( Life is just a cup of cake )

What a long name for a store.

It’s taken from a pop song called “Life is just a bowl of cherries”. This is a place where sweet cupcakes are baked. In this cozy little space, people eat cupcakes and drink coffee. Everyday a variety of different people enjoy their conversations and is full of healthy laughter.

Some people share their love for each other and some aspire for their dreams. So in this spaceI want there to be no worries.

Everyone has his or her own sense of reality and shape of life. Life does not mean the same thing for every one. For some it may be hard, for some it may be enjoyable. However I named it that because at least in this cupcake shop I want everyone’s life to be happy and sweet.

Just like a cupcake.

Have you talked to such a user?

Have you visited the users’ work environment and observed what their tasks are, how they approach these tasks, and what pragmatic circumstances they have to cope with?

Such simple user-centered activities form the basis of usability engineering. More advanced methods exist and are covered later in this book, but just a simple field trip to observe users in their own environment working on real-world tasks can often provide a wealth of usability insights.

Have you ever seen one of the people who will be users of your current project?

CHAPTER I.

TransformationTrial and ErrorOne Summer Day

CHAPTER II.

Menu SelectionForeign Cupcakes180 Degrees

CHAPTER III.

LetterTraditionSpecial GirlsSharing

( transformation )

Serena would swirl and shout, “I am Sailor Moon, the champion of justice! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you! I will right wrongs and triumph over evil and that means you!”

and would transform into Sailor Moon in a split second. Wouldn’t it have been great if I could have swirled around my store like Sailor Moon and if it would have magically transformed? However, the reality is far different.Hannam-dong 738-61 1st floor’s problems.

The ceiling is very long. The interior space is small. The elevation is uneven. It’s dark. The roof made out of kiwa* tiles.

Current interior trends are comprised of high ceilings, exposed walls, and various designed chairs casually placed through out the store and a balance of antique and modern decorations on epoxy-coated floors.

However, for Hannam-dong 38-16 1st floor where the space itself screams ‘vintage’ that kind of interior would not work. I started to think how I could take advantage of the low ceilings that makes the small interior even smaller because the space was divided up into various sections.

* = traditional korean tiles

…The study of affordances of objects. When used in this sense, the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing,

primarily those fundamental properties that determines just how the thing could possibly be used.

A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting. A chair can also be carried.

Glass is for seeing through, and for breaking.

Wood is normally used for solidity, opacity, support, or carving.

Flat, porous, smooth surfaces are for writing on.

So wood is also for writing on.

( transformation )

The first place I lived in for 6 months when I first moved to England, the structure was very different from what I was used to with Korean apartments.

Korean apartments are structured so that the living room, kitchen and dining room are all connected in one big spaceand onlybedrooms and bathrooms are separate rooms, however English houses were separated by room and pur-pose. I was used to the openness of Korean houses therefore my first English housefelt small and uncomfortable

It wasn’t only English, most European houses are structured like this; the space is separated by its function or purpose. In the living room, you watch TV or eat snacks and in the kitchenyou cook your meals.

This kind of structure makes the space feel more cozy and smaller. Small, low, and separated; if I used these aspects well I could make Hannam-dong 738-16 1st floorfeel like an English house.

It’s often said that when people open up their first shop that they try to cut down on their renovation and interior time as much as possible, however it was a little different for me. I could only attend to the shop after office hours so naturally the construction progress was slow. The slower it was, the more costly it got but,

‘life is just a cup of cake’!

What if things were late by a day or two. It brought me joy to watch the shop transform day by day.

