Matrix Group International

Tag: Trends

  • Reflections from 2021, Thoughts for 2022

    Reflections from 2021, Thoughts for 2022

    2022 on running trackIt’s December 22, 2021. Phew! Another year has come and gone and as usual, I’m thinking about the coming year. I’ve been having conversations with my team, friends in the industry and fellow CEOs about what to expect in 2022 and we all agree that next year will be another wild ride.

    Who wants to go back to in person meetings?

    Not gonna lie. Once I got boosted, I felt invincible. I was still careful but I had lunches with team members and clients, I attended a bunch of client social events, and I went to the mall a few times. And then over the weekend, the dreaded emails and calls came: I had multiple exposures at a networking reception I attended, and both of my boys had exposures at school. To make matters worse, I started feeling sick on Sunday. I slept badly on Sunday, got tested on Monday and I’m thankfully negative BUT I know scores of people who have tested positive.

    My confidence in attending in person meetings has dipped and I’m wondering about the rest of the world. My hunch is that C-suite and salespeople want to go back in person but the rest of the world, less so. Clients with conferences and tradeshows attended by high-level staff will probably do well in 2022, Conferences that are more education-focused and/or not attended by C-suite types will likely still have lower than normal numbers and it’s not clear what hybrid really looks like these days.

    I know I’m willing to take the risk and attend in person meetings, but I’m less willing to send staff and I sense reluctance on their part anyway.

    Staffing Will be Ultra Challenging

    Every time I get together with my CEO group (I’m a member of Vistage), we talk about how tough it is to find and retain top talent. We have all decided that recruiting, retention, professional development and leveling up our staff is the number one job of CEOs these days. If you’re a CEO and it’s NOT your number one job, it should be.

    At Matrix Group, we’re doubling down on 1-2-1 meetings with all staff, including me, who is meeting with every single team member. I’m finding it so helpful to learn about my team’s hopes, dreams and fears for the future.

    Where are Your Team and Family Emotionally?

    Matrix Holiday Party 2022Last Friday, for the first part of the Matrix Group holiday celebration, I hired a facilitator to run a group discussion about the year we’ve just had. Brian Tarallo from Lizard Brain led us through a two-hour reflection and asked us questions like: What has been your overarching mood in 2021? What is a defining moment you had in the last 18 months? What are you grateful for? What gives you strength? What are you fearful of going into 2022? What would it take to make 2022 amazing for you personally?

    As a CEO, you never really know what you’ll find out when you ask questions like the ones above. Brian assured me that if we created a safe space, I would get some great insights, and I did. Some of the discussions were funny, some sad, some deeply moving. I’m grateful to my team for bringing their true selves to the discussion. I learned that my team is resilient and proud of how they managed the last 18 months. I also learned about their fears and that I have work to do to make them feel more supported at work.

    Reinventing the Work Environment

    The media is full of stories about CEOs wanting their staff to come back to the office, CEOs deciding to go fully virtual, CEOs creating a hybrid work environment.

    I had lunch with my commercial real estate broker a couple of weeks ago and he says it’s anybody’s guess what commercial office space will look like in 2022. Here is what I do know:

    • My staff misses seeing each other, and they’d love to get together, just not very often, not even weekly. 
    • Staff who used to have a long commute and basically suffered through it are less tolerant of long commutes these days, after 18 months of no commute and work from home flexibility. I suspect I’ll have people quit on me if I make them commute to Crystal City from Gaithersburg or Herndon every day.
    • Asynchronous work is here to stay. I have staff around the country, around the world even. So it doesn’t make sense to say that work must get done from 9am -6pm Eastern time. Between kids learning at home, sick parents, or just life, why not give people the flexibility to leave work at 3 and then get back online later?

    I’m thinking a lot about the future. Reading a lot. Discussing with anyone who’ll tolerate me. If you have reflections on your 2021 and predictions for 2022, please share.

    I hope everyone has a healthy and joyous holiday season. As always, be safe, be well.

     

  • Top 5 Web Design Trends for 2021

    Top 5 Web Design Trends for 2021

    It’s safe to say that, thanks to the pandemic, our lives are lived online now more than ever before. The more time we spend in the digital world, the more the lines are seeming to blur between physical and virtual, lending way to some exciting new web design trends. Here are the 5 trends that I think will be most popular in 2021:

    1. Neumorphism

     

    Neumorphism example
    Twitter header of Marques Brownlee

    The death of “skeumorphism”, or the digital equivalent of “real-world” surfaces and objects, gave rise to “flat” design that has dominated UI design for a few years now, famously championed by Jony Ives, former design director of Apple. The inevitable backlash to flat design is a trend back towards more “realistic” interfaces, but far short of full skeumorphism. This “neumorphic” trend features elements that rise subtly from the background, (e.g., gentle shadows), and are far more subdued than pure skeumorphic digital objects. While more prevalent in app design, these neumorphic elements are popular on the web as well.

