365 Days Later

2008-02-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

If I can average better than a post a year...gee that would be pretty cool.

Right now Steve Jobs is causing me heartburn.

It's the same old story: design by genius or design by research. Steve, unfortunately, is inflaming the jobs-wannabees into thinking that they are smarter than they are. The weakness in the "design by genius" approach is that only market cycles show who the geniuses really were, and in the short term prima donnas rule the day.

It's the same old story: enterprise software is purchased by people who don't use the software. In the 90's they purchased based on checklists of features, regardless of how complex or unusable the software was. In the 00's they purchase based on cowbell and flash, thinking they are solving the usability issue with bling, but once again the end users aren't consulted.

Inaugural Post

2007-02-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

The software company I work for has many different views of the customer. Our executives see the customer as be-suited C-level executives, members of the same club. Our sales guys see the customer as IT stakeholders. Our professional services arm sees customers as admins and project managers and development teams. The small usability team of which I am a part sees customers as everyday joes, just trying to get their jobs done and get out of the office in time to pick up Junior from daycare. There's a tendency to call these people "users", but that's already so demeaning: it's labelling them from the perspective of the machine. Users are people.

Everybody thinks they have a corner on what's going to make the customer happy, but this whole pyramid scheme is built on the average joes, the bottom of the pyramid. If they can't get their work done and aren't happy with the software, everybody else's agenda gets put on hold. And in fact, the pyramid can come toppling down.

Users are people too

365 Days Later

Inaugural Post