The day that we put wooden panels on the walls. The day that we painted the walls white and waited a day for the paint to dry then sanded down everything.The day that we laid down expensive hardwood floor that they said that’s used in luxury villas. The day that we put wooden pan-els on the walls. The day that we painted the walls white and waited a day for the paint to dry then sanded down everything. The day that we laid down expensive hardwood floor that they said that’s used in luxury villas. The day that I held back my tears as we put down expensive tiles. The day that I visited every single antique shop in Itaewon to find affordable yet pretty chairs. The day that I hammered the first nail for a frame after contemplating where the best place to do so. The day that I scoured through the Eul-ji-ro markets to buy lights. The day that I painted a big cupcake on the large window. The day that I painted a big chunk of chalkboard paint on the white walls to write the daily menu. The day that I installed a fuschia awning that would complement the kiwa tiles on the roof.

Everytime I could see a footprint that lead me one step closer to my dream, the joy I felt was a lot greater than I anticipated. Finally, the dark and gloomy Hannam-dong 738-16 1st floor had transformed into a bright and loveable space that might pop out of some fairytale. It made me doubtful that this was the same place it was two months ago. I believe this is what people call a ‘180 degree transformation’.

( transformation )

Some consider it noble to have a method; others consider it noble not to have a method. Not to have a method is bad; to stop entirely at method is worse still.

One should at first observe rules severely, then change them in an intelligent way. The aim of possessing method is to seem finally as if one had no method.

Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua ChuanThe Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting

After opening shop, I’ve become much busier than before. In the morning I could clean the shop, water the plants then would frost and decorate the cupcakes. Soon it’s 12am. Then I open the shop to customers who come after finishing their lunch and welcome them with coffee and cupcakes. For a person who’s used to sitting at an office working and moving constantly, there’s not a part in my body that does not ache.

Learnability is in some sense the most fundamental usability attribute, since most systems need to be easy to learn, and since the first experience most people have with a new system is that of learning to use it. Certainly, there are some systems for which one can afford to train users extensively to overcome a hard-to-learn interface, but in most cases, systems need to be easy to learn.

Everything is moving at a slow pace. I don’t have time to bake cupcakes. Because a café should have a quiet and calming atmosphere I can’t run a loud mixer during store hours. I was still not used to using the espresso ma-chine and let alone baking. I was not used to doing bothat the same time. Because of this situation, baking would precede late night or very early morning. Baking till very late at night, I felt that would be unfair to my husband. We are after all newlyweds. I decided to give up some sleep and bake in the morning. ‘I’ll just get up two hours ear-lier’ was an easy decision to make, but baking cupcakes in two hours is not possible. I ended up getting up three hours earlier to bake.

Everyday for a month I would come early in the morning to bake cupcakes but now I bake a larger quantity and more varied menu, and bake every other day or inanother words, three times a week. Since it is said that cake tastes the best a day and a half after they have been baked. A surprising thing happens. Since it is the first cup-cake shop in Korea, many magazine publications covered our shop and there are more customers than I had expected. An unexpected situation started to happen: what I had expected to sell in two days were starting to be all sold within a day. So we’re back to square one, bakingcupcakes every day.

When analyzing learnability, one should keep in mid that users normally do not take the time to learn a complete inter-face fully before starting to use it. On the contrary, users often start using a system as soon as they have learned a part of the interface.

Because of this I decided to hire some one. One person can be baking the cake and one person can sell them so I don’t have separate the time between operating the shop and baking cupcakes so it should make things much easier. Although the stand mixer is loud, it doesn’t seem to bother the customers. Instead it seems to spark curi-osity with customers they come and ask “Do you make the cupcakes here?” It’s a good opportunity to tell them about the good ingredients we use here and tell them more about cupcakes.

( trial and error )

When I used to pass by a bakery on my way to school or work in the morning, I used to think that was happiness. Yes, I achieved my dream but it’s very exhausting. It’s a lot harder trying new work because I’m not used to it and I have to get up early in the morning so the fatigue is felt in multiples. To find happiness I quit my job and opened this store but baking cakes is pure labor. I had anticipated it but to bake cakes, pull coffee, greet customers, wash the dishes, clean all by myself is not easy work.

