My initiation into usability was cruel. Looking back, however, I think the experience taught me how sensitive web site owners are. Some may want to let the air out of your car tires in exchange for your honesty.

Janna

I changed her name for this story, but trust me. She hates me. She was the Project Manager for a company I worked for. In my first year there as a User Interface Engineer I was assigned to a web site redesign project. Janna came to me with a site design that was determined by some mysterious person I never met. My job was to implement all the changes the stakeholders wanted.

I did. It was a web site driven by a huge application that was also being redesigned to be more user friendly. Every time Janna and I met, I changed fonts and colors. I’d move fields and check boxes. I did whatever I was told, even though inside my head, I was asking “WHY!” Some of the enhancements made no sense. I couldn’t see how we were improving the site.

One day, I overheard a salesman selling the new web site to a potential client who might have wanted what the application could do. I was shocked. We were still in development, with no testing planned and I wasn’t aware of any roll-out date. I couldn’t understand what he was selling. Was it the site I was working on that I knew sucked?

I Leave Janna

One day, my manager approached me and I figured I was fired. Not sure why…paranoid I guess. He led me to the Director of our department, so I knew I was so fired then. I was partly correct. It was obvious that I had no eye for design. I could code like a banshee and spot an error from the town next door, blindfolded. I could tell you, without knowing how I knew, what was going to blow up or confuse someone.

So, it was decided to put me into their software QA testing department. I had no idea what that was but it didn’t matter. The QA Engineer assigned to train me was adorable and we became instant friends. They hired a Human Factors person for the UI department who was also assigned to train me as best she could on usability. What I didn’t know, I set off to learn on my own, with them funding the bill.

I was fully trained in software functional QA testing. They had to rewire my brain because QA is so disciplined and controlled that I drove my manager nuts. My Director saw my talent and wanted me for himself, but to handle my growth, he assigned a very calm man to “manage” me. I thought that was funny and very smart. Tracing FR’s and BR’s is the stuff of nightmares.

As I was learning how to wrestle with Rational tools (now owned by IBM) and spent more and more time in “important” meetings, it came to pass that a new web site was moved from development into the QA testing arena. It would be my very first assignment as their first (and only ever) User Interface/Usability QA Engineer.

The site was the one Janna and I had worked on.

Janna Wants to Kill Me

The first thing I did was show how the site wasn’t working. The application wasn’t functioning. It didn’t meet functional requirements. The site was a user nightmare. There were so many band-aids thrown at it that it was no longer even a shadow of its original self.

A few months went by and that poor little web site NEVER got past QA. I was never able to sign off on it and say it met and passed our testing. The site slipped quietly into the spider webs of the building and Janna hated me.

She would see me coming down a hallway and turn down an aisle so she wouldn’t have to breathe the same air. When the company bought a third building and moved the QA department there, I thought I’d be able to get through a day without causing her distress.

Then they moved her to that building.

The dotcom crash happened, I was laid off and now I’m here. I have no idea whatever happened to Janna. I can say, without hesitation, that she hates usability people.

Are We So Mean?

There were many lessons I could learn from that experience What sticks out is that the company had their web development process set up wrong. Had they brought in a usability person way back in the very beginning, when the redesign was hashed out, they would have better understood what to fix, why, how and for who.

The company was showing some thought when they brought in a Human Factors person and put her into the UI department. She was a huge resource for them and myself. She helped us understand how important it was to put the end users first. It used to be a “Stakeholder wants it this way or else” approach, but a site owner tends to want what they like put on a web site rather than what will work, or what will convert, or what their customers feel are their primary tasks.

I know my job as a usability consultant scares people. I do what I do because I love applications that not only function, but are such a pleasure to use you want to go back and do it again. I don’t like telling anyone how to run their business and I don’t like telling them that their raised table cell borders are so 1996, but if their competition has done their homework and built a web site that rocks, they’re getting your money too.

Janna hated me because she felt I was critical of her site. She didn’t understand that I wanted her site to be successful and in demand by the customers it was targeted to.

I was on her side the entire time.

I should begin by clearly stating I’m no legal expert, application developer or feeling overly paranoid (oh shut up!). However, my travels today led me to discover something I wasn’t aware of before.

Facebook applications can be sold by their creators.

This means, for example, an application for Facebook, with thousands upon thousands of Facebook members happily using it and passing it on to their friends, can change ownership at any time. Maintenance can change. It can be moved to a new server. All the data changes hands. That sort of thing.

I found one of the popular applications for sale. Bids have gone past $3000 for it. Not bad for a developer who likely coded it in a day.

Facebook is merrily chugging along with enhancements to applications and specifically, the delivery of them to the Facebook community.

