The personal website of Matt Henderson.
23 January 2013
I’ve always been interested in well-designed experiences, perhaps because behind all well-designed experiences are people who care. In the business I’m in—designing products and services—we often speak of the “user experience”. Since this blog chronicles my life, I thought a meaningful name for it would be “This User’s Experience”, and thereafter thisusersexperience.com was born.
That was a long name though, and having to spell it over the phone a few times (in Spanish) convinced me something had to be done. In a stroke of brilliance, I had it — ThisUX.com. You see, in our business, user experience is usually abbreviated “UX”.
You know those drawings where you see a beautiful woman but the rest of the world sees an old hag? Well, where I saw “This UX”, the rest of the world saw, “This SUX”. And that did suck, but I couldn’t think of a better option.
One of Makalu’s first customers, some fifteen years ago, was the City of Darmstadt, Germany. We designed their online news publication and implemented the CMS behind it. The name they chose was Dafacto, which I thought was really cool.
A few years ago, the City decided to centralize all their online activity around the more city-branded domain darmstadt.de, and initially they kept the dafacto domain dormant.
Perhaps due to the excellent service we’ve provided over the years, or more likely out of pity, the good folks at the City of Darmstadt recently decided to let me take over the domain I always admired, and today I’m excited to announce I’ve relaunched my blog at:
(And I hope all four of you continue following along here.)
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