Then one day my little sister introduced me to a famous chef and restaurant consultant who owns several successful restaurants and had got-ten advice from some one who is much more knowledgeable and have experience in this field. He gave me perfect advice for my biggest problem: not finding the time to bake the cupcakes, he told me that cupcakes taste better a day after they have been baked and therefore I should bake every other day and frost them everyday. Also showing the customers the cupcakes being baked during the day is something that‘s more enter-taining for the customers. Also it givesmore of a “home-made” atmosphere. He said to take the time to enjoy and bake cupcakes comfortably. Sure, that was my intention.

The most common way to express the specified level of proficiency is simply to state that the users have to be able to complete a certain task successfully. Alternatively, one can specify that users need to be able to complete a set of tasks in a certain, minimum times before one will consider them as having “learned” the system. It is common to define a certain level of performance as indicating that the user has passed the learning stage and is able to use the system, and to measure the time it takes the user to reach that stage.

Home-made, simple, and unsophisticated dessert. The cakes that I bake are baked with happiness inside.

We can’t all be successful in the beginning, but we can certainly improve.

There are good days and bad days; there are people who smile and people; who scowl, there are days we laugh and days that we cry.

There are countless days, but if you think differently, it’s just a day in one of the many days in a lifetime.

It’s okay if I’m progressing slowly.

Slowly but surely, The cupcake store, and I are both growing; that’s something I know for sure.

( trial and error )

Efficiency refers to the expert user’s steady-state level of performance at the time when the learning curve flattens out. Of course, users may not necessar-ily reach that final level of performance any time soon. For example, some operating systems are so complex that it takes several years to reach expert-level performance and the ability to use certain composition operators to combine commands.

Also, some users will probably continue to learn indefinitely, though most users seem to plateau once they have learned “enough”. To measure ef-ficiency of use for experienced users, one obviously needs access to experienced users. For systems that have been in use for some time, “experience” is often defined somewhat informally, and users are considered experienced either if they say so themselves or if the have been users for more than a certain amount of time, such as a year. Experience can also be defined more formally in terms of number of hours spent using the system, and that definition is often used in experiments with new system, and that definition is often used in experiments with new systems without an established user base: Test users are brought in and asked to use the system for a certain number of hours, after which their efficiency is measured.

Finally, it is possible to define test users as experienced in terms of the learning curve itself: A user’s performance is continuously measured (for example, in terms of number of seconds to do a specific task), and when the performance has not increased for some time, the user is assumed to have reached a steady-state level of performance for that user. A typical way to mea-sure efficiency of us is thus to decide on some definition of expertise, to get a representative sample of users with that expertise, and to measure the time it takes these users to perform some typical test tasks.

( one summer day )

This summer will be remembered as the hottest summer of my life. It’s because I spent every single day in front of the oven baking cupcakes. It’s not like there is no air conditioning but it faces near the cupcake display so inside of the kitchen is a different world. The heat from the air conditioning, the steam from the espresso machine, and the hot air from the ice machine and the oven that’s always at 180 degrees celsius. Even just standing makes me break out into sweats, but having to move around constantly…

Well, you can guess how suffocating it is inside. It being sweltering hot is not a problem for us but it’s a problem for the ingredients. Most of the ingredients used in baking are very sensitive to temperature. As the summer weather progresses and hotter the temperature gets, the butter melts faster and the temperature within the flour and sugar get hotter and the result or shape of the cupcakes differ. Too much and too irregularly. After slaving and sweating over making the batter and it comes out of the open too small or collapsed it makes me loose all motivation. Sometimes I want to throw my oven mitts and cry. But I can’t not sell cupcakes just because it’s the summer. How to survive the summer!

First of all I decided to store the flour in the refrigerator and I would take out the butter 10 minutes before I used it, and I use take out the milk only when I needed to use it. If lowering the temperature of the ingredients is first point, then the second point would be reducing the amount of time making the batter. The longer the batter is outside, the worse the shaper of the cupcake gets. It’s very important to finish making the batter as quick as possible and putting it in the oven.