As a member myself, one of the reasons I like Facebook is that some of the applications you can add to your Facebook page make it easier to interact with and get to know your friends. When you work virtually, as I do, it can become a habit to check in several times a day to check on the “Status” of your friends. Many of them use it to communicate what they’re feeling, how the day is going, news of the day, etc. It’s an insight into people you work with or associate with but rarely ever see in person, but care about anyway.

According to an item in Facebook’s developer news page, there will be new ways to promote applications.

“Because News Feed is an important part of distribution for everyone, we hope to enable feed stories to be shown to users who haven’t added the application (italics mine). We’ll also begin to optimize these stories into higher rotation amongst the other application add stories. But this addition is likely to be further down the line than the others.”

It’s not specifically worded to say something like “we hope to enable feed stories to be shown to your friends who haven’t added the application.” Rather, it sounds like feed stories, which is another type of status update, will be fed to people outside your group of friends.

I doubt this is what they mean.

But, in the interest of already existing privacy issues and concerns by some Facebook users, it struck me as interesting to learn that all your votes, messages, booze mail and video sharing data are not only up for grabs but can be sold to the highest bidder.

Related, on different blogs:

Compare People Facebook App Pulls a Bait and Switch? - Rae Hoffman

Using Facebook: Uploading Your Original Content Automatically Grants Them License to Use It - Li Evans

There’s a place for everyone on the Internet. Meeting other people just like you has never been easier and so ridiculously difficult at the same time. There are so many social networking websites that I feel like I’m standing in a corn field.

Three More

These sites are all attractive and ready for you to check them out.

1. Quechup - You can search for people, start your own blog, submit videos of interest, chat, play games and more. I couldn’t determine the target user for it, but the first Ad Sense ad in the que cracked me up. “Find Adult Here. Visit our Adult Guide.” So there you go. (Updated: Link disabled. See comments.)

2. Gather is a robust online watering hole that invites in-depth conversation you can sink your teeth into. Gather isn’t messing around. The site has attracted over $20M in corporate investors such as former Lotus Chairman Jim Manzi, Pittsburgh Pirates’ CEO Kevin McClatchy, Allen & Company, The American Public Media Group, Hearst, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and Southern California Public Radio. They claim to attract over one million”highly educated, highly informed” adults each month. I was sold the instant I saw “Read thought provoking articles” on the homepage. That’s a value proposition aimed towards me!

3. TierraNatal targets a niche with style. Launched by my good friends at Digital Telepathy, this social site is “a unique Hispanic social network grown to provide a connection between Mexicans living in the US with their hometowns (tierra natal) in Mexico. There are over 300,000 towns listed with a beautiful UI to display the towns and states their in.” Techcrunch ran a good review, giving it a positive heads up.

First there was “chat”. I typed in a subject I was interested in and AOL took me to a virtual room where people were talking about it. I shyly disguised my name and joined in the discussion. Before long, my screeching modem was a regular household sound.

The year was 1995. I was a newly divorced mom and did I EVER chat with some fascinating dudes, lemme tell ya.

I inhaled those people I met. They argued. They had ideas. Some were naughty, some weren’t used to the sudden freedom of expression and so they told us everything, in detail. They came from everywhere.

How Freedom Felt

I fell in love with the Internet because nobody knew me and frankly, neither did I. I could make up a different me every day. Some days I was so hot and people actually believed that stuff!

The rest of the story is the same thing that happened to hundreds of thousands of other people. I built my first web site and hosted it on AOL until I learned a better way. Chatting led me to email lists, Deja News, instant chat rooms, IM, newsgroups and eventually eGroups, which Yahoo! ate up and spit back out as Yahoo! Clubs. I hosted and moderated email lists early on, having passed my 10th year of moderating in 2006.

I was employed as a webmaster by companies that had no idea what we did, nor any respect for us either.

The year I went independent and stopped working for everybody else was the same year I left the SEO industry, dove into Usability full-time and started Cre8asiteforums.

When Do Forum Owners Get to Leave?

I realized something over the weekend, while recalling the first few years when I kept telling the forums staff I wanted to get off the ship and let them have it. Now I can’t leave.

I’ve married it.

Did Brett Tabke marry his forums? Did Jill Whalen marry her’s? Does anyone who starts these gigantic projects ever consider how to get off the ride?

Why am I still typing and not out planting trees?

In the news today is the now announced decision by Ammon Johns to leave his post as Adminstrator for Cre8asiteforums. He was the famous guy there. It was never me and Bill Slawski, though to our credit, we know five people now.