    2. More lives lived online, more integrated experiences

     

    virtual event features

    2020 saw us working remotely, avoiding close contact with other humans, and sheltering in our homes. The COVID crisis has had an enormous impact on our daily lives, and how we do business. Matrix Group is, of course, no exception – we’ve had to change our way of interacting with our teams, serve our clients, and craft interactive experiences. For our association and non-profit clients, one of the biggest challenges was how to hold conferences and annual events in the year of COVID and non-gatherings. To address this challenge, we at Matrix Group created a virtual event platform called BeSpeake, with the goal of having virtual meetings that are more than just a bunch of video conference windows, but a space to still have meaningful interactions with members, vendors, and sponsors. This trend of integrating live video, multimedia presentations, chat, and data is continuing to evolve as we need digital tools to replace what was done face to face, but now is increasingly done virtually.

    3. Less rigid layouts

    example of less rigid layouts

    Since the earliest days of the Internet, web design has always been a grid-based experience, due to the limitations of, at first, table-based HTML layouts, then CSS. The ability to freely place elements anywhere on the canvas has been something that we web designers have always envied from print design. This limitation is gradually being removed, however, through more advanced CSS and the latest browser support. Asymmetric grids, overlapping elements, and even randomly-placed objects are in vogue, and are a welcome respite from the usual, rigid layouts of most web pages. My hope is that someday soon, we can design as fluidly as print designers, and web designers will have the freedom to create as we see fit, not limited by code or browser technology.

    4. The horizontal scroll is back!

    Gelataria Amande Website Screenshot

    Horizontal scrolling was once popular, then became a huge no-no; but it’s making a comeback. Perhaps the resistance has been eroded by the mobile experience, where apps frequently use the horizontal swipe interaction to scroll content. There are many more sites using horizontal scrolling, such as this site for Italian gelato. We at Matrix Group have done a few recently for clients, including a recent project for FMI’s Food Prices report. For good usability, it’s key to make sure to have clear controls for the horizontal scroll, such as arrows, or to allow for the mouse scroll wheel.

    5. 3D elements

    The Year of Greta website screenshot

    3D elements are becoming increasingly used on websites, whether in the form of rendered illustrations or an actual 3D-like environment. One of my favorite recent sites is the Year of Greta, where the interaction is a virtual experience based around a 3D statue of Greta Thurnberg. As you drag your mouse, the statue rotates and video windows appear that commemorate the 2019 moments of Greta’s fight for climate change. The use of 3D can be gratuitous, but I feel in this case, it was used well, and a fitting testament to a courageous young woman fighting for our environment.

    —

    2020 was a tumultuous year, with disruptions on many fronts. One of the main missions of a designer is to bring visual order to chaos, to facilitate communication, and to create experiences that entertain, educate, and illuminate. All these “trends” reflect advances in technology, stylistic evolutions, and so on, but ultimately, they are a means by which we hope to bring joy to our clients and our audiences. Here’s to a more joyful year ahead!

     

     

  • The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Keep Only What You Love

    The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Keep Only What You Love

    I’ve blogged in the past about Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Last year, my husband and I set about tidying our house, with great success. While I wouldn’t exactly call my house neat and sparse, I am definitely more in control of the clutter.

    So what’s all this got to do with your website?

    Marie Kondo’s number one rule for deciding whether to keep something is pretty simple: Does it spark joy? In other words, does that article of clothing, book, or memento spark joy and love?

    I think we can apply the same rule to the content on our websites. The next time you conduct a redesign, or engage in an inventory of your content, ask yourself this about each page and document:
    • Is this content signature content, or content that one should find at the top of a search results page?
    • Is this content that members most want to find?
    • Is this content valuable?
    • Is this content of interest to lots of people? or your most important audiences?
    If the answer is no to specific content, consider removing it from your site — forever. Removing clutter from your site has all kinds of benefits:
    • Your navigation will be easier to navigate
    • Your search will return fewer, higher quality results

    If you find that you just can’t part with content, move it to an offline archive. Monitor the amount of traffic to the old URL and track requests for the archived data. Just like the dress you haven’t worn in x months or years, once a certain amount of time has passed, you should consider that content permanently removed from your site. Remember that 20% of your website pages will drive 80% of overall traffic, so why not focus most of your attention on that 20% and make it great?

