Pleasure and Pain

Improving the human experience one day at a time

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

Entries Tagged as 'Pleasure'

The NEW Frappuccino: however-you-want-it

May 12th, 2010 · 16 Comments · Customer Experience, Pleasure

From middle school through college, I was obsessed with Starbucks. Five-times-a-week obsessed. Then five years ago I realized that I was spending $1,500 a year on coffee, quit cold turkey, and haven’t had a drop since.
Part of me also hated the evil empire it has become. In middle school when the first Starbucks opened [...]

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Being a godmother is like being a user experience designer

May 11th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Pleasure, Strategy, User Experience

On April 18, 2010, Griffin James Lam Konig was born at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasett, NY, weighing in at 7 lbs 13 oz.
Griffin’s mom Donna is the 39-year-old daughter of my childhood babysitter Theresa (who I’ve always called T-T).
The day after Griffin came home from the hospital, twenty-seven years after Theresa welcomed [...]

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Reaching outside the UX tribe at STC’s Technical Communication Summit

May 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Career, Community, Conferences, Pleasure

In Transcending Our Tribe, my closing plenary at this year’s Information Architecture Summit, I asserted that in order for the field of user experience to survive, we need to stop spending so much time looking inwards, and start reaching out to the larger business and technical communities.
Because I’m a big fan of practicing what I [...]

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Holy crap…I gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2010

May 10th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Career, Conferences, Pleasure

Thirty days later and it has still barely sunken in that I gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2010 in Phoenix, AZ, titled Transcending Our Tribe. Being bestowed with this tremendous honor was a shock in and of itself, but having actually survived the months of preparation, the intense trepidation, and the profound duration [...]

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My 20 Guiding Principles for UX Design on Monster.com’s InsideTech

March 26th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Articles

Last month I mentioned that UX Magazine would now be syndicating some of the content from Pleasure and Pain. A couple weeks ago they republished my Guiding Principles for UX Designers post, which then in turn got picked up by Monster.com’s InsideTech, a “meeting place for IT professionals.”

The article has more than 2,600 views in [...]

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