dancingmango

March 21, 2005, 5:35 pm

India was christened over the weekend. With no cooker to cook food we turned to Marks and Spencers to handle the catering. I arrived at the Banstead store to be told that they did not have the salads I had asked for. The store manager was full of apologies - and was eager to right her companies wrong. She substituted the salad (free of charge) and was exceedingly pleasant in the way she went about things. I was impressed. And left feeling positive about M and S.

Sunday morning and I was in ASDA (ugchhh) buying fresh french bread for the afternoon. I’d also bought a large serving bowl. The young geeky guy on the checkout tried to make light conversation.
“A-ha, you like lots of Weetabix.”
“Eh?”

And he kept on, trying to make a pun about the size of the bowl and breakfast cereals. He tried to engage me in humour but failed. He didn’t know his audience. I left ASDA, holding it even lower in my esteem.

April 1, 2005, 12:39 pm
Is this bad news for development
A long time ago, when I was working in the development business I applied for a scholarship with the World Bank. They rejected me (ho hum). If I was working there I’m sure I would have grave concerns for the new president, Paul Wolfowitz .

He is a signatory to the Project for the New American Century, a call for America “to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the the future. Has the leopard really have changed his spots? We shall have to see. how long before the “war on terror” creeps into world Bank project criteria? A gloomy thought.

March 15, 2005

So we are now three weeks into our new house.

The things you discover.

Funny smell in the kitchen. Smells like the drains. Take up the covers and Lindsey fills and empties the sink. No water comes through. Must be a blockage. Flush the toilet, water runs down the soil stack that the kitchen outlet shares, and flows down the drains. Hmmmm. Water isn’t quite making it from the sink to the drain. Repeated emptying of the sink and a small puddle appears on the floor. Hmmmm. Remove the footplate on the cupboards and see that the space under the cupboards is a couple of inches under water. Hmmmm. Pipework is hidden behind the cupboards so have to knock them to pieces. A spur from the waste pipe has been left uncapped. Waste water is just gushing out and onto the floor. I remove the lino and the hardboard covering is sodden. I remove all the lino in the kitchen and the whole floor is sodden. Up comes the hardboard and a number of floor boards. Luckily the wood is not rotten. We are living in a kitchen with boards up, drying out. Ho hum. Did I mention that the vendors took the oven, despite it being on the inventory. We are cooking using the van’s calour gas stove. Nice. We can only presume the previous owners didn’t use the sink, just using the dishwasher – the waste water problem only occurred when a large volume of water flushed down the pipe. Great. Getting architects in - looking to build an extension to incresase the size of the kirtchen. So until then we are living in a horrible kitchen. Funny smell in kitchen is now disappearing.

To be replaced by…

Funny noise in the loft.

The pitter patter of tiny feet. Assuming it is squirrels. Pest control came around on Monday and put poison down. Lindsey just rung saying it sounds like there is an army up there. Spoke to pest control Arrr, that is a good sign. They go mental when they eat the poison. Should be dead in 24 hours. Dead and rotting? I thought they’d use new dessicating poison. Apparently not. We’ve got a loft conversion. Will be hard to remove the bodies. Hmmmm.

March 14, 2005
It was back in December when I first downloaded this blogger to my site. Since then I’ve been playing with creative ideas, style sheets and getting hung up on process rather than content. Enough. I’ll leave it vanilla- the branding can come later (as can the navigation back into the main site. ho hum. So in March I commence scribbling. I’ll start with a question posed at a meeting last week.

I met a potential client yesterday in a sales meeting. The client was looking to update the GUI on the employee facing application they’d developed. My turn came to speak and a stream of consciousness gushed out.

I should have caveated my thoughts. I didn’t. I told him how it is.

His application GUI was crap. Bottom line, it was difficult to use. It was supposed to support users through business processes, yet it was constructed around the application architecture and the database structure. Little thought had been paid to the daily needs and goals of the end users.

As I wrapped up my damning thoughts on the interface the potential client spoke.

“Anything good about it?” he asked, through gritted teeth, steam coming out of his ears.

Ummm. I’d not really looked for the good when I’d played with it that morning.

“The colour and general aesthetic is quite nice” I ventured.

And then he asked the question. “Why is it that you usability guys see things that no-one else does? I’ve only heard the things you have said about my application from one other person. Another UI specialist”.

That’s a good question. The answer I suppose lies in the fact that usability people have sat with countless users and observed how shocking interfaces can be, and how much difficulty users can have when things are not structured around thier needs and motivations. Maybe it is beauce UI people aspire to a utopian vision of software. Software that is invisible; that empowers and enables. Where others will put up with an awkward navigation, complex steps through a process we will say no! It doesn’t have to be this way….