I’m sure in a big bakery or a factory, they would lower the temperature of the entire space or use some kind of machinery to cool things down, but since it’s a small cupcake store, we’re spending an analog style summer.

Analog cupcakes.

Localization based on system-wide resources and translation of application-specific resources is sufficient to support use of an interface for a single, specific culture.

Thus if you are a German living in Germany who only communicates with other Germans in German, then your prob-lemsshould be solved if all your software vendors had done a proper job of localizing their systems to German. Even though many users would find this form of single-locale support sufficient, there are also many users who need multi-localized interfaces. Examples would include anybody who moves to or visits a foreign country as well as anybody who communicates or exchanges data with people in other countries.

It’s already been a year and a half since I baked for the cupcake shop. Not simply just baking, but experimenting with different ingredients and learing different recipes andflipping through a variety of foreign cookbooks and studying them. Since I lack knowledge in baking, I asked many professionals and gotten absorbed in learning how to bake cupcakes. This trip to London I had learned and felt a lot as well.

In the States or in England, bread is a staple food. Many people bake their own bread or cake so there is a variety of different baking materials and ingredients ranging from high end products to affordable products; the selection is limitless. Also, most cupcake recipes tend to use vegetable shortening or margarine instead of butter. To use shortening or margarine is easier to cream and bright-er in color and expands more. For people who eat cake often, using margarine or shortening is not a big problem but for Korean people, who eat cake for dessert on special occa-sions, but that’s unacceptable.

Because even for me, I don’t want to eat cake made with shortening. Therefore we use pure butter in our cup-cakes. Cakes made with real butter instead of shortening or margarine has a completely different taste. So if it doesn’t taste like American cupcakes don’t think of it as it being weird!

It’s because we’re using the real stuff!

( foreign cupcakes )

American or British cupcakes are very simple in flavor and texture; the amount of cake is very small. The height ofthe cake is as tall as a person’s thumb but topped with a generous amount of cream. So when the cupcakes are eaten without the frosting it virtually has no taste. It only serves as a platform to place the frosting on. They usually eat it for the frosting.

However in Korea it’s little bit different, instead of it being overpoweringly sweet they prefer something that is moderately sweet and want the cake to be moist and soft and the overall taste to be elegant. If you look at many famous foreign cupcake recipes they tend to put all the ingre-dients into one bowl and mix it together to create the batter. If you make the batter this way then the cake becomes firm and chewy; this is characteristic of American bread. To Korean people’s taste, this is not considered tasty but overly “floury” in taste. That’s the reason why we don’t use recipes from famous American bakeries and consider the what Korean customers like at ‘Life is just a cup of cake’ to create our own cupcake style.

Pure butter, Valrhona chocolate and other kinds of ingredients that people consider to be high quality, so we can’t help but to price our cupcakes higher than American cupcakes. But I didn’t want it to be a junk food style cupcake. Sometimes customers complain because it is pricier than American cupcakes but we are trying hard to create our own unique tasting cupcakes that can’t be found anywhere else in the world. If some one said that it’s different from American cupcakes but better than American cupcakes or if an American person said that it’s the best tasting cupcakes they have eaten or if a British cupcake store owner offered to open a store in Eng-land then perhaps it might be worth a taste?

( foreign cupcakes )

INDEX OF DIFFICULTY time = a + b * log2 (distance + 0.5)

Before actually starting to make the batter, a couple of things need to be done. All ingredients need to be measured. Usually a slight difference in measurements usually doesn’t create a huge difference but some cupcakes can be sensitive to even 1 gram of a difference. Slight changes in grams don’t have a big impact but since all ingredientsneed to be added properly it’s important to check all the in-gredients and measure them. With something like butter andmilk, it needs to be left out in room temperature so that it’s easy to mix.

What’s as important, as important as the ingredients, is the temperature of the oven. Usually cupcakes are baked between 175 degrees and 180 degrees. Because the oven needs to be preheated in order to reach the desired temperature, the oven needs to be turned on before the batter needs to be made. If the batter goes into the oven be-fore it has reached the temperature, then the cake mightnot rise properly or might do the opposite and overflow. Or it might look perfect when it has come out of the oven, but shrink in size.

