Usability/User Experience Specialist Listed among the Best Careers for 2008!
http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/best-careers/2007/12/19/usabilityuser-experience-specialist-executive-summary.html
Cheers
MuthuKumar.R
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Does 2 different credit cards help in building my credit faster?
Selected Answer from Yahoo Answers.com
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To have the best score/profile people need 3 credit card accounts (revolving) with balances below 30% of their credit limit and 2 cars, boats, homes, furniture or personal accounts (installment) all with good long payment history's.
Selected Answer from Yahoo Answers.com
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SPIFIMAN1 (Finance manager for over 7-years.)
--- yes the more open lines of credit paid as agreed someone has the better their score is going to be.To have the best score/profile people need 3 credit card accounts (revolving) with balances below 30% of their credit limit and 2 cars, boats, homes, furniture or personal accounts (installment) all with good long payment history's.
Is Usability in products and applications making people dumber?
Selected Answers from my Linkedin.com network:
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Garlin Gilchrist II
Web Developer & Designer, Smart Guy
Usability not only improves productivity, it also enhances the positivity of experience and interaction.
Processing more things/data/information does not make one more or less smart. Being smart/intelligent is largely about making the right choices on what to focus on. Better usability in products and applications allows for demonstrations of intelligence for the user and the application creator:
Robert Jakobson
If we follow your logic for a moment here, it would mean that by going to a good school with skilled instructors and up to date books and technology, the education you recieved was a disservice to you.
Merely making things easier for people does not reduce their ability to learn or cause their brain processes to become reduced. The falacy of your argument is based on the misunderstanding that learning is similar to a muscle and it needs to be excercised to become stronger and if it's not used it will atrophy.
Where to some extent this is true, it's also true that you excercise it not by using the interface of a computer - but by the activity you're performing on it. So in a sense by allowing people to more easily engage in activities usability increases ones intelligence.
By the same token, making it easier to go to the gym doesn't give someone a strong body - if they don't excercise when they get to the gym and you have to ingest something other than junk food.
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Jim Dustin
Muthu-
Interesting angle and kind of a trick question! Many of the answers consider usability from the perspective of software design, for which it has gained much attention. However usability and its principles literally surround us, including nature.
Taking your question in broad terms and assuming by “dumber” you mean: enabling people not to struggle using a tool, understand a communication, mentally process a service or other task in a way that is more comfortable, than if these same things were less easily achieved – then yes, dumber.
Thinking is work-- and primates as well as many other animals would rather not work, if it’s not necessary. If it is necessary, for survival, we’re hard wired to try to solve problems and even these can start to drift out of the realm of toil and into ego fulfillment, challenge satisfaction and other forms of pleasure. Are complex video games work, pleasure or both?
Like many things, both man-made and natural, it really is just about shift. Animals seek easy navigational paths to watering holes and use them over and over again, until something changes. There would be no need to blaze new trails each time, which could bring unnecessary danger. For humans, using the wheel was easier than dragging; a bow and arrow, easier and more accurate than throwing a sharp stick, printing presses, much easier than handwritten copying, etc.
At each evolutionary stage, we rarely go backwards. A modern calculator is a perfect example. I’d bet many people could no longer do the long hand equations that are easily made using the device. They may have traded off the need to understand how, just as they no longer know how to survive in the wild and hunt for food. If something has proven to be usable and easy, we gravitate toward it naturally. We want to be dumber in some things, so we can be smarter in others. The advent of metal tool making, allowed us to free up our minds for other tasks and opportunities, rather than use the time and thought required for handcraft. Constantly shifting. Even a river seeks the course of least resistance.
Usability is an extension and reflection of invention. It’s not just relegated to polishing something after the fact; it’s there from the beginning and evolves. Arthur C. Clarke once stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I suspect that in many ways, a Tribesman living off the land in the Amazon jungle is way smarter than I would be using the same tools. Usability as it relates to “smarter” or “dumber” is a matter of context.
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Jim Hancock, MBA, CQM
Good usability allows us to be specialists. Put differently, if a widget has poor usability then I have to become an expert at operating the widget. This diffuses my focus from my original activity ...and therefore I can't learn the original activity as quickly as I otherwise could.
So good usability allows us to learn more deeply ..and poor usability forces our skills and knowledge to remain more shallow.
This assessment of course implies that the person is in fact TRYING to learn something. The "ignorance is bliss" crowd aren't going to learn much regardless.
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Bob Jude Ferrante
Quite the contrary... but it depends how you define "dumber."
If you define intelligence as the ability to complete tasks, then better usability is actually increasing the user's effective intelligence. The brain is better used to perform connections and to rise above quotidian detail; enslaving the brain to memorization of complex system commands is actually reducing its ability to make those essential connections.
Selected Answers from my Linkedin.com network:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Garlin Gilchrist II
Web Developer & Designer, Smart Guy
Usability not only improves productivity, it also enhances the positivity of experience and interaction.
Processing more things/data/information does not make one more or less smart. Being smart/intelligent is largely about making the right choices on what to focus on. Better usability in products and applications allows for demonstrations of intelligence for the user and the application creator:
User: I only have to process/think about important things (e.g. the task/challenge at hand), a better use of my brain functionality and capacity.
Creator: I apply my intellect to focus only what the user really wants, and eliminating as much of the other stuff as possible (this is their challenge).
Usability does not reduce the ability to tackle challenges; it instead let's us focus directly on them.
