Everything I know about User Experience I learned from National Lampoon

Note: Originally written March, 2014. Keep that in mind as you read. Nevertheless, the lessons still hold.

There was once a time I used to be funny. Not anymore. Not now that I have two small children and a baby at home, anyway. But never mind that. A longer time ago, back in the 1970’s, there used to be this really funny magazine called the National Lampoon. You may have heard about it because of Harold Ramis’ recent passing. Ever seen Animal House? He co-wrote it. Anyway, along come the late 90’s, and the magazine stopped being funny, and as a result almost ceased to be a thing altogether: the Harvard Lampoon literally shut it down, as was their contractual right. And then in October ’99, the new owner had the brilliant idea to start a website. I answered an ad and since I was the only one who knew anything about HTML and Photoshop and whatnot, they made me Webmaster.

The young comedy writer in his natural habitat (National Lampoon’s Westwood office).

Now, try to think back to 1999, assuming you are old enough to do so. Remember what it was like? Pretty much everyone was still using a 56k modem (that’s 56,000 bits per second) to get online. Even the most tentative of technophobes eventually succumbed to AOL’s…