( 180 degrees )

If the temperature is too high than only the outside gets cooked while the inside is still uncooked. Because we use a deck oven where the upper and lower part of the oven can be controlled I found through experimenting that 180 degrees for the top and 175 degree for the bottom is ideal.

After putting the batter into the pan and putting it in the oven I wait 20 minutes before turning on the lamp inside the oven and watch the cupcakes being baked. When I look at the plump and well baked cupcakes it makes me feel accomplished and proud of my own work. Like having to watch the temperature to bake pretty cup-cakes, to operate a cupcake store and the corners in life that’s not easily seen, what kind of temperature needs to be kept in order to maintain it?

When I first opened the store I was so motivated that I did work that I didn’t have to do. But as time passes I found my-self pushing things to do for later. I try not to raise the tem-perature of my intentions so that I don’t try to over achieve or be too greedy. What’s even as bad as uncontrollable thrill is the lack of thrill.

As I carefully observe the cupcake batter in the oven with adequate temperate, I also need to observe the temperature in my life.

THE POWER LAW OF PRACTICETn = t1/nª

Hello, President of ‘Life is just a cup of cake’ May I call you president? I wasn’t sure what to refer to you by…Now that I’m writing this letter to you I feel a little nervous. Until recently I was a student who took college exams for the second time. Because of my poor results, for a while I decided not to think about my studies. But decided for the last time I would take the entrance exams one more time.

As I surfed through Naver blogs, I found this store’s blog, and really wanted to visit and I finally did! To be honest last time I tried to come I didn’t really check the map properly and got lost around the Jeil Advertising building for a while. This might be my first and last visit this year. That’s why I’m frantically writing this letter to you. You might have thought it was a little weird how I didn’t even order and just sat down and started writing. This store is so cute and cozy! How should I say…It feels like the moment that I stepped into the space the atmosphere is different. I like the feeling of how a door separate the space between fairytale and reality. The cupcakes makes me hungry just looking at them! The care that I felt when reading your blog shows in your store as well.Hmm, I think that in a way this ‘Life is just a cup of cake’ store will give me hope at my third try at the exams.

Thank you. I hope you visit you again with good news at the end of the year. I hope that this storewill always stay warm and cozy.

I hope you stay well,

Yeon-KyungFebruary 2009.

( letter )

Subjective satisfaction refers to how pleasant it is to use the system. Subjective satisfaction can be an especially important usability attribute for systems that are used on a discre-tionary basis in a nonwork environment, such as home computing, games,interactive fiction, or creative painting. Users should have an entertaining and/or moving and/or enriching experience when using such systems since they have no other goal.

In principle, certain objective measures might be used instead of asking the users’ sub-jective preference to assess the pleasing nature of an interface.

In a few cases, psychophysiological measures such as EEGs, pupil dilation, heart rate, skin conductivity, blood pressure, and level of adrenaline in the blood have been used to estimate the users’ stress and comfort levels. Unfortunately, such measures require intimi-dating experimental conditions such as wiring the user to an EEG machine or taking blood samples. Since test users are normally nervous enough as it is and since a relaxed atmosphere is an important condition for much user testing, the psychophysiological approach will often be inappropriate for usabil-ity engineering studies. Alternatively, subjective satisfaction may be measured by simply asking the users for their subjective opinion.

From the perspective of any single user, the replies to such a question are subjective,but when replies from multiple users are averaged together, the result is an objective measure of the system’s pleasantness. Since the entire purpose of having a subjective satisfaction usability attribute is to assess whether users like the system, it seems highly appropri-ate to measure it by asking the users, and this is indeed what is done in the overwhelming-number of usability studies.

Users also differ in other ways than experience. Some differentiating factors are easy to observe, like age and gender. Other factors are less immediately obvious, like differences in spatial memory and reasoning abilities and pre-ferred learning style, where some people learn better form abstract descriptions,and oth-ers learn better from concrete examples.

The important lesson from studies of these and other differences is that one needs to consider the entire spectrum of intended users and make sure that the interface is usable for as many as possible, and not just for those who happen to have the same characteristics as the developers themselves. In addition to differences between groups of users, there are also important differences between individual users.

( letter )

My family has a tradition of going to dinner on December 31st and going to church to attend New Year’s Eve service to conclude the year and to welcome the new year that’s about to come. We’ve gone to different churches and different services as we were growing up, but we always gathered at the end of the year to attend church service. This tradition had no exceptions when I was in Germany, my sister in Korea and my parents in Mexico, we all gathered in Mexico to spend the New Years together. I think that every family has some kind of tradition whether it shows or not.

These kinds of traditions allow for shared laughter and conversation and as time passes, these memories warm our hearts.

There is a family that makes their traditions with sweet cupcakes. They are a family from Austrailia. The father was assigned as the manager of the Asian branch of a large advertising corportation and the mother is working for a international credit card company and their two adorable sons. The father came to Korea first last June. Our relationship started when the father came into our store late at night and ordered a cup of café latte. He came to Korea all by himself and felt extremely lonely. For him it was nice to meet a friend who could speak to him in English. After work he would come to store from time to time to order café latte and catch up.

Then one day he came with his beautiful blonde wife and two sons. His face, after being together with his family once again, looked much brighter. That’s the power of family. As soon as the family arrived in Korea, starting from their reunion to the Dad’s birthday, Mom’s birthday, sons’ birthdays, and even their nanny’s birthday they always came to buy cupcakes from our store.

“These cupcakes have become our family’s new tradition. Now a party feels empty without cupcakes.”

It makes me feel proud to know that at a family’s most intimate and happiest moments are shared with my cupcakes. The fact that the oldest son can get the vanilla cupcake he always begs for infront of the store after he gets off the school bus creates a bigger anticipation. However, unfortunate news came; the father’s advertising firm’s Korean branch was shutting down and the entire family relocated. Now the family has started a new life in Singapore, and I hope that when they think about their time in Korea that one of the things they will think about arethe cupcakes. Although it was short and sweet, it was a tradition after all. The mother, Jessica, is currently pregnant and I hope that their soon-to-be born daughter will be their biggest present from their time in Korea.

Stay well!

( tradition )

( tradition )

The troublemaker green tea cupcake, I use the same recipe and the same ingredients but every time it comes out differently.

Sometimes it comes out brown and spotted or sometimes it comes out a gorgeous green in color but didn’t rise properly. Sometimes when it seemed to have baked fine but when it cools, the cupcakes shrink in size. Sometimes, the batter overflows to the top and becomes a massive green pancake on top of the pan.

There’s definitely something wrong with the recipe. With the same recipe I have successfully made delicious green tea cupcakes. But for cup-cakes to look like this at a place where we sell cupcakes puts me in a difficult position. I know we’re going for a “homemade” look but for all cup-cakes to look this different everytime is problem. I decided to reevaluate the recipe.

At first I used an American style vanilla cupcake recipe and exchanged the vanilla extract and bean with 10 grams of matcha powder, but because of its high sugar and flour content it looked fine, but was very dry and it wasn’t long before I threw it out the recipe.

The second I used was a matcha cupcake recipe I got from a Japanese baking book that took a long time to translate. Because we used matcha powder directly imported from Japan I thought that if I directly fol-lowed a matcha cake recipe then it might help to make the taste deeper and stronger. However, this recipe keeps on bringing me trouble. If there was nothing wrong with the translation. what’s wrong with it?

I’m quite dumbfounded. It’s hard for me to figure it out scientifically because I haven’t been properly trained in baking. Using my natural sense of experimentation, I tried various amounts of the ingredients to find the perfect balance of ingredients but it’s taking a long time and I’m wasting a lot of ingredients. It’s very rewarding to make a cupcake that’s my own, but the feeling of sweat and nervousness that’s created in the process is not rewarding at all.

