Published yesterday, the piece takes five of my principles for designing user experiences and shows how they apply not only to human-computer interaction but to human-human interaction as well.

There’s already a great discussion going on so be sure to head over and share your thoughts.

Whitney Johnson is founding partner of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton M. Christensen’s investment firm, and just released her new book Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy for you and five of your friends.

• Designing for Startups in Smashing Magazine
• Photo of the day: Push to take toilet paper
• Interaction-design.org’s Encyclopedia is live!
• Etiquette isn’t dead
• My mug is on the new Skitch homepage

The user is not like me. Words uttered by Bonnie John, my professor of 05-410 Introduction to HCI Methods (now called User-Centered Research and Evaluation). On that first day and in many subsequent classes, she made us repeat it back to her over and over again. Not only is it the motto of CMU’s HCI department, Bonnie ensured it would become our north star.

The user is not like me. Over the years, I’ve recited these words to colleagues and clients, peers in the community and those I’ve mentored. I continue to believe it is the founding principle of the entire User Experience discipline and I spread the message like a missionary.

The user is not like me. When I found the notebook yesterday where I had written this for the first time, I noticed an explanatory note just above it:

Expert blind spot: “Intuitions are fast, but might be wrong.” — [Psychology professor] Ken Koedinger

The user is not like me. Some designers don’t hold this truth to be self-evident. They claim that the best user experiences are “for us by us” — created by people who actually are like their users, so they can use their intuitions rather than reason to design products with the greatest impact. But are the proponents of self-design suggesting that all businesses should be in service to their own communities? Or only that the “best” businesses are? Self-design is self-satisfying, but it disregards the needs of the greater population, neglects the greater good.

The user is not like me. Mustn’t we acknowledge that most of us don’t work for companies who serve anyone like us? Shouldn’t we recognize the benefit of an outside perspective?

The user is not like me. Our organizations are in a position to make other people’s lives and work easier and more fulfilling using the collective knowledge we’ve accumulated, our diverse perspectives and skills, and the resources that are available to us — but not to them.

The user is not like me. So long as you acknowledge that you are not your user, you will not make the mistake of designing for yourself. You will not assume that you know everything about your target audience. You will study them until you do. You will strive to gain understanding in an effort to make informed design decisions that are not based on your own preconceived notions and perceptions of the world. You will build empathy for your users, within yourself and amongst your team. You will slowly train your intuition to embody what the user needs. The user will be inside of you, but they won’t be you. You won’t be them. Empathic consciousness is achievable.

The user is not like me. No matter how much they seem like me, they are not like me — for the mere fact that I am in the position of creating the thing that they will eventually use. That automatically makes them nothing like me, regardless of what we may have in common. They don’t know what I know. They don’t believe what I believe. They haven’t experienced what I’ve experienced. And vice versa is especially true. They are them and I am me, and the more I put myself aside and get to know who they really are, the more I’ll be able to see that. The more I’ll be able to give them not just what they want, but what they need.

The user is not like me. It works every time.

• User Experience is Not Enough
• You’re not a user experience designer if…
• What I learned in 2011 and my predictions for 2012
• How Little You Really Know
• Being a godmother is like being a user experience designer

This new name much better reflects my mission to help organizations build deeper connections amongst colleagues and customers in an effort to deliver the best possible experiences for both.

vi·car·i·ous
adjective

1. Experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another
2. Performed, exercised, received, or suffered in place of another
3. Taking the place of another person or thing; acting or serving as a substitute

part·ners
noun

1. A person who shares in an undertaking with another
2. Either of two people dancing together or playing a game or sport on the same side

verb

1. To serve as the partner of

I am continuing to offer best-in-class user experience consulting, providing services in user research, product strategy and interaction design.
My expanded focus is to integrate these practices into corporate strategy and policy, cultivating a culture of empathy at the highest level of the organization.

This work can’t be endeavored alone. I partner with other practitioners as needed while remaining the primary client partner on every project. Together we aim to forge partnerships between senior leadership and staff while demonstrating how to engage customers as partners in success.

