Babel II

I want to get back to this user interface vs. interaction design vs. yada yada yada.

Just because hypertextuality makes web design have more involvement from the user, er, ah, reader, doesn't mean that non-hypertext design has none. I guess that is what bugs me in all this: the fact that the usability mavens are all strutting about and pontificating about the user "experience" as if they invented the concept of paying attention to reader needs with one's design.

One quick example comes to mind from my world of newspaper design: jumps. We know readers hate jumps (how? We asked!), but we also know they dislike long gray slabs of body type. So we run as much type as we can justify (pun intended) on A-1, then jump all stories to the same place to ease the "user experience." Done it for years.

This new stuff is just the overtechnification (new word) of a simple concept. Hey, who let the engineers into the designer's room?

BTW, I used to think I was the first to coin the word "infotainment," way back in the 80s. Finally searched Lexis-Nexis and found it in a 9/13/81 column by William Safire in the NYT. His best guess was that it originated in a February 1980 Phone Call magazine article by Ron Eisenberg. Sigh. But how about journalebrities, for people like Nancy Grace or that O'Reilly guy on FOX NEWS and their ilk -- celebrities who think their 15 minutes of fame allows them to qualify as journalists? I think that's mine.