User stories
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Interaction unintended
Opening the oven released a cloud of steam. I should have been expecting it. It’s hardly the first time I’ve roasted a chicken.
What I most certainly did not expect was that the chicken would start talking to my phone.
As the steam billowed …
User story: the time travelling courier
“I’m really sorry, but it won’t let you sign for another thirty seconds.”
The delivery driver on my doorstep looked apologetically at me, then accusingly at the rugged little plastic computer in his hand. His use of the pronoun ‘it’ spoke volum…
Self-serving machines and the human antidote
It was seven o’clock in the morning. We were four self-service screens and four user experience failures into our journey.
It didn’t help that there hadn’t been enough time for coffee before my partner and I left the house, but even fully caffe…
User story: iPads and heirlooms
They were seated close to each other around an old, circular wooden table at the back of the café. Two ladies with grey heads craning their necks over the faint blue glow of an iPad. The comings and goings of the café murmured around them. They we…
User story: the BBQ and the errant butler
Part of MEX User Stories, an ongoing series of tales about digital user experience in the real world.
Alexa, it seems, can be an opportunistic dinner guest. At a recent summer barbeque, she was sitting quietly on a deck laid for outdoor dining, a…
User story: iPhoning for the first time
Part of MEX User Stories, an ongoing series of tales about digital user experience in the real world.
“I’m going to get an iPhone,” she said. “I’ve decided.”
She had spent the previous several minutes confiding the woes of her three year old Sam…
User story: the drone pilot and the missing boat
He walked with that mixture of determination and anxiety which suggests someone late for an appointment. In one hand he carried a big, square metal flight case and in the other he grasped his phone, alternately holding it to his ear and then out i…
User story: flowering future forward
There’s always a first warm day in March, when winter’s low skies open into the blue promise of spring. It rarely lasts. Not in England.
But today the lawns of the garden square were dry for the first time that year and already filling with the…