Audience Experience

I was sitting at a Conference table when I saw this in front of me. In case you can't see it clearly, there is a built in phone/power jack built into the center of the table. There is a metallic flap to both cover & protect the connections, and to reduce the visual clutter in the surface of the table. However, the phone line has been CUT to accommodate the placement of the phone on the table.  Also, a surge protector with additional outlets has been plugged in. Presumably because there were not enough or they were not easily accessible for placement. The chord does not allow the plate to close properly. The phone line and the chord must be bent properly and do not easily fit into the gap of the plate.  In fact, the plate encourages more damage to both. Better design required, perhaps?

Giant corporations are often compared to giant ships, difficult to steer & even harder to change course quickly. For instance, old telephony & new telephony are competing. The first needs to prove the worth of their old technology (wired lines), while the new can jump ahead and offer many new digital features without having the costs of infrastructure to deal with. As far as the audience/customer is concerned, they just need their service to work. They don't care why things don't work, or about the layers of difficulty you have to deal with to fix it.

There is nothing worse than the idea of your own money getting lost. The process of claiming funds, albeit fax free, is frustrating to begin with, spending $500 on band-aids is even worse. It is easy to have the sense that you are always having your money wasted on things, and the more accounts it gets tied up in, the more likely you'll be locked out at the wrong moment. It is all about how you make people feel.. Not the actual words you use. It is all about how the system makes people feel, not the amount of work it takes.

If a theater has an audience, then a video game has a player.  And if a book has a reader, a piece of software has a user. The company I'm working for has put a piece of software out into the world. Something complex, many moving parts, difficult to understand at the best of moments.  And I am one of the few people seeking out the response of the audience/player/user/customer. No longer are metrics measured in dollars, they are measured in engagement. Usefulness. And abandon rates.

Big month!!  Published a short story in the Morris- Jumel Mansion Anthology ("The Making of A Modern Woman") And doing a monologue from my series of short stories currently called "Imaginary Friends and Other Enemies" (info below) GOLDEN FLEECE LTD. THE COMPOSERS CHAMBER THEATRE Lou Rodgers, Producing Artistic Director presents THE ARGONAUT SERIES ------------------------------ ------------------------------ ------------------------------ SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016 AT 8:00 PM ARGONAUT SERIES #74 (PLAYWRIGHTS IN PROGRESS) Presenting Playwrights: Sal Anzalone Stuart R. Brown Julia Genoveva Lou Rodgers Tammy Rose ------------------------------ ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Studios 353 353 West 48th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), 2nd Floor, New York, NY FOR RESERVATIONS AND INFORMATION, CALL  (212) 691-6105 .

There are moments in everyday life when you want to tell someone something. I was on a shuttle bus and wanted to apologize to someone sitting in front of me. It would have been easy to tell him when I first got on, but I was distracted finding a seat. It would have been easy to get up at the first traffic light, when the bus was stopped. Or at the second.  Things were quiet enough for conversation too. We were about to head into the countryside, so I knew there were not many more moments. When I approached him, it was not the person I thought it was. I did feel better that I had tried. And that there was one more traffic light than I had expected.

Working on a series of short stories. UX Journeys, simple ones around an app.  Stuff that's possible and even stuff that's likely.  (As one friend puts it, it's all been done in the movies). I'd like to only write User Journeys.  Craft them into a narrative, and develop it into something complex.  Everyone who does an app goes into it trying to predict the User. But they are unpredictable.