me? So I called Chase to find out more — and the CS operator had a phone number: 1-800-COMCAST. Oh! Comcast Cable of Coatesville! My automatic bill pay — how could I not have figured that out? (Yeah, right)

This is the type of “customer experience” issue that often gets overlooked. It’s just a credit card bill, right? Not at all — a company must realize that every time they interact with the customer in any way, they run the risk of creating a negative experience. Because of their lack of customer focus on this issue, I had to take time out of my busy day to call Chase. Had they taken a minute to realize that “Comcast” makes a lot more sense than “CC of Coatesville” on my bill, they would have saved me a real headache (and I wouldn’t have had these negative feelings towards the company).

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day regarding Dunkin’ Donuts and their latest marketing push to move more towards the Starbucks coffee shop model. What struck me most was the research methods they used — they paid a group of die-hard DnD customers and paid them $100 to switch to Starbucks for a month, then also paid some ‘Bucks regulars to frequent DnD at the same time. At the end of the project they conducted interviews with everyone to find out each customer’s impressions.

The data showed two distinct groups — which DnD refers to as “tribes” — of people. The ‘Bucks regulars felt DnD was unoriginal and boring, while the DnD tribe felt Starbucks was pretentious and snooty.

As a result of all this, DnD is moving towards a more “coffee shop” model, completing their transformation from purely a donut shop in the 80’s to a coffee-first destination with food today. Newely remodeled shops include granite countertops, curved espresso bars, constant music, yogurt parfaits and open pastry shelves. Because their customers, however, are not quite ready for the Starbucks schtick, they are trying to keep this model more down to earth, more straight up coffee and bite to eat and less coffee, cd and witty magnet set. In fact, they recently changed the name of their new “paninis” to “stuffed melts”, since customer feedback suggested that “panini” was too snobby. (One step at a time…)

It will be interesting to see how the remodeling, along with some new marketing campaigns that we should see shortly, will change the perception of DnD over the next year or so. At the very least, their creative research should be applauded.

So the other night I met up with a few old friends, and we all swapped phone numbers. Unbelievably, my friend Kally’s number uses the exact same digits as mine — basically, if my number was 123-4564, hers would be 132-5446.

What are the odds of that??? And these are cell phones — back when we used home phones with the same first 3 digits (i.e. everyone in town is 687), this may have been more common, but nowadays, this seems pretty out of the ordinary.

When I first saw that ESPN Mobile commercial during the Super Bowl, I thought it was just some mobile web page you got on your regular phone. The commercial was cool — a guy sits with a phone as all kinds of sports go on around him (with mostly famous athletes), but I really wasn’t all that intrigued.

Interestingly, I was totally wrong about the service. It is actually a phone and whole new phone service specifically called ESPN Mobile. There are several exclusive applications that allow the user to keep up to date with all the lastest sports scores and news.

I learned this by watching the new, far more annoying commercials that ESPN has just brought out. The Super Bowl one was “cool” and fun to watch, but it didn’t tell me the data I needed to understand the service. The new commercial annoys me, but tells me the info I need. And, it makes me actually consider the service. (I’m not getting it, but I at least thought about it.)

I suppose my point here is that sometimes “ugly” is more effective, if it gets the message across. Maybe ugly is the new black.