    Just as our homes suffer from clutter, so too, do our websites suffer from digital clutter. Make 2018 the year your clear your website of unnecessary content that just doesn’t spark joy.

     

  • The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Part I

    The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Part I

    Last year, my husband and I read Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.“ To say this book was life changing isn’t an exaggeration. Besieged by clutter, we went about decluttering our books, clothes, papers, kitchen accessories, and on and on. We gave away over 1,000 books, I donated 60% of my closet, we shredded mounds of paper, and we can finally see the floor in our garage. Are we done? Absolutely not! But I’m not overwhelmed by the clutter, the master bedroom is a sea of calm, and I love everything in my closet.

    Like closets and homes, websites need regular tidying as well. If you hear this from your members, “I can’t find anything on your website” or “I can’t find what I”m looking for because I get too many search results,” it’s time to tidy.

    Why The Clutter?

    First, let’s examine why our websites have become the equivalent of cluttered homes and self-storage units. This is what I hear from my clients:
    • We need a place to store our archives
    • Someday we might need that study from 25 years ago
    • We don’t know what’s valuable to our members or the public

    What Members Really Want

    And yet, in interview after interview with members, this is what we hear:
    • Just give me the best stuff when I do a search
    • I need my association to curate all the information on “x” topic
    • Tell me what I need to pay attention to
    • The navigation is overwhelming with too many choices
    • I just don’t know where to start looking

    Take the First Step Toward Tidying: What Are People Trying to Do On Your Website?

    This blog post is NOT about the art and science of information architecture. I can go on for day about that. This blog post IS about decluttering. If you want your website to be high performing, ask yourself questions like these:
    • What are people trying to do on my site? If your audience includes researchers who need the historical data, then please include a comprehensive library AND create an effective search. If you want to make the case for membership, chances are you need to do that in six pages or less.
    • Why do we have archives of the conference pages from the last 15 years? If people need the handouts, perhaps you’re better off creating a database of the presentations and creating a great search. If it’s just the staff that find the archive useful, take it offline and make it easily accessible on your local network.
    • Why do we have news and newsletters from the last 25 years? If people need the archives for research purposes, great. If legislative updates from even last year are irrelevant because Congress has a new set of priorities each year, ditch the detailed updated but do keep a list of your legislative priorities and what you’ve done over time.

    Over the past year, Matrix Group has completed about a dozen website redesigns. In almost all cases, the client, after reviewing the content inventory, looking at the analytics and discussing content strategy, ditched more than half of their old content. Tidying made content migration easier and less expensive, the information architecture is more streamlined, and site search is more effective.

    In the next blog post, I’ll talk about love. What’s love got to with your website and clutter? Stay tuned.

  • Getting Started with eLearning and How Mobile is Transforming Professional Development

    Getting Started with eLearning and How Mobile is Transforming Professional Development

    At the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) Tech Conference last week, I attended a terrific session called “Anytime, Anywhere eLearning: How Mobile Transforms Education.” Wendy Rath and Mary Rehm of PRMIA (Professional Risk Managers’ International Association), as well as Ken Parker from NextThought, did a terrific job of articulating PRMIA’s eLearning journey.

     

    Background on PRMIA and its Professional Development Program:

    PRMIA is a professional society that creates an open forum for the development and promotion of the risk profession. A big part of how PRMIA accomplishes its mission is professional development and education. But recently, PRMIA education appeared to be in trouble. Registrations were way down and the association had to cancel a number of meetings.

    What did PRMIA decide to do? Instead of just blasting out more emails, PRMIA decided to go deep and learn more about what’s really happening with their members and their educational needs and objectives.
     
    PRMIA conducted a member survey and learned:
    • Members want more learning opportunities, not less.
    • Members are constrained in terms of time and money.
    • Members want online learning.

    The eLearning Solution

    Knowing what they learned about members’ education need and desires, PRMIA got to work.
    • They took a long, hard look at their technology and realized that much of it was already conducive to eLearning. Much of it supported a mobile experience. The rub was that PRMIA was not taking advantage of these features.
    • PRMIA invested in a new learning mangement platform; they selected Articulate Storyline.
    • They started re-developing their in person courses to be offered online.
    • They offered courses online, in real time, but also recorded courses for on demand viewing later.

