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In the lead-up to the Chappelle Show sketch ‘When Keepin’ It Real Goes Wrong’, Dave Chappelle gives the following pretty great advice:
“It’s good to be real sometimes. It’s good to be phony sometimes. Yes, I said it. Phony! You think I’m this nice in real life? F$ck that son!”
Let’s quickly recap the past three news roundups:
At first glance it appears that poorly thought-through user experience is my sole fascination. But when the Suez Canal blockage story from March kept my full attention for nearly 10 days, I realized that my real fascination is the unintended consequences of poorly thought-through user experiences. Sometimes the poor user experience is relatively minor enough that a new protocol can be developed (in the case of Flash) or an anxiety-inducing technology gets made (in the case of the Expanscape).
User experience, and its related topic of user interface design, are important. How important? Well the US government’s General Service Administration (GSA) took the time to build a website to explain what it is. What other proof do we need? Well not only did the GSA build a website, but they invested in the SEO necessary to make it top of Google organic search, right below the featured snippet from interaction-design.org.
Which is why the saga and ongoing story of Citibank’s debt repayment blunder all the more amazing. Here’s a quick recap:
You’ll have to stay patient with me on this post, since the point I will eventually get to really is the confluence of a number of different threads that have been going through my head the past few weeks.
Let’s start with my time in business school from 2007 to 2009. Charles Dickens couldn’t have penned a better dichotomy between the beginning and end of my time in school. In short: 2007 = the economy couldn’t be better, 2009 = the economy couldn’t be worse.
With nearly one month of 2021 in the books and the spectre of Covid-19 exhausting all of us, let’s do a quick inventory of the memorable moments of the past three months, shall we?
