Moving Jobs & choosing life
Posted by Peter Cavallo on October 19, 2006
Well, it’s time to move again. I’ve been here 5 years and now it’s time to move the career up a notch. I’ve had plenty of changes in my life from being a sound engineer to a preacher,TV producer and now a Usability Analyst. I must say that out of all of them I find dealing with usability to be the biggest challenge. OK, I know most of you are still hanging on the Preacher thing aren’t you?
It’s true, I was a fullon Preacher of the Gospel but have now seen the light and would rather be a real help to society, given that most of us in the western world are dealing with computers at some stage of our day.
When I first discovered the benefits of Usability testing and analysis I was amazed that every business wasn’t concerned about it too! Come on people…this is important I could hear myself saying in many a meeting. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you know”, of course no one could answer that. I’m not being a smarty pants but to me if usability is not included in your development process then you have some serious floors in all that you produce. Don’t look at me like that! You know it’s true, you just don’t want to accept it because you think it will blow out your time frame and the whole project will go on budget overload. You know what? It will. If you include usability as an after thought.
So, don’t sit there with your UI design patterns and tell me everything is going to be ok! Plan to involve usability methods from the very beginning, from requirements to installation.
I’ll leave this with you: “Usability is like oxygen, you never notice it until it’s missing”…and then I might add, your project is dead.
Choose life!
