Pleasure and Pain

Measuring the impact of new technology on human experience

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

University of Phoenix needs an education

July 2nd, 2008 · No comments yet

Here’s my rant for the day.

I was looking up a definition on Dictionary.com when I saw this skyscraper from The University of Phoenix.
The list of degrees they offer scrolls down (from top to bottom) instead of up (bottom to top). Hit play to see what I mean.
Why is this bad? Well, the degrees [...]

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The user experience of a staircase

June 22nd, 2008 · 2 comments so far

As I was going over the Triboro Bridge on the way to JFK on Friday, I saw a metal staircase high above the traffic that construction workers use to access the top of the bridge tower. Seeing it from a distance made me appreciate for the first time that a staircase is great design. It’s [...]

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Plurk You

June 20th, 2008 · 3 comments so far

I’ve been wanting to write about Plurk for a while. Everyone seemed to be so enamored with it when it first launched, but maybe that was because Twitter was experiencing serious downtime and people were pissed off — not because it was anything actually worth being excited about.
The first time I logged on, I had [...]

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The Stranger Aversion

June 5th, 2008 · 2 comments so far

Social media has created a world in which everyone is interconnected. Forget six degrees of separation; we’re probably down to three. So have we completely lost the notion of a stranger?
Charlie O’Donnell, CEO of Path 101, recently wrote a post on his personal blog about the shift towards using social systems to connect with pre-existing [...]

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Group Video Chat: A Usability Evaluation

May 23rd, 2008 · 2 comments so far

Back in January when I started this whole “getting to know the community” thing, I met a couple guys named @matto and @snook, a.k.a. Matthew Oliphant and Jonathan Snook respectively. Matthew had been following me based on David Armano’s recommendation, and I had followed him back because, well, I basically didn’t know anybody on Twitter. [...]

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