Quoted: This is the most important column I have ever written. Please do more than read it: Visit the new organization at http://InteractionDesigners.com, subscribe to the discussion group at discuss-subscribe@interactiondesigners.com and do your part to make it happen.

Useful templates to do user profiles for usability

Quoted: View and download Information & Design's free Analysis Usability Resource about User Profile Forms.

Here's the schedule of webcasts for World Usability Day

Quoted: World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better.

Quoted: Usability goals help focus attention and resources on the user and their issues. They challenge the design team to innovate and provide the basis for design tradeoffs. In addition to guiding design, usability goals are useful in customer interactions, evaluation, and testing.

I'm reading the chapter written by this guy, Mister Robert Barlow-Busch, who feels like eating sushi every day. The topic is Marketing versus Design Persona. It is ok so far, (I'm on ... uh... page 2).

Quoted: Robert leads projects for clients who want to distinguish themselves through products that are well designed, usable, and deliver an outstanding customer experience. As Practice Director of Interaction Design, he also works with teammates to develop Quarry’s design methods. For instance, Robert introduced the use of personas to Quarry and has since then employed personas for projects in a variety of industries. He has also helped develop methods for better aligning usability with the goals and practices of marketing and branding. Some of this expertise is captured in Robert’s invited chapter about “Marketing Versus Design Personas,” in The Persona Lifecycle, a book Morgan Kaufmann will publish in 2006.

I've been thinking a lot about getting a Master's in UE, but it seems like a lot of the programs are very research-reading oriented. Maybe I should just work on a portfolio of designs for now.

Quoted: How do you know if you’re any good?

This may seem like a strange question. So much of college level education is focused on requirements, grades and exams, that the essence of what makes a good designer or developer gets left behind somewhere. What feedback do you have, other than your grades, on how good you currently are at what it is you want to get paid to do? Think about it. Where does your confidence regarding what you want to do with you life come from? How do you think your skills at getting good grades apply to getting professional level work done in the field?

Info on HCI and UE training

If Don Norman thinks MSN is easy to use, he is on something.

Quoted: "Don Norman is sick and tired of hearing people praise Google’s clean, elegant look. He argues Yahoo! and MSN are complex-looking places because their systems ...