So green tea, please! Please work!

Users should make as few errors as possible when using a computer system. Typically, an error is defined as any action that does not accomplish the desired goal, and the system’s error rate is measured by counting the number of such actions made by users while performing some specified task. Error rates can thus be measured as part of an experiment to measure other usability attributes.

Simply defining errors as being any incorrect user action does not take the highly varying impact of different errors into account. Some errors are corrected immediately by the user and have no other effect than to slow down the user’s transaction rates somewhat. Such errors need not really be counted separately, as their effect is included in the efficien-cy of use if it is measured the normal way in terms of the user’s transaction time.

Other errors are more catastrophic in nature either because the user, leading to a faulty work product, or because they destroy the user’s work, making them difficult to recover from, does not discover them. Such catastrophic errors should be counted separately from minor errors, special efforts should be made to minimize their frequency.

( green tea, please! )

How many times in a lifetime does some one get a flower bouquet? Besides graduation, birthdays, and other special events how many times do you get a bouquet on an ordinary day? Unless a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend hands you a flower saying, “I saw these flowers and I thought of you because they were so pretty”, it’s rare to get flowers from a stranger. It’s like being a celebrity.

I’ve gotten flowers from a stranger once.

Just once.

But that one time felt like a hundred.

An autumn day in 2008, it was one of the very few days I left the cupcake shop because the ingredients ran out and had make a trip to Bang-san market. I came back two hands full of butter and chocolate and saw flowers that were not there an hour ago. What is this…? A customer left them in the cupcake shop while I was gone. It was written that she was a fan of ‘Life is Just A Cup of Cake’ and that once they bought two boxes because they liked them so much. The worker who got the flowers described that person to the best of their abilities but I had no idea who it was. It was painful how I could not remember who this person was.

I flipped through the receipts and the person’s English name seemed to be ‘Eve’. A pretty bouquet of flowers from someone with a pretty name. I was very curious and I wanted to say thanks somehow so I wrote an entry on the blog. And soon I got a message from Eve. She said that she felt better after eating cupcakes on a day she felt very depressed and she wanted to show her gratitude by giving us flowers. I wonder if she knows how much better her flowers and card made me feel. It seemed like we both made each other feel better. If you think carefully, in some way and form we are all people who give strength to each other; that’s what makes us great.

Every man is an island.And I stand by that.But clearly, some men are part of island chains.Below the surface of the ocean they are...

Actually connected.

- ‘About A Boy’

( flower bouquet )

NAME Jisoo

Enjoys home bakingLikes to enjoy finding new dessert placesEager and curious regarding her interests CURRENT LIFE GOALS

To pass her college entrace exams with good scoresEnter a college of her choice EXPERIENCE GOALS

Find good cupcakesDevelop a good relationship with the cupcake shop ownerShare her own baked goods with others

END GOALS

To find courage and find leisure

PERSONA 001.

Jisoo is a regular at our store. Last year she graduated from high school and she took a year off to try another shot at college. She likes to bake her own cookies and go around eating desserts like cupcakes. She said she always goes to new dessert stores that have opened. I don’t know which one of those she has a special relationship with, like the one here. But that’s not important. What’s important is that she is my special customer.

One day late at night, Jisoo sent me a text. I don’t remember exactly what the question was but I think it was something about cupcakes. After I received that text message, I was a little bit scared.

‘How did she know my cell phone number?’

It seemed like she got it from my business card. However, to send a text that late asking a question like that, I was a bit surprised.

“Kids these days sure are different’.

