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A year ago the marketing world was abuzz about “snackable” content. Everything was getting shorter. Blog posts were getting replaced by lists. Lists were getting replaced by infographics. Infographics by short videos. Videos by short blurbs. And on and on and on. Marketers were panicking over shortened attention spans and trying to optimize everything for tiny mobile screens.

But a pendulum can only glide so far in one direction before it starts to swing back the other way. So, despite the rise of snackability, long form content never actually bit the dust. And by now I think it’s proven that it never will.

If you head over to Nebo’s Careers Page you’ll find we have Copywriter listed under the “Ongoing Needs” section. Sometimes we’re looking for full time help and sometimes we’re just looking for freelancers to pitch in on certain projects, but the fact is there’s always a place here for great writers. And you can imagine that, with the listing staying up all year round, we get a ton of resumes.

But we’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently in a lot of our submissions: copywriter applications with no cover letter.

For many of us at Nebo, it can be hard to leave our work at work. Intuitively, we apply the same human-centered approach we use for our clients to our everyday experiences. Realizing that it is futile to fight it, we’ve decided to embrace it. We’ve decided to look at everyday things and figure out ways that the user experience can be improved. This is a look at the user experience in real life, or as people online might put it, UX IRL.

Today’s subject: clamshell packaging.

Twenty cents.

That’s how much actual product is contained in a 20oz soda. About twelve to fifteen cents worth of syrup, a few ice cubes, water, and a burst of carbonation. Depending on whether you’re drinking out of a glass at a restaurant or a paper cup from a fast food joint, the actual price can fall anywhere from fifteen cents to a quarter.

When I first learned this, I was infuriated. A 20oz bottle of soda costs about two dollars at a gas station. A fountain soda to go with your meal-deal runs somewhere in the dollar-and-change range, while a cola at a sit down restaurant can run you as much as three bucks. We’re talking about a markup of anywhere from 300-600%! With these kinds of margins, soda is easily one of the most profitable food and beverage goods on the planet.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wikipedia was nothing more than a punch line. A fun place to poke around for fifteen minutes, maybe, but not a place for serious learners to spend any considerable amount of time. You couldn’t cite it in your school papers, or even mention that you glanced at it. You couldn’t quote it during intellectual debates, lest you risk being mocked. Acknowledging you learned something from Wikipedia was kind of like recognizing the Don Henley song “Boys of Summer” because you loved The Ataris’ version. The whole premise of Wikipedia reeked of amateurism.