    Lessons Learned

    After about a year of effort and redevelopment, here’s what PRMIA learned:
    • When re-developing courses, their winning formula was to split up a course into 10 nano lessons, each about 5-10 minutes long.
    • The sessions work best when they are standalone, i.e., members can pick and choose the sessions that interest them, and don’t need to have taken any prerequisites in order to take a specific sesson.
    • When offering online courses, you need a really dynamic speaker AND really great slides. Otherwise, it’s hard to keep the attention of the students.
    • eLearning must be mobile-friendly. Test out your online courses yourself on a phone and tablet and make sure you can navigate the environment easily.
    • Solicit feedback from registrants and have a plan to respond to comments.
    Is your organization ready for an eLearning strategy? 
  • Lessons from a CIO on Work, Senior Staff Engagement and the Permission-Based Economy

    Lessons from a CIO on Work, Senior Staff Engagement and the Permission-Based Economy

    At AMS Fest a couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to sit down with Reggie Henry, Chief Information and Engagement Officer at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE).

    I always ask Reggie “what’s new?” and “what are you thinking about?” Reggie *never* fails to impress me his insights and curiosity. Here are some of the things he’s been pondering lately:

    We need to change how we work. Reggie says there isn’t a shortage of tools out there to facilitate work and collaboration, but we’re still too focused on the tools themselves, whether it’s Microsoft Word, or Slack or Skype. Instead, he says the tools should be secondary to the goals and the work, which is why he loves Office 365.

    He gave me a tour of how ASAE uses Office 365 and it’s breathtaking. Every team has projects and each project has notes, conversations, reports and so much more. Staff work within each project to share information, ask questions, author documents, etc. They make great use of Teams, Planner and Delve and I have to admit to being really jealous!

    Senior staff need to use the tools. Reggie says organizations are innovating and investing in fabulous tools and systems, but senior staff are not using them and that’s a mistake. Senior staff need to show their staff that they, too, are interested in the tools, that they are part of the conversations, and willing to try new things.
     

    Be wiling to forget what we know to design the future. Reggie and I talked about how “experts” are often the enemy of innovation because experts think something can’t be done, what can go wrong, what has gone wrong, etc. But how many awesome things have happened because someone didn’t believe it couldn’t be done? I’m thinking about the fabulous badge builder that a junior staff person created in MatrixMaxx. He asked his Product Manager what her dream functionality was and then he just did it.

    How prepared are you for the permission-based economy? We’re moving toward the day when organizations need to get permission for nearly everything they do with member and customer data, from location services, to cookies, to purchase history, to demographics. Is your organization ready to handle this level of granularity in your handling, storage and use of your customer data?

    Many thanks to Reggie for his insights!

  • What Employees Want From Office Space: Flexibility

    What Employees Want From Office Space: Flexibility

    About a year ago, I was facing a big office space decision. Do we stay in our current office or move? Keep the current space design or blow it out? Our landlord paid for a fancy architect to come up with new layouts and designs. In the end, we decided to stay in place, sign a short lease and use a modest budget to think about what the next generation Matrix Group office space should look like.

    I held meetings with staff, we visited other offices, and we scoured design magazines and blogs. After a year of discussions and moving furniture around, here is what we’ve learned:

    It’s not about offices, workstations or open space. It’s about flexibility. Turns out most of my staff like being in an open, airy area. BUT, on a regular basis, they want the option to work from home, be isolated so they can concentrate without interruption, or crash on a project with 2-3 other team members. It’s not unusual to find the IT team huddled in one of our huddle spaces during a launch. Or the new biz team meeting in Tatooine (one of our conference rooms) when crashing on a proposal.

    Small meeting rooms can meet a lot of needs. Previously, we had two small meeting rooms and one large one. The large room is used infrequently – a few times a month when we have staff meetings and for large meetings. We replaced the finicky projectors with large TVs and Chromecasts and never looked back. We use the small conference rooms for group calls with clients, troubleshooting teams, and as isolation rooms for people who need quiet time.

    Good design and lack of clutter are inspiring. Over time, office space just degrades. We accumulate junk, the walls get dinged, and stuff gets dingy. It’s so important to step back and give the office a fresh look. In our case, we didn’t have budget for a complete overhaul, so we cleaned the carpets, repainted some walls, bought some new lobby furniture and came up with new artwork for the walls. We also encouraged the staff to declutter their spaces; it’s amazing how much stuff I tossed just from my own office! When I walk around the office, I can feel the breathing room we created just by tossing a lot of junk we had stopped noticing!