What is MY purpose as a forums founder? Who has even heard of Cre8asiteforums? Not everyone. Who is it for? Not everyone. That is our thing. We are a tribe that represents quality vs. quantity, holistic vs. tunnel vision and fireside chats with beer or peach schnapps over shot gun duels to the death.

It is one of many, many forums to choose from and yet if it disappeared tomorrow, I don’t think the hole in its place would be that large. The hole in the hearts of the Community, however, is a completely different matter.

It is for them that we remain committed. It is for you, we have a soft spot.

There are days when I lack the desire to keep this up and without fail, the forums staff puts me straight. They tolerate me quite well.

Why A Forums?

With social media being the fad, yet another new and wonderful way is available to chat with people. We still need to be moderated, as a recent ruckus at Sphinn will show. It’s still fun to have a place where we disguise our names and scream out obscenities because we’re far, far better than everyone else.

Search engine marketing blogs communicate, even if one sided and not always in a chatty way. Nowadays, we can hear real voices with podcasts and view real bodies with video. Forums can’t replace the beauty of watching people doing things online they’d NEVER do in your actual living room.

Are forums dying out?

Have they become narrower in their purpose? For example, at Cre8asite, there is a core group of both active Community members and moderators who visit and participate often. That core is shrinking as their expertise grows, making them more attractive to employers. This, in turn, means less time for forums.

Whereas, an outer ring of people visit only when they need something. They take. They don’t give. They don’t remain long enough to be known or trusted.

I’m wondering if this is our future. We’re still talking to one another but instead of a nice long discussion, we’re now down to votes, comments, 500 word limited blog posts, hopscotching links to get from one thought to another and otherwise no longer staying long enough to care about each other.

When the caring totally stops, that’s when I know it’s time for me to get off the ride.

This topic went “Hot” at Sphinn on September 18.

A few nights ago I dreamed I was arguing with a woman named Mary. No matter what I did, I was being judged. I woke up, fell back to sleep, and continued to have a yelling match with her. Next, I was standing outside on a hill watching a gigantic tornado funnel cloud heading directly towards me.

I ran around trying to warn people, but they were ignoring me. As the tornado hit, I found shelter under an overhanging cliff, because suddenly I managed to fly to a hilly forest.

In real life, Mary was a woman who took me into her home when I was 19 years old. Her daughter, my best friend from high school, knew that if somebody didn’t come into my life at that precise moment, I would likely not have survived to be 20. I lived with that family for 3 years.

I never argued with Mary. She cared about me when I didn’t care about me. One day she threw 15 bras on my bed and said, “Someday you’ll thank me for this.” She was right.

I’ve never seen a tornado. But I know something is going to happen. I know a dream like this means I’ll either take care of myself in an emergency, or I’m about to do something stupid. In all likelihood, I’ll do it on the Internet, so everyone can watch and make fun of me.

When you live on the Internet, you know you’ll die there too.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a strange, wonderful post the other day called How to Make Love To A Ghost. In his dream, ghosts were giving him instructions and advice, such as “Don’t make love to a ghost, even if she is your wife.”

Of his ghosts, he wrote:

“These messages were conveyed clearly, and with authority. Although I knew their origin, I was not afraid. So matter-of-fact was my acceptance that I began framing what I was learning within a normal workday context. Specifically, I realized that these messages made the perfect Tweets.

For while Twitter may reduce the immense possibilities of communication to single-line banalities of 140 characters or less, it is paradoxically the perfect vehicle for distilling and broadcasting profound, irrational truths, such as those the dead share with us while we dream.”

Interesting. I do this framing thing also.

An event, such as being stranded in a K-Mart parking lot in a broken down motor home in Virginia with 5 kids, a dog, a husband who desperately needed valium for his wife, in 105 degree weather, with no hope of a tow, had me writing an article on usability, navigation, being stuck, and getting lost, in my head and later on a computer. I never ran that article because remembering that summer vacation is on my “Top 5 Memories To Put in the Never Happened” file in my head.

Zeldman’s ghosts gave advice to “Fill your eyes with tears. That is how a ghost sees”. I likely would have used that for an analogy on web site accessibility, had it been my dream.

Speaking with angels, departed souls, ghosts and loved ones who have passed over are topics that have always fascinated me because I’ve already had experiences that clearly show we’re connected in mysterious ways.

The Internet is part of the experiment. I know I’m here. I know you’re there. But we can’t see each other. Does that mean we don’t exist?

I made my husband promise that if he goes first, he should yell to me the following words from the other side: “STOP STARING AT ME!”

I like signs.

The article that experience would inspire could easily be about breadcrumb navigation or web site authenticity and credibility.

Yes. I know. You’ve never read about article or blog writing inspiration like this before.

That’s because this is a blog that ignores the rules.

Life is too short.