The Backstory

On August 3, 2005, eight months into my first full-time job, I established an LLC for the freelance gigs I was doing on the side to make ends meet. I called the company Wet Pavement Productions from a childhood fascination with inscriptions sealed into the sidewalks of NYC. I’ve always been enamoured with the publicness of something so intimate. When I was in the 8th grade and the Internet was young, I wanted to start a website where kids could publish their creative writing. “Make your mark” was my imaginary tagline. The site never materialized and I put the name on the shelf where it sat idle for a decade.

When I went independent in August 2008, I continued to use the LLC as my business entity, but chose not to publicize the name Wet Pavement or brand it in any way. I don’t even have it on my business cards. The only place I mention it at all is in my LinkedIn profile, and that has confused quite a lot of recruiters into believing I’m employed and available for hire. When I started out, I wanted to approach things very casually and informally, and felt that being the principal of XYZ Company would not only be inauthentic, but it would make things more complicated than they needed to be. Over the last almost-four years (holy cow!), I’ve come to realize that having a branded company is an asset, an individual in its own right capable of achievement and growth, and a means for me to create more of an emotional barrier between the professional and personal.

As I tackle increasingly complex problems and focus on a new target, the name no longer fits. So I set out to find something that would immediately convey my greater purpose and attract the kinds of clients I want to be in partnership with. I hope I’ve achieved that.

Vicarious Partners LLC was established on March 9, 2012 in the State of New York. I look forward to helping it thrive, helping it serve the world, and hopefully one day helping it stand for something that exists entirely beyond me.

• The Work I Love
• User Experience is Not Enough
• Nationwide Insurance demonstrates user research with NationPam
• Who is Peter Kim’s mentor?
• Finding a day and time for Whit Hour

Asking isn’t easy. It takes time. It introduces risk. It creates the appearance of not knowing. We’re afraid of not knowing. We’re afraid of others knowing that we don’t know.

But don’t worry, they don’t know anything either.

We wear our beliefs like a pair of glasses: they shape how we see the world, they allow us to see nearer and further, they guide our path and help us to avoid obstacles, they block out the glare. But what if we took them off from time to time? What if we chose not to see so clearly? What if we challenged ourselves to know less?

Better yet, how about we try on someone else’s glasses. See the world through their lenses, their beliefs. What are their assumptions, their experiences, their values? What are their goals? How are we getting in their way?

We’ll never be able to see the world the same way again. Maybe we’ll see ourselves differently, too.

Let’s stop pretending we know so much and start finding out what we don’t. From each other. About each other. About ourselves.

None Found

Designing the product is all for naught if you don’t first take the time to design the organization.

— Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) April 20, 2012

I’ve been a user experience designer for the entirety of my career. And in the decade I’ve spent doing this work, I have discovered that there is only one universal truth about how to design an extraordinary user experience: you must design an extraordinary company first.

A group of individuals with a shared goal (in other words, a business) who do not equally and universally value one another simply cannot equally and universally value their customers, and therefore are in no position to create and support a product that will have a deep impact on people’s lives.

A great product experience can only be crafted in an environment that encourages collaboration, iteration, and risk. Working in unison, having patience and long-term vision, and being willing to fail are key factors to success.

What ultimately allows for these positive attitudes to exist and thrive in any organization is a culture of empathy. Empathy is defined as the ability to identify with another person’s experiences, even if you have never directly experienced them yourself. Imagining the world from another’s perspective, recognizing how it differs from your perspective, and demonstrating that you understand and value those differences is what it means to be empathic. This is not simply the ability to feel compassion for another person’s state of being (sympathy), but rather to muster a vicarious feeling of that state. To feel what another feels.

As experience designers, we focus much of our efforts on developing organizational empathy for our users, but we neglect to facilitate the same prosocial behavior on our own home turf. We must remember that creating effective user experiences requires not just an understanding of human-computer interaction, but more importantly of human-human interaction. And without great human-human interaction present within the organization, how can we possibly foster great human-human interaction between our colleagues and our customers?

Designing products is no longer enough for me. I want to design companies. I’m tired of silos and turf wars and egocentricity. It’s helping no one, and it needs to stop.

They say you can’t truly love another before you learn to love yourself. Organizations are no different. If we don’t love and respect and admire the people we work with every day, we can’t collectively give our customers the love they deserve. Love is a verb.

I want to use the same skills that I’ve honed crafting digital interactions and put them to use in crafting interpersonal ones. In fact, I’ve become obsessed with the thought. Figuring out how to do this work consumes my every waking moment and many of my sleeping ones, too.

