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Mark Hurst

Mark Hurst started his user experience career in, well, in kindergarten really. And it was because of a Marine. Later, he was all about games, and even created a non-computer-based, multiple-player game that went viral in his high school. He fed his inner geek with lots of coding, went to MIT, and did a Master's project that ended up saving a real company more than a million bucks (did YOUR Master's project do that? 'Cause mine sure didn't.) Several adventures later (including a stint working for Seth Godin), he partnered up with Phil Terry to create Creative Good and, later, the coolest conference in the whole wide world: Good Experience Live. Now his mission is to get the weight of the technical world off our backs before it breaks us...one overstuffed, unmanageable email inbox at a time. He's totally right: bits, my friends, are heavy.

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One of the coolest things - this was another formative moment - was when I first wrote a program on the TI 994A. I realized by typing in words, I could make something happen. I could say 'print,' and then in quotes I could say 'hello,' and it would follow that instruction. I thought that was amazing. Because up to that point, if I wrote words, they would sit on the paper and do nothing. But here was a way something would happen. I could make something happen just through the power of words.

A few years ago - in the Good Experience Newsletter - I wrote a column called The Most Important User Experience Method. What do you think it was? Was it site maps or card sorting or ethnographic research? No, no and no. The most important user experience method, in my opinion, is to change the organization.

More About Mark Hurst

Mark Hurst is the founder of customer experience consultancy Creative Good and the Good Experience Live (Gel) conference. He is known for popularizing "customer experience" as a business focus, and for coining the term "bit literacy" -- in 2007, he wrote Bit Literacy, which is curing zillions of people who suffer from computer-caused chaos. All of Mark's projects are available at goodexperience.com.