Today in antique metaphors: CC in your email

Today in antique metaphors: Cc in your email, and explaining carbon copy to a digital native. 

Related: Store receipts. The white copy is theirs, the yellow one is yours.

Building to scale

What is experience design and UX?

When you see a wayfinding sign after you're already on the highway, and it's more of a congratulatory artifact than a piece of help content, someone at the highway department got the experience design and the UX wrong. (New Jersey Turnpike, I'm looking at you.) 

When something just works, the people who manage the experience design and the UX worked with the people who build it to make it that way.

Who is responsible for UX?

The short answer: Everyone who touches something that someone else will use. 

The shorter answer: It depends.

The longish answer: Various people at different points in a digital project, depending on the scope, the budget and the time and space required vs. allotted for the relevant discovery, techniques and tools.

What does specialized UX on large scale digital projects look like?

UX leads and teams add depth, breadth, structure, planning and testing once things get bigger than what a smart visual designer, copywriter and developer can handle on small projects. 

The bigger the market, the more UX is more established as a specialized discipline in startups, agencies and web shops.

Back where I came from

Before the internet, a small-town friend who was the best chess player for 100 miles came to NYC every so often, got pwned by the hustlers in Washington Square Park, and went back home humbled.

Per A.J. Liebling, prairie geniuses are raced in cheap company when young.

But then came the internet, eradicating time and space beyond even the capabilities of railroads and telegrams: now that we're living in the future, we can interact with anyone, anywhere, asynchronously or in real time, who shares our interests in chess, collecting Soviet New Year cards -- anything, no matter how otaku or obscure.

Soviet New Year's card

Back Where I  Came From, A.J. Liebling

No print archives for #Curiosity

It's lovely to see the photos Curiosity sends back from Mars all over the internet, but there's no large format weekly print magazine archiving them like there was for the Apollo program.

UX Pitch: What is it?

To pitch UX, you have to define it.

Here's the short version:

UX/IA: How it works, what it does, for who, and why

• What are the business goals?
• What do users need?
• How do I work this?

User research + Personas + Narratives = Requirements

Requirements + Interactions + Look and feel = UI

Facilitation: Asking the questions whose answers are the roadmap.

Evaluation: Testing concepts and prototypes with the target audience. 

Ideation and Creation: User flows, sketches and wireframes to document the customer journey with iterative steps that define, test and improve solutions against requirements so that it's more likely to be built right.

Example of how *not* to do UX:

Antique metaphor of the day

Mom, what's kryptonite?

#manofsteel #secretidentity #clarkkent #mildmanneredreporter #thedailyplanet #ux

Spring always takes you by surprise

Dear internet: Here's today's reason why I <3 u.

Years ago, I heard a song in a cafe. Every year, when the world slowly -- then suddenly -- starts turning green again, the title phrase comes back into my head, and gets stuck there for a few days.

"Spring always takes you by surprise." Such a lovely line; such a pretty melody around it.

Every year, I google the title phrase; every year I can't find what I'm looking for.

But today, when I saw the iris buds that weren't there last time I looked, and the earworm returned, right on time, I googled the phrase and boom -- the MP3 on Amazon came up as the first result.

So I bought the song, after years of thinking I'd never hear it except in my head again.

Thank you, internet.

<3