5 DICEE: deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering by @GuyKawasaki. Me: I give it a try on the #iFacturas product!

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Enchantment

Guy Kawasaki is out with a new book called Enchantment. In an interview with Michael Stelzner he explains what an enchanting product is: "The acronym is DICEE. It’s deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering."


I liked that acronym, and I'll try to use it on my iFacturas' project:

  • Deep - iFacturas is deep, ie. it has a large functionality set, with the most important features easily accessible. It lets sweep through thumbnails of invoices as if they were photos.
  • Intelligent - it register your fincancial and geographical context in order to reduce the steps you have go through in order to bill your customers, like obtaining your customers address using GPS.
  • Complete - it lets you bill per hours and products with various VAT rules in various countries
  • Elegant - our User Experience Responsible is from one of the world's fashion centers: Barcelona. And we strive to make everything fresh and modern - colors, fonts and UX.
  • Empowering - we want to give some of the power of the enterprise to the freelancer. Enterprises are partly surviving due to excellent ERP like SAP and Oracle. iFacturas is a mobile ERP, stored in the cloud, created to give freelancers the means to create invoices on the go.

However Guy, I have to admit, in an important sense, that iFacturas is not complete enough. Currently it's only available to Norwegian iPhone users and Spanish Windows Phone 7 users. That's a pity, and we are working hard to remediate this incompleteness. But I promise you, in the summertime you'll be able to bill in an enchanting way!

But on the other side, for those who are Spanish or Norwegian (or both like me) you are lucky, and have the possibility to work with a billing app that's already enchanting!

A post from Social Media Examiner by Michael Stelzner has the whole story. Here is a part:

Mike: Now let’s flip it over to the enchanting product. What are some qualities of an enchanting product? Can you give us some examples?
Guy: Sure, there are basically five or so key elements to the product. The first is depth—a product that is feature-rich. It does a lot.
The second thing is that it’s intelligent in the sense that its makers have intelligently figured out the customers’ problem and a solution to their problem, maybe even before the customers have.
The example I like to cite is that Ford Motor Company has a product called MyKey. What that enables you to do is program the top speed that the car can go. Imagine if you bought a really hot Mustang and you had to loan the car to your teenage son. You could program it so that the car could go no more than 60 miles an hour. I think that’s a really brilliant idea!
The next quality is completeness. Great products, enchanting products, they’re not just a physical entity and they’re not just a download. There’s a totality of the experience, which would be a string of enhancements, online documentation, technical support, all the good stuff. It’s not just the car. It’s the totality of the experience.
Another quality is elegance in terms of user interface. Someone has cared about the interaction between you and the product. That’s where Apple really shines.
The last thing is that I think enchanting products are empowering. That is, they make you feel better about yourself. A Macintosh is enchanting because it makes you feel more creative and more productive. Some computers you fight and some computers make you better.
Mike: I like the way you’ve analyzed that. I think a lot of businesses can really be thinking about this when they’re developing their products and services.
Guy: The acronym is DICEE. It’s deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering.