Sandra’s Miscellany

Have you ever downloaded a piece of shareware or freeware (perhaps for ripping DVDs or converting .mp3 files to .oggs)? Once you got it installed, were you able to use it?

The makers of this software, generous souls that they are, clearly assume that I have a degree in multimedia or have in-depth knowledge of DVD tracks/articles/sessions/whatever.

Well, I don’t. I’m a regular person who simply wanted to rip Persuasion to disc so I could watch it on my laptop rather than carry around the DVD. I don’t want to have to understand which track is the movie, which is the gubbins in the front, or which track to select to get English. None of these things are actually defined, by the way — I have to intuit from things like file size which track contains the movie, and then half the time I ended up getting the French version. Or portions in English and portions in French.

Say what? Or, ce qui?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been indulging in some serious reading about user interaction.

Not usability. User interaction. Very different things.

It started with the STC Conference Master Writers course taught by Sharon Burton. Some folks thought it was a snooze but I found it incredibly useful — a crash course in cognitive theory that totally transformed my view of users in general, and my company’s users in particular. Our users are so emphatically not “just like us” that I can’t imagine anyone less like us.

Then I moved on to The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper. This short book is a little repetitive, but I think he may know his audience — engineers — very well. Some of them may need to hear the same message over and over, in slightly different ways, to fully grasp what he’s saying. (And that’s not a slam against engineers — it’s a matter of how their brains are hard-wired.)

I’ve been skipping around in Cooper’s About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and hope to finish this one by the end of July.

And all of these things have contributed to my being seriously interested in user interaction design. If I wanted to move to California, I’d probably start by applying for a job at his joint, Cooper Interaction Design. I’d love to apprentice somewhere in his group, because they clearly have the answer for the craziness we’re forced to put up with in software and hardware design.

In the past, the dSO would curse a piece of equipment or a web site or software app, and I’d think, “He’s so inflexible. He just needs to learn the product.” But now I’m thinking that he’s got it exactly right — that designers and developers are creating toys for themselves rather than for the 75% of people who aren’t like them at all.

Now, to try to get this message to other parts of the organization….