Whatever I discover along the way, I will be sharing it with you here. And if you choose to join me in putting this philosophy into practice in your own organizations, I’d love to hear what you find.

Now let’s go change the face of business forever.

• Constructing Your Personal User Interface on Harvard Business Review
• The Work I Love
• Bill Maher makes fun of Captcha’s poor usability
• A Hippocratic Oath for User Experience Designers
• Why I detest the term “Lean UX”

I was struck at how different our respective UX and design communities simply aren’t. We face the same challenges, have the same aspirations, use the same tools and techniques and vocabularies. I think I was expecting to notice vastly different perspectives and titles and haircuts. Instead I realized we’re all just passionate cool-nerds who pride ourselves on helping others. The world now feels that much smaller to me. A tremendous thanks and endless hugs to Dan Szuc and Jo Wong of Apogee HK for their hospitality and kindness.

Next I took a short flight to Manila where a very close family friend has been living for the last 8 years with a new-to-me wife and daughter. Again I narrowly thought, The Philippines, sweatshops and shantytowns and giant call centers. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Instead what I stepped into was basically Miami. Makati City is modern and cosmopolitan and tropical and just a bit gritty without being dirty. Sushi restaurants and public parks with public art, Kumon and Gymborees and high-end gyms, SUVs and fancy buildings with doormen (well fine, more like 5 security guards out front strapped with rifles, but that was really the only element I felt was out of the norm).

Being in southeast Asia made me realize just how much more time I want to spend there, just how much of the world I’ve been missing out on being a part of, maybe because I felt it was too different or I wouldn’t fit in or I just didn’t give it enough thought. But the way of life and the food and the culture — the masses of cultures all intermingling not unlike what I’ve grown up around in my hometown of NYC — makes me want to take it all in and learn and be changed by it. I hope there will be an opportunity that will take me back there for an extended period of time at some point in my near future.

It was less than a two-week layover back at home (which included me chopping off all my hair for Locks of Love) before I headed down to Austin for the annual SXSW Interactive Festival, this time with man who had never attended or been to Austin before.

It was a privilege to be on a panel titled Hunt or Be Hunted: How to Get the Design Job You Really Want with moderator Amy Jackson and fellow panelists Jason Putorti (formerly lead designer on Mint.com and now co-founder of Votizen) and Gina Bianchini (formerly co-founder and CEO of Ning and now founder of Mightybell). We had an excellent discussion up on stage, and I personally felt we’d barely scratched the surface when the hour ended. I look forward to spending much more time with these lovely folks soon.

After stuffing our faces with the world’s best BBQ and dancing the cool-and-rainy nights away under the stars to a cacophony of live indie bands, the party ended and it was time to head home again. But not a week later, I was back in the thick of it when I headed down to New Orleans for the 13th Annual Information Architecture Summit. It was my first trip to NOLA and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. I had kind of expected it to be one giant Bourbon Street (which admittedly really isn’t my thing), but it turns out there’s much more to see, with its historic architecture and lush parks and variety of distinct neighborhoods.

I felt the most at home in the warehouse district, where gentrification has turned these enormous brick-and-steel buildings into loft apartments, high-end restaurants and hip hotels. I suppose I gravitate to reuse wherever I go, and industrial is rather familiar and comforting to me. The restaurants I ate in were mostly blech with a couple high notes. The beignets at Café Du Monde were, as promised, divine.

The conference itself was the best one in years, I have to say. Fantastic speakers — many of them brand-spanking new to the stage and very well supported by the Speaker Studio run by Adam Polansky — all talking about topics that are not only very relevant to the challenges we’re currently facing as user experience practitioners, but I felt collectively hinted at (hell, screamed) where the industry is going and how our roles are about to change in a big way. I’ll be writing about this more….a lot more.

It was hardly a week and several panic attacks later that I hopped on a plane and crossed the country in the other direction to Seattle where I was humbled to be sharing the stage at An Event Apart for the fourth year running. 4 years already?! I still can’t quite believe it.

