I decided to make something special for my debut shot and to thank the person who invited me.

“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” — Jeffrey Zeldman

As User Experience Designers our job is not just to make things usable, in fact that is the minimum requirement for our work. Our goal is to create experiences. Experiences between humans and something else. For myself, and you the reader, we are coming in at the end of a long journey of this type of design, albeit the beginnings of the digital one. But, before the iPhone and before the wheel, it was us and nature and we learned how to survive by playing. The same way that a young lion cub learns how to hunt as it wrestles its siblings, each pounce they are training their muscles and brains for hunting. When they are ready they go out and do it for real and learn even more. Play is nature’s way of making learning enjoyable. Whenever we create an experience we are in fact creating systems for the users to learn our product. By studying games we can extract those mechanisms that turn that learning into fun. Usually learning new software is the very opposite of fun, but with these gaming mechanisms we can not only mitigate the pain but replace it with joy and pleasure. For User Experience Designers, studying play is studying natures own, perfected, human interface.

On tumblr’s home page, clicking the sign up or sign in buttons starts a smooth animation that wisks the user away to the form which expands or contracts when switching to and from sign up or sign in. The experience feels so fun, and reassuring. The animations help to guide the user to the next step with out breaking them out of the experience.

~ Steve Jobs.