    Rethinking how we communicate. On any given day, I have staff working from home or working in a location other than their desk. So how does the poor receptionist find people when they get a call? How do I find someone I need to consult on a project? In our case, Slack has been a godsend and a game changer. Using Slack, we can communicate directly with other staff. Even better, we have Slack channels for each client and each team (e.g., the MatrixMaxx team or the new biz team) so we can easily collaborate, share, and keep each other updated. The expectation is that all staff stay on Slack if they’re working. So it doesn’t matter if you’re working in the kitchen or Tatooine; you will respond if you get a Slack message. Most of us have Slack on our phones as well, so it’s easy to respond to quick questions. Yes, Slack has reduced the amount of in-staff email we send out.

    I’m almost done with the my office redo and the new wall stickers and artwork are coming next week. So stay tuned for a blog post with before and after photos. I’m loving our office and loving the conversations we continue to have about next generation office space.

    How about you? Do you love your office space? What’s working? What do you wish you could have and do?
  • How a $35 Device Disrupted an Industry

    How a $35 Device Disrupted an Industry

    A few months ago, the office space committee met to discuss conference rooms at Matrix Group. We have a standing committee that is thinking about the future of work and we decided that we needed more collaborative space, complete with a screen and projector since we’re always looking at wireframes, designs, applications or code.

    It was going to cost a bunch of money to outfit four meeting spaces with screens and projectors. Yuck. Would we have the budget to do it?

    Then one of the committee members said, “Hey, why don’t we just get big TVs and Chromecasts?” A Chromecast is $35 device from Google that lets you stream from your laptop or phone to your TV. I have one at home and we bring it when we go on vacation so that we can stream Netflix to the TV in our hotel room. Could this work in our office setting?

    We did some research. Amazon had 55″ LG TVs for $499 each. Even better, they were on Amazon Prime Now, which meant we could have them delivered within two hours. The Chromecasts were $35 from Best Buy down the street. For less than $2,700 (or the cost of one projector of decent quality), we could outfit all of our collaborative spaces with a large TV and Chromecast.

    So we did a trial run. We spent $550 on a TV and Chromecast and put it in our “war room” – the open space we use when a group of people are launching a site or troubleshooting a problem. The TV and Chromecast worked beautifully! The Chrome browser has the casting capability built-in. And when you cast your desktop, you can stream any application, including other browsers, PowerPoint, anything.

    I gave the trial my blessing and now every meeting space at Matrix Group has a TV and Chromecast. We even added a Chromecast to the projector in our large conference room to make it easier to project, but we kept the large, pull down screen. We also got a Chromecast for our reception area so it’s easier to show PowerPoints and movies in our lobby. Yay! No more wires, a friendly user interface, super reliable casting, and no special software needed. When we have guests who need to project, we just ask them to go to Chrome, cast their desktop, and then go to their browser or PowerPoint presentation; they are always amazed at how easy the process is.

    Total win for Matrix Group, big loss for the projector industry, another industry being disrupted by a small, innovative and inexpensive device.

    I’ll be talking a lot in the next few months about disruption and innovation. No matter what business you’re in, you’re in disruption or about to be disrupted. No company is exempt. So what’s your innovation strategy in the face of disruption?

  • I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers

    I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers

    M_and_tap_200For my birthday this year, my husband bought me an Amazon Tap. The Amazon Tap is a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled speaker that lets you use voice commands to play music, check the weather, order stuff on Amazon, look up things on Wikipedia, and on and on.

    Who knew that this little speaker would quickly become my gadget of choice? I carry my Tap with me everywhere!

    The Tap is powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant. I connected my Tap to my home and work Wi-Fi, my iPhone and my Alexa app. I then connected my Alexa app to my IHeartRadio app and my Amazon app. There are many more Alexa integrations to what Amazon calls Skills. And since I’m an Amazon Prime member, I have access to Prime Music.

    I mean, look at the kind of day I now have with the Tap around:

    • In the morning, I say, “Play NPR,” and Alexa starts playing the live stream from WAMU, the local NPR affiliate.
    • While I’m cooking or cleaning, I’ll say, “play 80s music,” and Alexa will say “Playing 80s on Prime Music.”
    • While getting dressed, I’ll say, “What’s the weather?” and Alexa will tell me the forecast from weather.com.
    • If I want to know about something, I’ll say, “Wikipedia Abraham Lincoln,” and Alexa will read the first paragraph about my favorite President. I can ask for more info, and Alexa will keep reading.
    • I can ask Alexa to read my Kindle books out loud.
    • And on Amazon Prime Day, I ordered a drone with just two voice commands!

