So who is this yahoo, anyway? February 5
Just in case you’ve found this blog without knowing anything about me (in which case, why are you reading?), I should probably drop a bit of background information for you. Seems like a good way to formally start a blog…
So, um, yeah…
Hi, I’m Rick. For the past four years or so, I’ve had the privilege of being able to take a small role in the evolution of the Macintosh world. For most of the last three years, that role has been as a user experience specialist at The Omni Group.
What’s a “user experience specialist”? It’s the best summary I can come up with for all the things I do here: basically I’ve been involved with just about everything that’s not the meat of our products (or the tofu of our products, considering some of the folks around here) but which is integral to the overall impression a user or customer gets of our work. Mostly I’m involved with human interface design and implementation… figuring out how to best handle this or that feature in usability terms and how to make to look cool, and then pushing the pixels and writing some of the code. (Yes, I’m an engineer. But I pretty much stay away from HTML rendering, automatic diagram layout, and XML outline processing.) I’ve also worked on documentation (print and online), marketing communications, installation and disk images, CD mastering, and pretty much every other facet of where the software meets the user.
Why? The success of the Mac is that its developers “sweat the small stuff”. Apple does their best when they leverage the fact that they, as Jobs says, “make he whole widget”. It’s more than just building the hardware and the software, it’s that they — and other successful Mac developers — take the time to make sure every part of the user experience is simple and positive, starting the minute you open the box. That gestalt experience is what turns contacts into customers and customers into fans.
But it’s a difficult process, with many pitfalls. That’s why I’ve started this weblog — hopefully, sharing some of what I’ve learned will be helpful to others, and the world will be a better place for it. Or I’ll spark some useful debate, and the world will at least be a more interesting place. 