I’ll never forget the first time Jeffrey Zeldman told me to speak for him. Yes, told me. And I questioned and hemmed and hawed and he just wouldn’t have any of it. My life has completely changed since I’ve been doing it, and every time I walk on that stage my heart is in my throat in fear that I won’t do the honor justice, that I won’t live up to expectations, that I won’t measure up to the other speakers, that I won’t make Jeffrey proud. And this year especially, as I was launching brand new content that I had only tested four days prior to a very small audience (read: 5 people) at New Work City because I hadn’t scheduled the practice run until the last minute (fear leads to procrastination) and then chose the worst time possible to do it – 5pm on a Friday. Whoops.

After two months of research and three intensive weeks of synthesis followed by a week of creating 100 slides, throwing them out, creating 30 slides, adding 50 more, trashing another 20 and then changing the tone of the whole lot, I sat back only 3 days before D-Day and for the first time thought, I might have something here. And it was only 15 minutes before showtime that I thought for the first time, I can do this. Which is another way of saying, I sincerely didn’t think I could do it at all for the two months leading up to that moment. And then your foot hits the stage and there’s no turning back and you give everything you have to that audience and whatever happens happens.

What happened was I think they liked it. I think some people even loved it. And it’s okay that some people weren’t moved at all, didn’t find it relevant to them or felt they already knew it all. That happens. But I still believe that one day they’ll go back to it and find a nugget they can use and it’ll all be worth it. See if does anything for you: What’s Your Problem: Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects. An enormous thanks to Jared Spool for talking me off a ledge a zillion times along the way.

Seattle itself, well I can’t say enough about it so I won’t even try. I had been there once before and hadn’t really gotten it. Back then, I had just come from Portland (which I absolutely adore and would move to in a heartbeat) and by comparison Seattle just felt like it was lacking somehow. But not this time. It felt vibrant, and rich, and majestic. That I was staying at The Edgewater in a room essentially inside the Puget Sound, with a spectacular view of the sunset bouncing against the crystal water, and the sailboats and seagulls flying by, and the port with its massive cranes in the distance — yeah, that had something to do with it. But I also was just able to see how happy everyone is to be there, despite the gray days and persistent spit rain and slight chill in the air. Everyone just seemed content.

At my mom’s insistence, I hired a car on my one free afternoon to drive me around town. We went to Redmond to see the Microsoft campus (which goes on for days — it was like 10 times the size of Carnegie Mellon and I’m probably underestimating it), and crossing Lake Washington was just beautiful. Multimillion dollar homes facing the water with their own boat docks and unobstructed views of the sunset? Yes, please! Then we drove through Bellevue and back across to Seattle, along the river, then under the bridge to see the Fremont Troll (a giant sculpture of a troll, it’s wild), then back around through downtown and ended up at Pike Place Fish Market, where I bought oysters and halibut and my favorite white king salmon and had them packed in a 24-hour box so I could bring them home to the man. Yes, I carried a 15.5-pound box of fish onboard my flight, put it in the overhead compartment, and brought it home for supper. That’s me.

And now I find myself writing this in a hotel room in…where am I?…Minneapolis, having given the opening keynote at MinneWebCon, hosted by the University of Minnesota. The people in the Twin Cities are so nice, though I’m told that’s just the Midwestern way of hating you. Maybe not entirely, but I am aware of the fact that politeness is a virtue here, so while I felt like I got amazing feedback on my talk, I’m not quite sure if I should believe any of it. The organizers of MinneWebCon have been fantastic for the many months we’ve been planning this and have taken great care of me. I had heard of the conference many years ago and had been wanting to attend for some time, so it’s quite nice to be here now in this important capacity, one that I still feel overwhelmed by and hope I was able to fulfill the duties of satisfactorily — or, hopefully, exceedingly.

I’ve slept in more hotel beds than I have in my own these days, and my neck can prove it. I’m looking forward to being settled at home for a while, getting back into the swing of things, getting back to my routine (or maybe finally creating one), walking around the beautiful spring streets of Park Slope, riding my bike through Brooklyn, cooking meals at home and eating outside and spending quality time with friends I’ve missed far too much. And writing more. I want to write a lot more. I want to share what’s been on my mind these past few months, beyond where my body has been. I’ll be doing that more regularly soon.

In the meantime, I urge you to follow your dreams, whatever they are. My life has become a dream state, and I can’t believe I get to live it. Don’t hold yourself back. Be prepared for anything and walk down the path that is put before you. But first, hug your loved ones. They’re the ones who suffer while you’re spreading your wings.

