It’s absolutely incredible to me that five years have passed since I started this blog. Five years feels like an eternity on the Internet, and yet it still feels so new. This is the place where I explore new concepts, share my experiences and insights, and examine my position on a slew of issues across the field of user experience and beyond. Having a vehicle to express myself and discover myself in the process has been invaluable in building my career and my character.

The last year brought many milestones that I’m delighted to share with you:

• Pleasure and Pain surpassed its 1 Millionth pageview, 350,000 of which came in the last year
• The greatest traffic came for my homage to the lives lost in Hurricane Sandy, attracting mourners, survivors and loved ones of the deceased
• I began writing extensively on the topic of empathy, and one post in particular really resonated with people. On Empathy and Apathy: Two Case Studies reached 20,000 readers in its first week, with an average time on page of 7 minutes
• More than 25% of traffic is returning visitors, a metric I am incredibly proud of
• My most popular post of all time remains So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources, with the highest visit duration and lowest bounce rate short of the homepage
• In 5 years I’ve published 676 posts, received 3,738 lovely comments, and squashed more than a half million spam comments, too!

It’s an honor and a pleasure to be able to reach so many people and to have a even a small impact on how practitioners and executives approach user experience within their organizations. My mission to put humanity back into business cannot be achieved without readers like you.

Thank you for your time and support, your enthusiasm and passion, and for always keeping me on my toes. Get ready for what’s to come in 2013.

Pleasure and Pain’s 10 Most Popular Posts of 2012 (in reverse chronological order)

• The People Who Were Killed By Hurricane Sandy
• If VCs Understood UX
• On Empathy and Apathy: Two Case Studies
• What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects
• How to Evaluate a UX Designer for Your Company, Or What Makes a Great User Experience Designer
• Knowing Why Beats Knowing How
• The User is Not Like Me
• User Experience is Not Enough
• Don Draper is the Antithesis of User Experience
• The Plain Numbers About Women in Tech — The VCs

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• Pleasure and Pain turns 3 January 10, 2011 | 5 comments
• Pleasure and Pain now on UX Magazine February 17, 2010 | 2 comments