I can’t help but comment on the Tom McCoy article on Interaction Design being a dead-end job.

Interaction Design is certainly no more weak a profession than Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Photography, or any other creative profession. Any single individual could take it upon him or herself to circumvent using a professional and do the work on his or her own using off-the-shelf tools, hacks or just *winging it*.

Frankly I think his blog post is shameless FUD used to gain “link” attention… and Cooper should know better.

I believe all professions evolve over time as technology and business models change. Look at how architects used to work 100 or even 50 years ago now and you’ll probably find that the current breed has a totally different skill set.

Even old sciences like Chemistry and Physics are completely different now than the old 19th century profs toiling about in their primordial labs.

Interaction designers who are really talented treat the profession more like a research effort than a “photoshop” effort. The reason is because the tools and techniques change on the delivery side, but the
desire to capture user or customer needs is always there. Even if the iphone SDK hands beautiful, simple ui components to you on a silver platter… I guarantee if you are writing a mobile banking application, you need to do some user research.

This little gem of his is a great example of flawed and almost bizarre commentary:

really?? REALLY???
So I just drop in some widgets, checkboxes, and fade-in fade-out doohickeys and people will be able to use my personal accounting or banking application? I am not sure of his point here, at all.

I do however agree with his assessment that Interaction Design is transitioning into User Experience design, but I do not think this is because new technologies are pushing designers out of that space. It is simply more economical for design firms or freelancers to bring their skills to a general audience.

At EchoUser we are continuously trying to improve our research and design methods, as well as expand our client base into the general customer experience realm. This is NOT because we are getting less work in the tech space, but because we want to grow beyond it.

Beyond tracking things via google analytics, I wanted to establish some custom log files (beyond spitting everything out into production.log). My first goal: track users that are logging in, and from where.

As I do with most things, I first scour the net for advice so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure I could probably figure it out on my own, but given how aggressively “best practices” seem to change with rails, I tend to do a lot of homework before trying something new.

This lead to frustration. I found a lot of material on the standard logging, and even a few posts on using log4, but very little on just using the standard logger to spit out a formatted message to a new file.

Finally I found this helpful post which seems to be about two years old, and a little sparse on details. Frankly, I was a little shocked.. even modern posts on custom logging were referencing this old article.

Anyhow, here was my final solution (which worked better than what was outlined in the article above):

create /config/auditlogger.rb

add this to it:

class AuditLogger < Logger
def format_message(severity, timestamp, progname, msg)
“#{timestamp.to_formatted_s(:db)} #{severity} #{msg}\n”
end
end

edit config/environment.rb

add this near the top: require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), ‘auditlogger’)

add this inside the Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

audit_logfile = File.open(”#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/audit.log”, ‘a’)
audit_logfile.sync = true
AUDIT_LOG = AuditLogger.new(audit_logfile)

(note: you actually need the all caps AUDIT_LOG)

Add this to track a user login inside your login_controller action:

AUDIT_LOG.info(request.remote_ip + ” Logged in: ” + @user.login )

Restart your rails application, watch all the goodies show up in log/audit.log

Regardless of whether or not you have enjoyed his books, it is clear his life exploration has always been at the limits of science and imagination through his writing.

What would he ask in this case?

If I were him I’d ask: What progress has medical science made in the fight against cancer?

I can’t help but sound ignorant and pessimistic here, (and I encourage you to comment), but as far as I can tell all we have done is marginally increased the effectiveness of our only tool: “chemo”.

I recall a conversation I had with an ex-oncologist at a wedding a few months ago. When he talked about his departure from the field (mostly because it was hard and depressing), I asked “but what about all the new drugs and technology”. His answer depressed me severely: “Just a bit of life extension, no significant stuff happening”.

WTF? This is the information age, that simply won’t do.

While petri dish wins are much appreciated, it would seem nothing is happening. Is this true? Is it that drug companies aren’t providing incentive to research effective (instead of profitable) cures? Is it that universities are only interested in small battles?

This is a disease that has been understood and studied frivolously for decades now… what gives? When is the nanotechnology, stem cell therapy, gene therapy, telomere therapy, star trek therapy supposed to kick in?

Soon I hope.

Now before you pummel me with examples, I do indeed inspect some of the latest news in research, and I do recognize that sometimes the small findings can lead to bigger successes later on… but I have been subjected to so many false hopes, so many clinical trials that lead to disappointment, I suppose I have become jaded.

Forgive the rant, but I want answers… use the form below

I was at the birthday party of a colleague of mine, who proclaimed that his “birthday resolution” was to quit smoking. All of us within earshot of this statement, instantly rolled our eyes. Countless times have we witnessed our friend’s quitting attempts, and countless times have we heard the excuses for his eventual relapse.

Almost daring him to quit, I blurted out my challenge: If you are serious about quitting, write me a check right now for $1000. I promise to hold onto the check indefinitely, and will only cash it if you smoke. I could instantly see his eyes light up. He ran into his room, and within moments produced his checkbook. Everyone was shocked… he actually wrote me the check.

Granted this little scheme has a few holes in it, but it did provoke some thought. Firstly, that many people are so desperate to quit smoking, they’d be willing to throw large sums of money at the problem, and most importantly that this might actually work if planned correctly.

Getting people to put a dollar value on something as intangible as quitting smoking, might actually encourage them to truely calculate how important it is to them. If they can put a dollar amount, I’d double that value, write the amount out to a friend (that you trust!), and if you do have the willpower… no cost to you. If you don’t have the willpower, beg your friend to pay for some rehab with his or her new found wealth

There is a certain blaze-ness when it comes to big companies and how they approach user feedback, it’s time to shake things up a little! Why not sneak your coffee cup design into starbucks all over the city? Or drop your improved mouse design on shelves at best buy (for free !).  Sure it isn’t the most legal of methods, but you’re bored, and you don’t care.

We’ve been dedicating a few evenings to this little project of hours,
and it is finally ready for public consumption!

It’s a pretty simple concept, we hope you like it.