The Experience Era

One of the speakers at Tools of Change commented that we are coming into the "experience era." First we had the industrial era, then we have had the information era, now we're moving beyond that to an era in which people value experiences most highly.

I've been thinking about this idea and asking, What does a digital Bible for the experience era look like?

A digital Bible for the information era is information-oriented: It emphasizes access to information in and about the Bible. So search is a key function, as are passage lookup and topic guides.

What about an experience-oriented digital Bible? What are the elements of that? Here some things that come to mind:

An outstanding experience of reading the Bible text. Not only does the Bible text have to be present, but it has to be beautifully formatted, with an excellent design on screen, and fully accessible to people with disabilities. It has to look and feel good on all kinds of devices. [Difficulty: Moderate]

A thoughtful, uncluttered space for Bible journaling. Access to the journaling function needs to be very natural and easy from within the Bible text, and it needs to be given a clean, uncluttered interface. When people are journaling, they don't want to be looking at all kinds of gizmos and doodads in the interface. Instead, there needs to be an open space in which their thoughts and spirits can soar and roam. [Difficulty: Easy (techically), Hard (for business people to do)]

Personally-relevant additional content related to what I am reading. It's not terribly hard to gather together piles of content and link it all to the Bible text in various ways. What is much harder, but much more necessary, is to provide people, from that limitless pile, a selection of additional content that will be personally relevant and meaningful to them in light of their own experiences and context in life. Online shopping sites like Amazon have been doing something like this with books - when you put a book in your Amazon shopping cart, the site suggests some other things that you might be interested in. We need something similar in digital Bibles, but with content. Providing this for people will be technically very challenging. [Difficulty: Very Hard]

An enjoyable experience interacting with others. Not only should it be possible to interact with people in various ways, but there should be mechanisms to help ensure that the experience is beneficial. For example, I don't like the public notes feature in YouVersion, because it's cluttered with all kinds of unhelpful stuff. More helpful would be an ability to share notes with my Bible study group, and let us have conversations around each passage right in the digital Bible interface. [Difficulty: Moderately Hard]

An experience-oriented digital Bible cannot neglect the more information-oriented functionality, but gone are the days when information is enough. People are looking for a better experience than sifting through too many search results, seeing piles of irrelevant content in the interface, and having to look at a cluttered, ugly Bible interface. Doing this is not easy.

In other words, it's going to be much harder to provide people a pleasing experience in using digital Bibles, and the winners will be those, not who provide the most information, but those who provide the best experience.

Do you agree? Are there other things that are very important for an excellent experience? Would a better experience win you over the most information? What do you think?