Since the beginning of recorded time, human beings have written down, shared, and conveyed their experiences and ideas in the form of stories. The story is the one common thread throughout the human experience. We draw pictographs on cave walls to describe our experience, calculate equations to explain abstract concepts, compose music to express that which cannot be expressed with mere words, and write poetry to capture condensed moments in time. We retell stories to record history and to interpret our dreams. Therefore, our life story is always about hearing, retelling, and creating new stories. As language and the world around us evolve, we continue to find new ways to tell stories, to share ideas, and to exclaim our newfound discoveries. Yes, we human beings are a vain and talkative lot.

As we launch into a new era of informational technology, contrary to what the purists believe, we have not lost our ability to tell stories. In fact, this new era allows us to tell our stories to more people than ever before-instantaneously! It is too dry and depressing to think that our experiences are now broken down into mere electronic signals of two digits-0 and 1. But if you really think about it, it is truly poetic and Zen. The world is now humming to the duality of one note and the void of a note. So perhaps, all engineers are really undiscovered poets.

In the last scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfus looks in awe as the flying saucer descends and then plays that famous tune of just 5 notes. What those 5 notes convey is connection, clarity, and an understanding that is beyond words. The notes are comparable to Haiku poetry, clean and elegant interface; e = mc2; or the "Om" of Tibetan monks. This is what we strive for. Whether it is training, Web applications, interactive games, or poetry, our approach is to weave together a good story, one with which the user connects and finds meaning in his or her situation. Because, regardless of what the product is, the core objective should always be the user's experience.

When designing a product, we always ask ourselves the same questions: Who is the audience? What is the setting, the known quantities? What are the objectives? What are the challenges and obstacles? What hooks do we use to keep the user involved? How do we organize the information so that it is intuitive and meaningful? What do we want the user to take away? How can we use our medium or platform effectively and creatively? We paint scenarios, build new worlds, anticipate actions with measured responses, balance challenge with encouragement, and provide details that keep our design interesting. And if we are truly successful, users would have grasped the essence of our story and continue to add to it and make it their own. This is the reason that the World Wide Web has become an ever-increasing presence in our lives. It puts us in touch with multiple narratives and encounters, enables us to share our own stories, and most importantly, it allows us to tap into a larger consciousness-the realization that we each belong to a much bigger, ever-changing experience.

In the midst of this technological revolution, we find ourselves as poets caught in the onslaught of information technology. But instead of segregating and compartmentalizing ourselves into the many specialized acquired skill sets that turn us into mere nuts and bolts, we've gone back to the fundamental question: What's our story? When we ask this question, we refocus on the human experience and not on the technology. And we continue to hum to the sound of a single note, and the void of a note.

The UBwebbin Team