    I haven’t yet tried it, but I can connect Alexa to a Domino’s account and order pizza by voice.

    I can’t do everything on my Tap, but it’s coming. And from what I read and hear, voice is the new new thing. The XFINITY voice remote already lets you search for programs by voice. We can already talk to our cars. And we endlessly give commands to Siri on our iPhones and iPads.

    Amazon allows developers to teach Alexa new skills. Apple just opened up Siri so that third parties can give Siri access to their apps.

    It won’t be long before we’ll talk to our refrigerators, stereos, ovens, and furniture, and interact with websites and apps with just voice commands.

    I’ve seen the future… er… rather, I’ve heard the future, and it sounds bright!

  • Why This Mom Loves Pokémon Go

    Why This Mom Loves Pokémon Go

    Pokemon Go | www.TheMatriXFiles.com
    Here I am, catching a Bellsprout Pokemon in my neighborhood.

    Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard about Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go is an app that lets you use your phone’s GPS and clock to detect where you are in the game and make Pokémon “appear” in your physical world so you can catch them, level them up, and battle your Pokémon against other Pokémon. It’s an augmented reality version of the Pokémon games on the Nintendo devices (e.g., Nintendo DS, GameCube, etc.) where players run around, catch Pokémon, level them up and battle against other trainers and their Pokémon.

    Pokémon Go is the brainchild of Google spinoff Niantic, which is based in San Francisco. Niantic partnered with Nintendo, the creators of Pokémon, to create Pokémon Go. The Niantic connection is an interesting one and very telling. When you play Pokémon Go, you are presented with a map of your surroundings; this map data comes from Google Maps and Google Earth. When you run around looking for gyms and Pokéstops, you’re really looking for Ingress portals. Ingress is the other blockbuster app created by Niantic several years ago. Here’s a fascinating story about Pokémon Go’s mapping service on Mashable.

    Anyway, my son heard about the game through YouTube and asked his dad to download the app the minute it became available in the US last Thursday, July 7 (the game was released earlier in Australia and New Zealand the day before, God only knows why). Trouble was, CJ could not get connected to the server. And no wonder, Pokémon Go topped the US App Store “Top Grossing” list within 24 hours of its release. I finally got him connected on my iPhone on Friday night and he begged me to go outside with him to go hunt Pokémon. We were supposed to watch a movie at home, but what the heck, it was an opportunity to be outside on a beautiful summer evening. My two sons and I ended up staying outside for nearly an hour as we hunted Pokémon all over our neighborhood.

    The next day, CJ could not contain himself. At every opportunity, he was running around the neighborhood, looking for and trying to catch Pokémon, getting Pokéballs and other gear at Pokétops, and doing battles at a “gym” in our neighborhood. On Sunday, he begged me to invite some friends over for an afternoon of Pokémon. By 1pm, two of his best buddies were over and they were outside until 6:30pm. Armed with water bottles and slathered in sunscreen, they went tromping all over the neighborhood for more than five hours! Five hours! Normally, they would have been parked in front of YouTube or Minecraft and I would have had to beg them to spend a little time outside.

    Monday was more of the same. CJ and two friends spent pretty much  all day outside, catching Pokémon and doing battle. I sure enjoyed their shrieks as they caught Legendary and Rare Pokémon. The restaurant in my neighborhood was the scene of many battles and depending on which team won a specific battle, that gym turned blue, yellow or red.

    Yep, the news is already full of the scary stuff associated with Pokémon Go, including gangs using “lures” to attract Pokémon Go users, people walking in front of cars, and a girl finding a dead body. Yep, I have duly lectured the boys on street safety, not falling prey to “lures” where a crowd is gathering, keeping their stranger danger antennas up, and checking in with the adults in charge of them that day every couple of hours.

    But this mom loves, loves, loves that Pokémon Go is getting my son excited about being outside. He’s walking, walking, walking because the eggs he found need to be incubated, and you can only incubate eggs by walking; the app can tell if you’re in a car by the speed of your travel. Nice! He’s running because that Gengar down the street might be gone anytime. And he’s interacting with his friends, not via chat, but in person. Imagine that!

    Pokémon Go is so fun that I’m thinking of starting my own account and going hunting with some mom friends. CJ says I need to be on the blue team. My avatar will definitely have spikey, purple hair.

    Want to know more about Pokémon Go? Here are some good resources:

    How about you? Are you playing Pokémon go? What level are you and which team are you playing for?