brightly colored food

If you haven’t already seen it, Kevin Fox of fury.com has an excellent bit of parody in response to Apple’s decision to cut off everyone’s .mac email addresses/accounts who won’t pony up for the full service. It’s called “Bait and Switch”. Also check out his response to all of the comments he’s received.

How much is goodwill worth? Apple is only estimating that 10% of the users with a .mac address will upgrade. Any idea how much this might be? Maybe a couple million? How much is not pissing off the other 90% worth? It’s a poor business decision, especially for a company that relies on brand as much as Apple does.

Kevin’s a newly-minted friend from the West Coast who will be joining us shortly here at Carnegie Mellon. He’ll be in the HCI Masters program, and we’ve already committed each other to the task of tightening the bonds between the HCI program and the Interaction Design program, where I reside. He’s a terribly bright guy, and previously worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! on their instant messenger app. He also possesses quite a fine apartment in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. I know it’s a nice place because I’m subletting it from him until my own place opens up (one day left). I only wish it came furnished - I’ve been sleeping on a tiny camping mattress for a month now and eating my meals picnic-style on the floor. Very glamorous, let me tell you.

In Jakob’s latest column, he describes what he thinks makes a good usability specialist. I agree with his points about experience and ability at detecting patterns, but I don’t buy his claim that the ability to arrive at a “conceptual insight that can drive the design” is one of the most important skills to have - it seems that the usability specialist is acting as a designer at that point, rather than an evaluator.

It’s a subtle point, but clearly differentiating your observations and patterns surmised from any of your design recommendations is one of the most valuable ways to gain credibility with team members. It’s fine to serve in the roles of a usability specialist and an interaction designer/information architect, but it’s worth making a definite distinction between the two roles that are being played (even if many of the skills are the same).

Experience counts for so much. If you have the means, work with older, more experienced (but not dogmatic) usability professionals. The mix of doing a lot of testing alongside someone who’s a seasoned vet is worth…so…much.

He also plugs NNG’s 230 Tips and Tricks for Better Usability Testing. It’s good, not life-changing, but definitely worth buying if it’s on the company, and much more concise than most of worthwhile usability books on the shelves. If you’re allergic to Jakob (I’m not, but some I know are a bit sensitive to his sensibilities), note that it’s written by Rolf Molich, who has done some great work of his own.