WebWord

Since the announcement yesterday of the Rebirth of the WebWord Newsletter there have been a lot of subscriptions. Apparently there is a lot of pent up demand.

I really should have started the newsletter back up a couple of years ago. Even periodic updates would be useful to WebWord readers, like you. More importantly there are always things going on that I think you would find interesting from a usability perspective and beyond.

Here are a couple of examples…

First, I’ve been listening to a book by Peter Drucker. This man was smart. He spent one chapter talking about profit versus cash flow. In a very eloquent manner, he stated that many people are stupid about business. Drucker specifically attacked people for caring too much about profit versus cash flow.

That makes sense when you think about it. If you only sell one item for $100 and the cost to you was just $1, then your profit per item is insane. On the other hand, if you sell 500 items $100 but the cost to you is $99, then your profit per item is low. However in the first case, you’re only pulling down $99 whereas in the second case you’re pulling down $500.

When I started thinking about this in relation to usability something struck me. Most consultants “swing for the fences” meaning that we take on just a few large projects. Although the income per project is huge, the overall level of usability in the world doesn’t change much unless the project in question is open and exposed to the masses.

Should UX’ers spend more time creating products and services for the masses? Is usability something you can mass produce in some manner or another? Do books and web sites fulfill this UX gap in any way? Is is possible for usability practitioners to shift from Whale Hunting to Fish Farming?

Here’s another example. Why don’t more UX’ers talk about the mundane regularity that makes up 94.85% of our waking lives? There are many things we do day after day that are not very user friendly (ugh!) but we continue doing them again and again. Imagine if we could improve the UX of putting on socks. Imagine if we could make it easier to comb hair. Imagine if we could improve the experience of brushing our teeth.

Sure, these are silly examples but I have a point. We don’t focus enough time on boring stuff that takes up hours or even years of our lives. We don’t talk about the dull stuff because, well, it’s dull. Imagine making improvements.

That’s enough for now. I’ll just encourage you again to sign up for the WebWord Newsletter. I talk about usability and UX stuff, just like I did in this posting. Sometimes what I write is a lot better. Sometimes not. Consider it an adventure.

Oh, one last thing. If you have subscribed the newsletter in the past (like 6 years ago, for example) you might be getting an email from me about signing up. I’m trying to import an ancient subscription list. Wish me luck!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.