WebWord

It’s been a very, very long time since I last posted to WebWord. It was in the middle of January this year. So that’s about three months. So much for frequent blog postings. Ugh!

I’d like to give you a quick update on what I’ve been up to the last three months. First, I finally took the plunge. I bought an Apple. To be specific, I bought a MacBook Pro. I have to say it’s one of the smartest technology purchases I’ve made. Perhaps ever.

Yes, I drank the Apple Kool-Aid.

For years I heard that Apple’s is easy to use, user-friendly, and just a complete joy to use. However, nearly all my friends used Windows machines. Also, I was simply worried about making the switch. But, I have to tell you, it was the smartest thing I’ve done in quite awhile.

The 17 inch MacBook Pro is a beautiful machine. To complement my laptop, I bought a 24-inch Samsung flatscreen monitor. So I have a dual screen set up now. I also bought an external hard drive. Backups are done automatically for me every single hour. (Thanks Tim Machine.) Absolutely brainless, no worries, no problems. I also decided to get a wireless mouse. Yet another smart investment.

Productivity is soaring.

I am mildly frustrated with some of the user interface elements of my Mac. But they are mostly trivial. In fact, so trivial, they’re not even worth mentioning here. That’s because overall I really do enjoy my laptop that much. The honeymoon is over, yet I am still as productive, if not more productive than I was before. Seriously, even with the learning curve.

I’d also like to point out that I bought a speech to text program called MacSpeech Dictate. After years of hearing that speech to text technology was good, I decided to make the investment. Extremely smart move. I can speak rapidly, more rapidly than I can type at least, and MacSpeech Dictate actually is able to keep up. Productivity is through the roof. By the way, the program is based on Dragon Naturally Speaking. The speech to text conversion engine is quite mature. Quite happy, as you might imagine.

Next I wanted to tell you about the Usability Professionals Association conference that I’m going to soon.  I’m doing a presentation with Paul Sherman and Daniel Szuc and it’s called Make Yourself Heard! Selling User Experience in Your Organization. In case you didn’t know, the UPA conference this year is in Baltimore, Maryland from 16 June through 20 June.  I really hope to see you there.

By the way, in the latter part of May, I plan on finishing my book: User Experience Infiltration Tactics. It’s about getting usability and user experience into an organization without doing any selling, at least not direct selling. I provide guerrilla tactics, secret methods, tools, and special tips to help usability professionals get usability into organization. It’s very “cloak and dagger” stuff. Plenty of fun. It’ll be available at the UPA conference.  Exciting stuff; can’t wait.

I’ll end by saying that a lot of my time has been spent doing online marketing and internet marketing. I’ve become something of an expert in this area. I’m quite keen on learning more about the intersection of usability and online marketing. In many ways, it’s an undiscovered country.

If you’re interested in usability, but you don’t know much about marketing, I strongly encourage you to get in touch with me. Similarly, if you’re an online marketer, but don’t know much about usability, I’m also the guy to talk to.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 11:07 pm 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.