I thought to myself. That’s how our relationship started. After that she randomly sent text messages and every time I received one, I responded to the utmost of my abilities. From time to time Jisoo would send texts or come to buy cupcakes. Sometimes she’ll just buy cupcakes and some-times she would give me a letter she wrote. Once when I was opening the shop, whether it was late at night or early in the morning when no one was around, she left a letter underneath the door. She had more free time because she was finished with her college entrance exams and left some of her baked cookies. She also left adorable animal decorated wooden picks for me to put on cupcakes!

( special girls )

I can’t forget about ‘Yah-ong’. She came to the store and in a soft voice shyly ordered cupcakes and whispered

“My friend said the cupcakes here was really good”.

After I handed her the cupcakes and couple minutes later, when she was finished, she slowly rose from her seat to pay. She handed me a movie magazine.

“The cupcakes were really good. I bought this magazine this morning to read, but I’ll leave it here for the store.”

She loves movies, performances and she also likes the band ‘Jeju Boys’ as I do. Sometimes, ‘Yah-ong’ would come to buy cupcakes in bulk or sometimes she’ll bring lots of friends to the store. Sometimes she’ll come to store very early in the morning to buy cupcakes for breakfast. Sometimes when I’m having a hard time, she’ll tell me an anecdote or recommend a good movie. Soon, she’ll be going back to the United States because of her studies and when she comes back to Korea, and I’ll be still here baking more cupcakes. Hopefully by then, my cupcakes would have improved!

As the years go by I have more and more special customers but I can’t forget the first couple customers who supported and adored the awkward first stages of theshop. I also hope that I won’t lose my warm attitude towards them for the years to come.

NAME Yah-ong

Shy, soft spoken, kind and sharingStudying abroad in United StatesEnjoys movies CURRENT LIFE GOALS

Finish college EXPERIENCE GOALS

Find a good place for her to become a regularFeel comfortable at the shopEnjoy cupcakes with her friends

END GOALS

Develop a relationship with the ownerHave fun

PERSONA 002.

‘Like love, cake is best when shared’.

Recently I have gotten many inquiries from people who want to open their own cupcake shop. People want to be taught how to bake their own cupcakes. However these recipes are result of hundreds of cupcakes that got thrown in the trash and after many failures. To share these precious cupcakes after so much hard work and my operating knowledge through hard learned experienceis difficult. I contemplated a little bit but every time I was asked by people who showed interest in cupcakes I turned them down.

Not too long ago I took a trip to London. I wanted to look at different types of cupcakes in another country, travel, escape from my daily routine of cupcake store, and being a newlywed. I was just a nobody who owned a little cupcake shop in Seoul, and to be part of a bustling London downtown where people from all over the globe go about doing their own business; I felt a little bit ashamed of myself. I should have a bigger heart and share more with others. All the good things that were happening were things I should be thankful for every moment.

To name my shop ‘Life is just a cup of cake’ made me realize that perhaps I had been living my life too seriously. Because of that, now I want to help people who want to open up their own shop. When I first opened the shop it was because I wanted to share good tasting cupcakes with others. It’s been over a year and I want to share my cupcakes and dreams with others. To share how to bake tasty cupcakes, how to purchase good ingredients, and how to operate a shop. I know that I still have a lot to learn, but I want to share as much as I can.

Because it’s said

( sharing )

I’m always in a ( starting position ).

When I hear ‘Ready, set, go’ from a distance then I’ll slowly start running. But because running might be too much, I think I might have to walk. If I keep following my intuition and keep up with it everyday, then I might find my path, even though I may be a little bit late.

I’m happy because I haven’t started the race yet. Since I’m at the starting line, I have nothing to be worried about. My heart beats fast, like when I was young waiting to start a 100m race.

Yes, it beats exactly like that.Life is just a cup of cake. So enjoy!

Cupcake, My Sweet Life Sem Lee

Design of Everyday Things Don NormanContextual Design Hugh Beyer & Karen HotzblattUsability Engineering Jakob Nielsen

Translation, Photography, and Design Ah Ra Cho

Typography IV Dan Boyarski, Dylan Vitone, Tony Lee Jr.

Carnegie Mellon UniversitySpring 2011