Banging The Beat Of The User

A UX Beat Poem

Zip, zoom, zam went the carousel, like day to night and light again. There’s me, basement bent over shining screens, weaving my way through endless seas of atomic code, dead loads, and content nodes, that low-lit room wallpapered with cards, each love note a compassionate cog in the big, bellowing brand machine. Napkin sketches of intent and function. Strips of content yarn. Snapshots of decisions. Fortune cookie fortunes driven with data and learning.

Boot up, my friend. Let’s build something good. All the clicks, the flicks, the swipes, the gripes, the owners, the moaners, the syntax and the brass tacks. All the pinch n’ taps, the stories n’ maps, afternoon naps, midnight laps, and the almighty boom of the board room claps [can I get a hell yes?] HELL YES, when UX can prove, you know the user’s gonna groove.

Listen. There it is. The beat. The beat we create. The beat we follow. The heuristic beat. The Confab beat. The caffeine beat. The heartbeat. POW. Mad internet cats, working the podium and working the trenches, arranging and tuning sound structures that flex and flow and know and go. Boxes, arrows, icons, and blood. Tables of insight and evidence. Responsive ideas and content for movement. Attunement. What lies in every artifact? THE TRUTH. And when it all comes together, it’s music. Valiant UXers, sketchers, etchers, and meticulous fletchers, all banging to the beat of the user. Tremendous.

Friday afternoon in the Webiverse. I’m clocked out, ready to unplug. Tweet out. InstaGONE, man. But BOOM the innovation machine drops a bomb in my feed. How can I not look? BOOM. The what? The who? Umpteen-hundred and thirty more devices coming down the conveyer? Contexts to convex my cortex? All the bendies, trendies, the modus vivendi (sorry, my friend, gettin’ all cognoscente). The pixels, trixles, sizes, and surprises we didn’t see coming of in all of our wildest dreams and brainstorms of complex futures.

Internet, I’ve given you all, and you’ve given back cats (and slow-mo dogs, and I’m thankful for that). While we may seem daunted, we live for your mess. We live to finesse. In the words of McGrane, we make you suck less. Our evolution enables revolution. Our stability is change. Disruption, our bittersweet lover.

Mwah.