Pleasure and Pain

Improving the human experience one day at a time

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

Entries Tagged as 'Pain'

How Little You Really Know

February 26th, 2010 · 10 Comments · Pain, Research, User Experience

You have no idea how little your users really know. And that shows just how little you know.
You work in technology for a living. You’ve been using a computer since you were born. You are obsessed with learning new things. You are a nerd and you hang out with other nerds. You constantly think about [...]


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I admit it: I’m always five minutes late. And it stops now.

February 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Pain, Productivity

I was just smacked in the face by a recent blog post by my dear friend Jeffrey Zeldman, Free advice: show up early, about the consequences of being late to client meetings. Why? Because it forced me to finally fess up to one of my major flaws: I’m always five minutes late.
Sure, five minutes [...]


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Photo of the day: Departures and Arrivals

January 22nd, 2010 · 1 Comment · Pain, Photography

Tuesday morning I was sitting in the Amtrak waiting area at New York’s Penn Station when I glanced to my right to see if my track number had been announced.

There were two screens, one stacked on top of the other, with two metal plaques that indicated Departures on the top and Arrivals on the bottom. [...]


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Photo of the day: MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY

January 20th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Pain, Photography

It’s so comforting to know that in times of imminent danger, our stress call will require seven careful steps.

I saw this sign posted on the Governors Island Ferry when heading back to Manhattan after a nice birthday picnic in the park. You may recall that New York City has had some ferry trouble in the [...]


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We scan from top to bottom

October 3rd, 2009 · 5 Comments · Pain

I shop online so often that it’s second nature for me to immediately start typing into an shipping/billing address form based on the textbox widths and layout. However, as I was just checking out from Garnet Hill, I realized something was off.

Field labels are underneath the text field. Wow.
Had it not been for the Middle [...]


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