Tag Archives: posterous

xDx and some notes on posterous

logo_xDx

hey hi ho there UX fanz and frenemiez — how goes it? what’s the latest?

well, as someone that believes in moving in and out of my own personal subconscious ADHD-laden internal thoughtSpaces, i firstly and most importantly want to quickly blog on this coolish idea i just came up with that i think will really be exciting to explore, and that’s that thar xDx thing you see in the logoPlay up above

the idea is pretty straightforward and goes something a little like this

so, i’m not entirely sure why or anything, but for whatever unbeknownst reason and such, when it comes to corporate work in general most of us are kept tied up in our little silos an’ such, right? the big division that i perceive over the years is any instance where art and science come up — there’s always been this schism, this division between where we keep our ‘creative’ people and where the more ‘logical’ folks set up shop

i don’t know, can’t understand the reason why, but — its just my own observation that whether its design and dev, or art and science, or engineering and interior design, companies far and wide keep these internal groups locked up in different pens

anyhow, in a recent thang that my good friend and colleague Robert Fiztgibbon and I set up and ran through AIGA Boston, a cool event called UX Roundtable — we brought together a nice cross-section of Boston-area design professionals to discuss Luke Wroblewski’s Mobile First methodology and why it might or might not work as universally as one might need as a modernday designer working with real clients in a professional scenario — we invited folks through AIGA Boston, but also extended the invitation to any and everyone at the company Rob and I work for, Mobiquity, as they graciously sponsored the event and let us meet in a Mob Conference Room and all — anyhow, we had some folks from our development and sales departments in attendance and i have to say, their presence and participation added an entirely new depth and color to the conversational mix and, as designers often solving everything from the very narrow vantage of what we, as designers, do, i felt the cross-disciplinary exchange in the room really helped fill out some parts of the picture that typically get left blank during discourse around design, business and process improvement

and — i would like to encourage, foster and arrange for MORE of these cross-disciplinary conversational exchanges — in the Boston-area and beyond

and that’s where i hope xDx can begin to organize that larger conversation

there’s that

and now, just a side note kinda

i’m moving my posterous acount, piece by piece, over to this WordPress blog under my dot com website

unfortunately, it seems posterous is going away — Twitter bought them a while back and some major change felt a bit inevitable — whenever we see this sort of purchase happen online, you can’t help but wonder something like, ‘aight, what’s that mean then?’ — on some realistic scale of things to come we all know it won’t all just stay the same — but i’ve loved using posterous up until recently, i think i specifically loved the simplicity and elegance of the presentation of my blogposts, and although i’m not sure if that’s something to credit to the posterous experience alone, that’s a HUGE thing for me — the fact that there’s been no advertisements on posterous ever seems somewhat amazing and Surreal to me, but besides that, i’ve almost solely posted to posterous for my personal bloggings over the last few years, with the exception of some experiments with tumblr and posting to half dozen other WordPress sites ‘n all

i do have to say this about posterous though — i just can’t understand for the life of me why posterous never seemed to implement an auto-save feature for those in the middle of writing a blogpost, ya know? there have been 2 times when i’ve lost a TON of amazing writing due to this lack of foresight and understanding for the general writing public — and those 2 times were like the fish that got away kinda moments for me, just really nicely evolved writing that i felt would be valuable and honest and real all POOF! gone in a bit of an instant thanks to the schmucks at posterous

so this is goodbye and thank you and good riddance

adieu

posterous2

a little pissed

i am so angry right now

a fairly lengthy post i was just working on just totally slipped away and is lost in the ether thanks to posterous

at a point where i was almost entirely done with a new post about the web design class i’m teaching out at Brookline Adult and Community Education posterous suddenly refreshed and brought me out to the sign in screen, asking me to sign into the site as if i were never in the Create a Post screen

only an hour wasted, but it just feels futile and empty, really ridiculous that in the year 2012 posterous { or at this point now, Twitter } can’t figure this simple shit out

its totally annoying

and from Day 1 of getting involved in this more digital aspect of visual expression i think i’ve realized the rather robotic limitations of these mediatypes — the rather purely mathematical and super uncool potential of the technologies we trust to help us articulate and express ourselves in a more efficient and empowering way

at moments like this i retrospectively reflect and think its all bullshit

why isn’t this stuff as cool as Star Trek yet? 

its 2012 people

why can’t posterous just save a fucking draft before totally shitting my time away?

is that really too much to ask? 

i should’ve thought ahead and copy-pasted all my hard work and typings into a Pages file or something, i’m sure, because even in 2012 we need to compensate for our lameass technologies and pretend like it all hangs together in a smooth and accommodating manner — but let’s face it folks:

its not true

we PRETEND like this shit works so nicely — people constantly work these systems in total denial that we’re all fumbling and live-testing every single technology we’ve invented on a daily basis

here’s what i’m asking you to do for me as a reader of these posterous passages here — put on a little play-pretend persona hat for me, suddenly become acutely aware of every microinteraction you have with your devices and the web and just be happily observant of everything you do on a daily basis to get everything to work correctly:

  • watch how you need to repeat swipes on your phone before the follow-up animation indicates you’re onto the next step;
  • see how long you’re standing there, waiting for the supposedly automagic liquidfoam soap-squirter to actually moneyshot deliver a blast of bubbly whiteness into the palm of your hand in one of these semi-haunted public restroom nightmare scenarios;
  • create a post here on posterous and watch as all your hard work and minutes dematerialize into nothingness when the system autorefreshes without even giving you the courtesy to copy-paste your thoughts prior to this systems-based power of deletion

i know its not intentional, these little faux pas of user experience — but jeez, add ’em all up at the end of the day and its a fucking miracle any of the stuff we do during the day happens at all — and in fact, on certain days it can feel like some sort of cyberSurreal and fully automated magical self-terroristic attack of our machines to the very psyche and general health of humankind

its machine-on-man violence, i tellya

forget about this HCI stuff, this Human Computer Interaction — the whole system is still inconveniently reversed in 2012 and we have a flip paradigm existence of machine-driven processes { still }

its a little different than systems-centered design, i think { although that’s what’s secretly underneath it all }

the technology becomes our special new pair of red shoes, and now its up to us to just keep dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing

its all good though

i got this one

we’ll fix this shit

here’s the first step, the whole ‘when posterous hands you lemons …’ kinda bullshit

i just squeezed this post out of my own unfortunate circumstances

my original post is lost

here’s the beginning of something bigger

welcome to 2012, the day we really dig in and start to make the world a LOT more user-centered using cyberSurreal forensic investigation of these ‘machines gone wild’ as the very backbone to sticking it back to The Man — or no, wait a minute, not back to The Man, sticking it back to The Machine