I’m honored to have been featured in the latest episode of Off Book, a documentary series by PBS, alongside greats Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria. Titled The Art of Web Design, the video gives a high-level overview of how the web is made and how it has evolved. Not surprisingly, I focused on why [Keep Reading…]
UX and The Lawsuit
So you may have heard that Apple and Samsung are suing each other. I hate when mommy and daddy fight. In general, this lawsuit really irks me. Patents are outdated, both sides are being petty bullies, and customers are the ones who are going to suffer. I was wishing it would all just go away [Keep Reading…]
Doing business as Vicarious Partners
It is with tremendous excitement and huge dreams for the future that I am finally ready to announce that I have formally changed the name of my company to Vicarious Partners™. This new name much better reflects my mission to help organizations build deeper connections amongst colleagues and customers in an effort to deliver the [Keep Reading…]
A Brief Recap on Year 4
2012 started off with a bang and my mind has been moving at a million miles a minute ever since. I managed to miss a few important milestones and never got around to taking the time to reflect on the year here. I suppose I decided that dwelling on the past (even if it yielded [Keep Reading…]
Elegy for Capitalism
10 years ago, I was a sophomore in college. I had an assignment in my poetry class to imitate another poet’s style. How I felt then is no different than how I feel now. Elegy for Capitalism By Whitney Hess Imitating Larry Levis Written 11/01/2001 It’s a new love outside A love you’ll never see. [Keep Reading…]
Historical Technology: Machines of Times Gone By
The Museum of the City of New York has one of the most extensive photo archives of historical NYC in existence. They made a significant portion of it (13,895 photos to be exact) available online last December, and when I first read about it on Gothamist, I must have spent hours combing through it all [Keep Reading…]
From the archives: I love new toys!
Pleasure and Pain is not my first blog. It’s probably my fifth, though it’s certainly the only one that ever took off. From September 2004 – August 2006, I had a blog called self-preservation (self-hosted WordPress, natch). At the time, I was pretty damn proud of myself for that witty title — and I kinda [Keep Reading…]
Old Guard Versus New Guard: An Interview by Tom Johnson
While at STC Summit in Dallas a month ago, Tom Johnson, a technical writer for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, asked if he could interview me for his blog I’d Rather Be Writing. From Tom’s blog post: In this videocast, I talk with Whitney Hess at the STC Summit in Dallas about her [Keep Reading…]
Reaching outside the UX tribe at STC’s Technical Communication Summit
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 [Keep Reading…]
Photo of the day: Kickin’ It Old School
I’ve been riding Amtrak a lot lately, and I’ve seen a lot of businesspeople with their laptops and USB modems and BlackBerrys and bluetooth headsets. That has become the norm, even among the baby boomers. So much so that I had to do a double-take when I saw this sweet guy kickin’ it old school: [Keep Reading…]
