Brooke Baldwin

A colleague of mine at work pointed me in the direction of this website, A List Apart today. So I read through a little bit of it and found this great article, “On Creativity” .

It kind of made my day to read such a well written article about something that I agree with, that creativity at work isn’t about expressing yourself but rather being creative means taking constraints and finding a (hopefully) elegant way to make those parameters work well. The article is on a site that is about designing and developing for the web, but I’d posit that his argument holds true for just about any kind of work.

Andy Rutledge, the author, writes

Creativity has nothing at all to do with self-expression or flamboyancy. Aside from the simple ability to create things, the most important feature of creativity is a highly developed perception filter that is somewhat less common than we’re led to believe. Despite what we were taught in school, we don’t all possess significant creativity, and fewer of us still have any skill at employing it. True, anyone can make something, and anyone can make something up. In this mundane sense, everyone is creative. But this basic truth belies the design-relevant definition of creativity, and ignores the fact that each one of us has different creative abilities.

I think he’s right. It’s not that hard to come up with some new idea, it’s hard to come up with some new idea that works and works well. Or even with some idea that’s not even new, but works well. How many of us are really willing to be rigorous in our thinking? And in our work? I think the right way to be creative is to come up with an idea and then keep asking if it works or fits or is right. And if the answer is no or yes, then trying to figure out why. Because the answer to why just might point you in the direction of the next right answer.

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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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