Robert Jakobson
Program Manager, Evangelist, Technologist
If we follow your logic for a moment here, it would mean that by going to a good school with skilled instructors and up to date books and technology, the education you recieved was a disservice to you.Merely making things easier for people does not reduce their ability to learn or cause their brain processes to become reduced. The falacy of your argument is based on the misunderstanding that learning is similar to a muscle and it needs to be excercised to become stronger and if it's not used it will atrophy.
Where to some extent this is true, it's also true that you excercise it not by using the interface of a computer - but by the activity you're performing on it. So in a sense by allowing people to more easily engage in activities usability increases ones intelligence.
By the same token, making it easier to go to the gym doesn't give someone a strong body - if they don't excercise when they get to the gym and you have to ingest something other than junk food.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Dustin
VP, Human Factors Design and Usability at Citigroup, Citi Cards
Muthu-
Interesting angle and kind of a trick question! Many of the answers consider usability from the perspective of software design, for which it has gained much attention. However usability and its principles literally surround us, including nature.
Taking your question in broad terms and assuming by “dumber” you mean: enabling people not to struggle using a tool, understand a communication, mentally process a service or other task in a way that is more comfortable, than if these same things were less easily achieved – then yes, dumber.
Thinking is work-- and primates as well as many other animals would rather not work, if it’s not necessary. If it is necessary, for survival, we’re hard wired to try to solve problems and even these can start to drift out of the realm of toil and into ego fulfillment, challenge satisfaction and other forms of pleasure. Are complex video games work, pleasure or both?
Like many things, both man-made and natural, it really is just about shift. Animals seek easy navigational paths to watering holes and use them over and over again, until something changes. There would be no need to blaze new trails each time, which could bring unnecessary danger. For humans, using the wheel was easier than dragging; a bow and arrow, easier and more accurate than throwing a sharp stick, printing presses, much easier than handwritten copying, etc.
At each evolutionary stage, we rarely go backwards. A modern calculator is a perfect example. I’d bet many people could no longer do the long hand equations that are easily made using the device. They may have traded off the need to understand how, just as they no longer know how to survive in the wild and hunt for food. If something has proven to be usable and easy, we gravitate toward it naturally. We want to be dumber in some things, so we can be smarter in others. The advent of metal tool making, allowed us to free up our minds for other tasks and opportunities, rather than use the time and thought required for handcraft. Constantly shifting. Even a river seeks the course of least resistance.
Usability is an extension and reflection of invention. It’s not just relegated to polishing something after the fact; it’s there from the beginning and evolves. Arthur C. Clarke once stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I suspect that in many ways, a Tribesman living off the land in the Amazon jungle is way smarter than I would be using the same tools. Usability as it relates to “smarter” or “dumber” is a matter of context.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Hancock, MBA, CQM
QA, QM and IT Director at Geospiza, Inc.
Good usability allows us to be specialists. Put differently, if a widget has poor usability then I have to become an expert at operating the widget. This diffuses my focus from my original activity ...and therefore I can't learn the original activity as quickly as I otherwise could.So good usability allows us to learn more deeply ..and poor usability forces our skills and knowledge to remain more shallow.
This assessment of course implies that the person is in fact TRYING to learn something. The "ignorance is bliss" crowd aren't going to learn much regardless.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Jude Ferrante
Software & Entertainment Author & Producer
Quite the contrary... but it depends how you define "dumber."If you define intelligence as the ability to complete tasks, then better usability is actually increasing the user's effective intelligence. The brain is better used to perform connections and to rise above quotidian detail; enslaving the brain to memorization of complex system commands is actually reducing its ability to make those essential connections.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Tips for buying used cars!
I recently bought a Used car and sharing my learnings and experience here. It is a Nissan Altima - 4 cylinder - 2.4 Litres engine with cool interior and exterior design.
I recently bought a Used car and sharing my learnings and experience here. It is a Nissan Altima - 4 cylinder - 2.4 Litres engine with cool interior and exterior design.
- Do your homework about the make, model, color and features.
- Use KBB or Edmunds.com and do some research about the car which you plan to buy for resale values, fuel consumption and unbiased reviews by existing car owners.
- Set a budget and look for the listings online at cars.com or autotrader.com
- Vehicle Background Check: Buy a Carfax report account to check the vehicle history
- Check the carfax report and market values when you find a interesting car on these websites.
- Call up the dealer/owner to setup a test drive.
- Ask for the title and see if the name of the dealer/owner matches as in records.
- Inspection: Regardless you buy from a individual owner or dealer - setup a quick inspection at a car mechanic unless the car is been certified by the manufacturer.
- Check the VIN # in the vehicle and match it with what is mentioned in the title.
- Avoid making advance payment to reserve the car unless you really like the car and see no issues purchasing it for the listed or negotiated price.
- Loan: When you plan to go for finance for the purchase - make a higher down payment to avoid paying higher interest rates.
- Warranty: Do some ground work online for buying extended warranty before you decide on the rates. If you have a quote from online - you can negotiate better and get a good deal from the dealer. Normally their markups are higher as $1000 than 3rd party warranty companies. So carefully analyze the plans and then buy the extended warranty.
- Call insurance agents in your area - from local.yahoo.com and ask for a quote. When you get a quote - make sure it covers your car value and also meets the state law requirements.
- Prepare to make monthly payments for your car loan and insurance ontime
- Play your favorite music and enjoy the ride because you would have saved a lot of money by purchasing a used car.
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