An email about a little thing, or “this is why I love doing what I do”
UX is about focus... it's about the little things. Ultimately, it's about making people's lives better.
I got this email just before the new year and, with Mark's permission, I want to share it with you. It's the little things like this – and knowing that what I do actually makes a difference – that make me happy.
The An email about a little thing, or “this is why I love doing what I do” article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
From: Mark van Dorresteijn
Message: Hi Aral,
I've been looking forward to send you this message. At our company in Amsterdam, ReedBusiness, you talked about delights and how we can make our work more fun for us and for our customers. It got me thinking what I could do for our magazine Zorgvisie.
After a while I noticed our ReedBusiness e-mail addresses were kind of long. i.e. mine is: mark.van.dorresteijn@reedbusiness.nl. That's very exhausting to spell out everytime you give someone your address on the phone, especially when people like me give their address a couple of times a day.
So I figured we needed shorter e-mails. And I talked a bit with the ICT-guys. They were willing to help and make an alias for us.
So now we finally have dorresteijn@zorgvisie.nl.
It's a real delight and it makes work more fun!
Sorry for the long story, but I thought you'd love to read about happy user experiences and the effect your story has on me.
Thanks!
Mark
The An email about a little thing, or “this is why I love doing what I do” article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Aral,
thanks for sharing this little story ;) so nice ;)
I know exactly what you mean – these sort of things do put a smile on your face and make your work even more fun, don’t they :)
always lovely to get such appreciative feedback – well done you :)
I really should share this story with my company’s ICT-guys, because my e-mail adress at work is actually even longer than Mark’s. And spelling it out on the phone takes _a lot_ of time, and quite often people get it wrong. :) UX ftw!
hah, thats fun — good story how things like make a difference! I do hope you now didn’t expose Mark to massive spam attacks by posting his email address here.
Hey Peter, thanks :) Spam filters have come a long way, I’m sure he’ll be fine! (I don’t worry about posting my email address anymore; Gmail handles the spam reasonably well.)