Usability

Several months ago, I bought Blackberry cell phones for my wife and myself. I got bluetooth wireless earpieces, as well, thinking it would be much safer to use them than to try to wrestle with a cell phone in hand while we were driving.

Like many technologies, the promises of bluetooth, at least on our Blackberries, were greater than the experience. We haven't used the earpieces since we bought them, despite my valiant efforts to make them work. They are cantankerous, hard to get placed, harder still to sync with the phones, and generally more of a pain than they are worth.

But, today, I will try again. I'm going to go through all the motions of charging the beasts, syncing them to our phones, and all the other myriad steps required to get them to work. And I'm sure they will...just not as easily and as conveniently as they should.

Once, I bid on providing management services to an association of usability professionals, i.e., people whose job it is to assess and evaluate changes to products to make them easy to use, intuitive, and to maximize the relationship between effort and performance. We didn't get the business. If usability professionals were involved in reaching the level of performance achieved in my Blackberry/bluetooth earpiece combo, those professionals should be removed from their professional gene pools and returned to jobs watering plants, roles for which they are better-suited.

But I'll try again. I'm pretty technologically-saavy. Maybe I was having a bad time before and it will be easy. In that case, I'll withdraw my scathing comments about the culpability of certain usability professionals. Otherwise, I'll continue to gloat that the association didn't select my company for management, a sure sign of ineptitude!