The User’s Experience
A Poet’s Dilemma in the Digital Age
Jeanne and Marcel were sitting together at an outdoor table of a Montmartre café with a panoramic view of Paris.
Neither could afford to live in Paris; each had come in from the suburbs. Jeanne was bemoaning the fate of poets. Marcel, who worked in IT, had some advice to give.
“You should get a UX degree,” he said.
“A what?”
“User experience. You know, someone comes to your website and you want them to buy something from you. Your product. Your service. You want to create a seamless user experience, so that they glide all the way to the checkout counter and pay.”
“Glide,” Anna murmured.
“Say, experiences for your readers. Your fans. You need to make money, yes? So, you get a UX degree and you work freelance and at the same time you use what you’ve learned to turn visitors to your website into readers and fans. Best of both worlds. A good part-time job from home and a poetry following.”
“Best of both worlds,” Anna murmured.
“Yes! Picture this. You create a frictionless funnel that gets visitors to your site and to your big-ticket item. Maybe it’s your high-priced poetry workshop that you run in Costa Rica. So, you create a funnel, maybe with an online reading, an exclusive chat with you, a stunt—maybe you read your poetry while hanging off the Eiffel Tower—just kidding—but I’m not. That way, doing all those UX things right, you get maybe thirty people to pay a ton of money to spend five days with you in Costa Rica writing poetry, eating organic lettuces, and getting massages. There you go. That’s what a modern poet’s life should look like.”
“Isn’t a ‘user’ what you call an addict?” Anna said.
“Ha-ha-ha. Very funny!”
That night, she could hardly sleep. Retreats to Costa Rica? Reading her poetry dangling off the Eiffel Tower? Users and their frictionless experiences? Agitated, she got out of bed and paced up and down the living room.
Her recent poetry referenced the two gods of the Cathars, that French religious sect denounced as heretical, hounded during the Inquisition, and eradicated by 1350. She heard herself murmur, “Now, what would have given the Cathars a good user experience? Better to be hanged or burned at the stake?”
She looked out the window. Dawn was breaking. “Maybe I do need a UX degree,” she thought. “After all—“ She didn’t know how to finish that sentence. But later that morning she found herself looking into UX programs, discovering a few that sounded almost interesting. “Ah, usability testing,” she said to the cat. “What do you think about that? Is that our next great adventure?”
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