Brooke Baldwin

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!

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Did you see this story on 60 Minutes story on December 30, 2007? I caught most of it and was delighted at the topic - usability. While the reporter didn’t use the term to describe the problem the core issue is that rapidly changing technology hurts the user most of all.

Steve Kroft reports, “Today, thousands of products and providers allow you to watch TV shows, make phone calls, download music, print color photos, and dictate letters without leaving your desktop, if you have the time, the patience, the aptitude, and the available brain cells to master yet another software protocol. ”

Here’s hoping I can make life a little easier for the folks at my new job.

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I’ve spent the better part of last week in New York at a usability class. It was put on by Human Factors International by this guy.

For the most part I really enjoyed myself, save for a few people who sat in the back, talked with each other, answered their phones, and appeared to be doing their regular work. What can you do?

But about the class. It’s been several years since I’ve taken one on usability and what a great refresher. New research was presented and old ideas both challenged and reinforced. Today I ordered a great text book that we discussed that has compiled a lot of cognitive psychology and interactive design research.

Maybe what I liked most about the class was being in an environment where it was welcomed to bring up ideas and discuss different view points without the usual office politics. Maybe the biggest drawback (aside from the before mentioned) was that it seemed like I was one of the more experienced practitioners in the group - or at least the one most willing to discuss real-life experiences out loud.

But we covered new eye-tracking research and I learned that it really shouldn’t be relied upon as primary research for a design. It’s such a hot topic right now that I’m glad to have empirical evidence to finally support my own theory. And I was surprised to learn that testing reveals remote testing can really be effective to subsequent rounds of usability testing but shouldn’t be used for the first iteration.

All told, I’m glad to have taken the time and expense of going up to New York for the class. Maybe a day course from Edward Tufte is next.

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