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.