• Around the World in 80 Days
• You like us, but do you know who we are?
• Week 1 of independence
• Genesis
• Who is Todd Zaki Warfel’s hero?

I’m trembling with excitement that I have the honor to sit beside Amy Jackson, Jason Putorti and Gina Bianchini on our Saturday panel Hunt or Be Hunted: Get the Design Job You Want.

SXSW was insanely awesome enough to select us as a featured session, and as a result we’ve been placed in a room with 2,400 seats. I haven’t the faintest idea what to expect and am completely terrified of sounding like a total ass, but hey, no turning back now!

In the past I’ve said that SXSW is never as good as the first time — and I sure as hell had a wild experience my first time. But this year I’m going to do things a bit differently: I’m not planning to go to any sessions. I’m using my time in Austin to see old friends, make new connections, enjoy the Texas BBQ and (hopefully!) warm weather, take stock of where I am in my career and where I’m excited to go next, and allow serendipity to play its role. I’ll find my way into a panel here and there when the mood strikes, or when someone grabs my arm and pulls me inside.

If this is your first SXSW, take it all in. Don’t sleep. Eat everything. Drink water in between every glass of beer (or whatever you have in there). Hand out business cards with abandon and make eye contact. You’re never going to forget this because there’s simply nothing else like it. You’re going to tell your grandkids stories about this.

There are 1600 sessions over the 5 days of the festival, and wading through the schedule takes the patience of a monk. So instead I’ve collected my recommended sessions, either because I know the speakers, because I care about the topics, or because they just sound batshit crazy enough to be worth attending.

Make sure if you see me in the distance, yell my name really loudly and then run over to give me a huge hug. But be careful of the back of my neck — it’s still pretty sensitive after seeing the sun for the first time since I was 2.

My previous SXSW Interactive sessions:
2011: Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters
2009: From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small

• I’m here at SXSW and I want to meet you!
• I’ll be on Jeffrey Zeldman’s panel at SXSW 2009
• SxSW: Our panel “From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small”
• Around the World in 80 Days
• SXSW Interactive: Never As Good As the First Time

As soon as I read the first article, I reached out to Brian on Twitter to say that I thought it was crucial that he incorporate the perspectives of practicing user experience designers in order for his series to carry any weight. There has been a lot of pontification on UX by non-practitioners who often get the facts wrong and, though well-meaning, end up causing more harm than good. Brian has a rare opportunity to evangelize User Experience to the broader business community using the highly esteemed platform of Fast Company. It’s a big break that UX folks have been working towards for a long time.

Brian immediately responded that he wanted to do things right and only has the best of intentions. I appreciated his openness and willingness to hear me out. Since I was on my way to the airport for 9 days in Asia, we set up a time to chat a few weeks out.

The second article in the series was published last week, and I certainly never expected that I would be the focus of it — before we’d even had the chance to talk.

The piece is titled User Experience The Don Draper Way and it’s been making waves in the user experience community, not only for being a loose paraphrase of some of my work, but also for his fairly large misinterpretation of its underlying purpose.

Given that I’m the subject of the article and also somehow accidentally responsible for getting myself written about, I felt that it was necessary to formally respond here.

What Brian shared in great detail is the content of my presentation “Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX,” which I have been giving around the world since last May. What he deduced from it is that products should be designed with emotion in mind, and that businesses must take their customers’ feelings into account when creating online and offline experiences for them. This is very much the crux of my message.

However, a big misstep in my opinion is that Brian related emotional design to the creative process of fictional hero Don Draper of AMC’s Mad Men. The highly anticipated return of Mad Men is on March 25, and I too am one of many people with a history working in advertising who adore the characters, feel the nostalgia for times past, and recognize a lot of the drama from our own working environments. But let me make this very clear: Don Draper is the antithesis of user experience. Don Draper is public enemy no. 1 of the user experience community, and relating his approach to generating solutions for his clients to anything that user experience designers do is misguided and borderline offensive.

User Experience is about gaining insight on customers and prospects, and guiding the design of products and services based on direct input from those people on a regular basis. UX is NOT about getting people to do what companies just want them to do. UX is OPPOSITE of advertising. UX is about making things that people actually need, not trying to convince people that they should want them.

