It Was Ten Years Ago Today…
By Mitch Berg
…that my current career got its first huge break.
I’d been working for about five years as a technical writer. Now, not to offend all the techwhirlies in my audience – but being a twirlie bored me stiff.
I first encountered my current field – which I wrote about a few months ago – when I was working at Cray Research in Eagan, in 1994. I’d been a tech writer for about a year, and already knew it was, shall we say, a “transitional career” for me. I just had no idea what I was going to transition into.
And I met a guy who had just finished building a Usability Test lab at Cray. I sat and talked for hours about Usability – which involves observing people doing things with whatever you’re designing, whether it’s software or grocery stores or artillery fire control equipment or online shopping carts, noting where they have problems understanding what they’re supposed to do, and coming up with ideas to rectify it – for hours. And the light went on above my head; “right now, I get paid modestly, to explain how to use badly designed software to end-users. In this field, I could use the same basic skills to explain to developers how to design software less-badly”. Better money, more respect, more fun? Sign me up!
Of course, it took four years to “sign up”. In that era, there probably weren’t two dozen Usability/Interaction Design/Human Factors people in the Twin Cities, and most of them were at the U, or at Medtronic or FMC, working in highly-regulated fields where human factors is a statutorily actionable issue. There were very few of us actually working in software at the time. Which is why for four years, I read everything I could find on the subject, attended the “Usability” track at all the tech writing conferences, and feverishly pitched the idea of usability testing and user-centered design to one project manager after another. I got a few nibbles – a few companies let me run tests, which generated some pretty cool and vindicating results – but I remained in the Tech Writer ghetto…
…until, finally, ten years ago today, a company (which no longer exists, although I swear it wasn’t my fault) bit the bullet and hired me to design a product.
Fast.
As in, they said “you can start right away” at the interview, on the previous Friday. “Great”, I told them, “I’ll give my two weeks notice”.
“No”, the guy said. “Monday”.
So ten years ago this morning I went in to my job at 4AM, asked my boss (when he showed up) if I could change my schedule to 4AM to noon (puzzled, he agreed) – and gave my two weeks notice. And then I drove about a mile (thankfully) to the other company, and worked from 1 to 9PM.
For the next two weeks.
And it sure hasn’t seemed like ten years…
April 13th, 2008 at 9:34 am
We may have crossed paths when you were at Cray in a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal broad sense. The company I worked for built the cooling systems for Cray. Facing the usability question of the systems my boss and I redesigned the thing, neither of us having engineering degrees just common sense. We created a quieter machine that was more efficient and was 1/3 cheaper then the experts design. Not only that in case of a component failure the techs could reach in and change it out in minutes instead of tearing half the system apart.
No one else knows about this but it did give me a warm feeling to beat the experts.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Were you at Chippewa or Eagan? (Or were you a real hard-core old-school Crayon from Pilot Knob?)
I was in the E building at Eagan from late ’93 to early ’94 – the lowliest contractor in the place.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:44 am
And yeah – you’re right, that IS what usability’s about. Except that you (and Cray, and its users and their maintenance people) were lucky – by the time most things get designed, it’s the experts’ “common sense” that gets built in – and they invest a TON of their ego in it. A big part of my trade is building a body of evidence to show what the users’ “common sense” really is, with numbers rather than gut feeling and ego.
Which can get…interesting.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I remember thinking I could burn the candle at both ends. In my case it was for the money, but later realized it just wasn’t worth it. In your case it was a time dated matter of principle, but I bet you were one tired dog.
That does, however, explain why your garage trips had dwindled for those two weeks *laughing*
Flash
April 14th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I remember when I was your age…I could work like a dog for 20 hours a day and still function like a normal member of society. It makes me tired to read that.