Tag Archives: worry

User Experience in the Real World

I’ve just been mailed by a company called Zetetic about their mobile password storage application called Strip.

Zetetic are interesting in that they are a small, cutting-edge software development house specialising in RoR and .NET. They appear to be principally a consultancy, but also develop and and sell their own applications. This is very similar to that other noo-tech (and intensely American) poster child, 37Signals.

Have a look at  Zetetic’s about page. What (to me) is also immediately interesting is that there is nobody on the team who is putting their hand up for user experience.  Both of the developers also have the word “senior” in their title, as if that meant anything in this context (the only other people in the company are the founder and a support hand). But I’ll let that go.

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Will Web 3.0 increase a user’s experience?

I’ve just spent about 10 minutes of my life trying to re-boot my mind after it suffered a cognitive blue screen of death on reading the questionWill Web 3.0 decrease or increase a user’s experience?

Deon Jenkins, an information architect at IBM, asks this question on a LinkedIn forum I’m a member of. It fell into my inbox like some kind of existential hand grenade this evening.

Every now and again, you have to evaluate what it is you are doing in life that’s so important. I find that a lot of that evaluation comes down to the value of the language you use in your work. If the words work, make sense, and aid the progress of ideas between you and the outside world, then things are probably going OK. If they’re anything like what Jenkins is using, you’re screwed.

Just as various people in the banking industry must have worried what would happen when all that toxic debt was discovered, people (well, me anyway) sometimes worry that the whole experience design and usability thing is being ridden out to the wilder plains of lunacy. I just hope Mr Jenkins has his cover story worked out.