No Cost for Culture

Oh geez, what am I doing? I’m in the middle (well more like the 1st quarter) of the UI Spec and happily working my way through it and I’ve stopped to post a blog (so I’m keeping it short!). The thing is, I was looking at the Garrett IA stencils in omnigraffle, and suddenly stopped and thought - wait, what are these ‘areas’? So I googled it, and duh, came across Garrett’s own Visual Vocabulary Page. I’ve been here before, but never fully absorbed it I guess. Hope this helps someone else, in your hour of need.

i’ve been reading different articles about how young people manage money, how the future is looking for generation x & y as far as earnings, savings, and retirement go, and even thinking about the national debt and what the implications are for americans as individuals. I even just watched a short film by Lauren Greenfield about teens in Los Angeles and their money. If you’re turned off by the Beverly Hills-shopping girls at the beginning, hold on - it gets better/more realistic!

I don’t want to get too political, but you have to wonder what kind of example our country is setting if its national debt breaks down to ~$500,000 a person, if it were our duties to “pay it back” (I read this recently, and now can’t remember the source). Is our government sending a signal that credit is good, debt’s ok? (As an aside, I’ve always wondered what’s to stop us from printing up our own money and cover our debt! Who decides how much money is in circulation?)

I’m also wondering, more practically, where this kind of information fits when conducting research for a product. I’m saying, there are these studies, there are statistics, and they inform what I know not so much about users as individuals, but about the world at large that these users fit into. I think these are important things to consider because although the users are the ones who will using the product and will ultimately decide if it’s a success or failure, in a sense, users’ habits are a symptom of a larger problem - at least in the case of a product like Finabler.

The idea for Finabler certainly came about partially because I was raised to be aware of money. My parents stressed about it - not so much about not having enough, but about making sure to save it and invest wisely. My mom balanced her checkbook by hand, and I carry this tradition on in a sense, by recording my receipts into quicken and reconciling my input with the bank statements at the end of the month (although this is a tedious task, so often I end up doing a few months at a time). And certainly, my habits were strengthened by having to develop more of a head for numbers by handling the books at a nonprofit for four years.

But I see the pain in what I do (i experience it!) and I see that others simply aren’t willing to track their money in that way, so Finabler is born. I suppose right now I have to realize that what I’m talking about her may lend itself more to business case than UI spec, and on with my work! But these things are good to talk through nevertheless.

Tonight my body aches from the stress and exhaustion of this week. I’m quite adept at wasting time on the internet, but I decided I needed to laugh in between the horrible flash project I’m working on, so I visited my trusty lolcat friends at http://icanhascheezburger.com/.

If, somehow, you’ve escaped the lolcats the past few years, I recommend starting backwards so you can see some of the original images first.

Here are two of my favorites. I think I laughed a little too hard at the 2nd one. :/

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1758.html

Here’s something you can listen to at work. How does google approach the user experience? Irene Au is the Director of User Experience at Google and she talks about how Google differs from other companies that she’s been at. She also talks about the culture at Google and even their hiring process for any googler-wannabees out there (that’s me, if you haven’t caught on ). I’ll come back to this with some comments after I’ve listened to it again.

(ps - this link comes to me from Therese Nielsen, my classmate from Columbia and now my colleague-from-afar who is studying HCI at U of M!)