One of the often-overlooked parts of the Customer Lifecycle is the point at which a customer opens the box....

This is referred to by industrial and product designers as the OOBE or the Out Of Box Experience. There are a couple of notable companies that give good OOBE, Apple being one, and the Dyson company being another, but many companies fall flat on their face at the point the customer opens the box. A classic OOBE for many of us was the cursed "batteries not included" small print on the toy we got on Christmas Day. I wonder what the modern day equivalent is?

Well anyway, there is now a whole blog dedicated to the art of "unboxing" and you can find it at unboxing.com, and a hearty Tip of the Hat to Adam Richardson of Frog Design.

And for all you Dutch speakers, here's a version of unboxing from the Netherlands, but they call it and Uitpakparty and they just threw one for the Nokia N91 (don't you wish you had a babel fish sometimes).

BTW if you're interested in participating in the uboxing meme, go post some photo's to the unboxing flickr group. I for one will be posting pics when I unpack my Nintendo DS Lite this weekend :-)

Cheers,

Karl