Don Draper’s work is self-expression, meaning it comes entirely from his own mind. He drinks a glass of whiskey, kicks his feet up on his desk, daydreams, and ends up with an epiphany of a “big idea” that’ll knock his clients’ socks off — delivering it with affect, poise, and his patented charm. The process of a user experience designer is NOTHING like this. We gather as much intel as we can possibly get our hands on, and we guide the companies we work with to empathize with the needs of their constituents. UX isn’t about expert intuition, it’s about expert listening. Don Draper doesn’t listen.

Brian is open to better understanding the perspectives of UX practitioners and I’m thankful that I get to help educate him on the complexities of our practice. But I have to admit it was a bit embarrassing to be the focus of an article that extolled the virtues of my work and then immediately cut them down with a poor analogy. I don’t believe it was intentional on Brian’s part, I just think that this stuff is way more subtle than most non-practitioners realize.

User experience design is incredibly hard work, and we’re all working our tails off day in and day out trying to help the business world understand where we’re coming from. We have a long way to go, but I know we’re going to get there. And it isn’t by demonizing industry thought leaders like Brian and his counterparts who are only trying to help us along the way.

I thank Brian for his devotion to the topic and I look forward to supporting his effort to better understand it, better share it, and ultimately create a better platform for all of us to stand on.

• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design — the presentation
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
• The User Experience Relationship
• Pleasure and Pain has gone mobile
• When You Startup With UX

My life never ceases to amaze me, and this is certainly one of those times. I am going half way around the world to share my message on designing with principles and creating a culture of user experience within your organization. It’s an honor and a privilege, and it wouldn’t be happening without Dan Szuc and Jo Wong of Apogee HK. They are leaders in the Asian UX community and I absolutely cannot wait to be immersed in the practice and profession on the other side of the globe.

Dan recently interviewed me on my career trajectory and my philosophy behind my work, and it is now featured in a 19-minute audio recording on Johnny Holland. His friendship and encouragement (from 8,000 miles away) mean so much me.

The world is a very big place and this is the furthest away from home that I have ever traveled. I am honestly a bit scared, for the 16-hour flight, for the culture shock, for all the unknowns. But the further I go and the more I see, the more I’m comforted to find that we all want the same things — happiness, fulfillment, ethical treatment of others, pleasure and lots of surprises.

I look forward to sharing my adventures with you. Be sure to follow @whitneyhess for observations whenever I find some wifi :)

Happy Valentine’s Day and be thankful for the love that’s all around us.

Míng tiān jiàn. 明天見

• I wish I were going to UX Hong Kong!
• Six Cities in Sixty Days
• Improved “Freelance to Agency” podcast
• Finding Myself in You
• Whit Hour starts August 2 at 9pm ET

CONTEXT IS KING
The most important thing that 2011 taught me about web design is that physical context of use can no longer be assumed by platform, only intentional context can. For the past couple of years, we have gotten into the habit of presuming that mobile means on-the-go, desktop denotes a desk, and tablet is on the toilet. But increasingly the lines are blurring on where devices are being used and how they’re being used in unison. This year I have learned to see devices as location agnostic and instead associate them with purpose—I want to check (mobile), I want to manage (desktop), I want to immerse (tablet). This shift away from objective context toward subjective context will reshape the way we design experiences across and between devices, to better support user goals and ultimately mimic analog tools woven into our physical spaces.

When I had blogged about my reflections, Jim Nielsen commented that my thoughts had spurred him to create a graphic to represent my idea. I love it so much that I wanted to reblog it here.

Paul Boag also read my thoughts in ALA and wrote about his reaction in a post titled, “Device implies use not context.” In his case he’s using “context” to denote physical context, whereas I differentiated between physical context (location) and intentional context (intention of use). While he likes the notion of tying device to intent, he isn’t entirely sure he agrees with the intentions that I apply to each device.

What do you think of how I’m using device choice as an indication of intention and not location? Do you feel that my division of check/immerse/manage is a fair one?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts as I dig into this concept more deeply.

• What I learned in 2011 and my predictions for 2012
• Apple’s Most Notorious Flops
• Pleasure and Pain has gone mobile
• TweetDeck stream of consciousness
• Why I Don’t Have an iPhone (but might someday)