----- Original Message ----- one other thing the anxiety is about: choices. One thing that's big in designing for the user/customer experience right now is how overwhelmed people feel by too much choice and too much information.
--- I'm not sure about that. For one thing there's a huge diff between urban areas where businesses mushroom all the time and there's always something new and different, and suburbia, which is dominated by chains.
Me, I feel like I have fewer and fewer choices. There's the illusion of choice, but choosing between stupid crap a and stupid crap b no longer feels like a choice to me.
Even on the retail level, you walk into whatever store and everything is CHEAP and BADLY MADE in GARISH colors and cuts that don't quite fit, and everything is clearly meant to fall apart within the year. There are exceptions, but they're a level of magnitude more expensive than the cheap stuff.
So where's the choice? Health care is a prime example of illusory choice.
As for the "information"...it's all somehow meaningless.
Joanna