This week started out a little bit rough at work, and that kind of bummed me out. It’s always a struggle for me to come to terms with who people really are versus who I’ve imaged or expected them to be. In the end, it’s better that I get to the truth, but sometimes I just set myself up for disappointment.

But things turned for the better yesterday. When I got home from work I logged into one of my email accounts and found a note from the UPA. See, at the end of last year I started thinking about the possibility of starting to present ideas, papers, and research at industry conferences. Since that can be a long process to get to the point where I’m getting paid to go to conferences, I figured that I needed to start small. First order of business, just start submitting to see if I can work on my proposals and ideas and get accustomed to the process.

The Usability Professionals Association has a yearly conference, this year hosted in Baltimore, Maryland. And they have the regular calls for papers, but they also have a call for what they term Idea Markets. The Idea Markets are 90 minute sessions that are fairly informal (meaning, no position papers or research required). The presenter has to generate an idea and discussion points and then lead that discussion for the group.

And so I found myself submitting a few ideas for the Idea Market. Low and behold, one of my ideas was selected. The subject matter is what I refer to as back-end usability.

So what is back-end usability? The short answer is that it encompasses a lot of areas not normally cared about by usability professionals but directly and indirectly impact the user experience of an application or website. This includes things like release management, disaster recovery, penetration testing and ethical hacking, load balancing, and a lot more.

I probably won’t be able to speak knowledgeably about all the things I think make up back-end usability. And that’s ok. I hope to introduce the idea that usability doesn’t just stop at the presentation layer and how quickly a page loads. But really it goes much further than that and to be an effective usability engineer we have to start learning about the middle and back-end layers of how our apps and sites work. And if we want to gain respect and the ears of our developers we need to start caring more about what they do so they might start to care about what we do.

Wish me luck!