When your kid scribbles on the wall, you figure: ‘hey — a future artist’. But what should you think when your kid creates intricate attribute-based taxonomies for several imaginary friend personas? Hm. Well, this week at OK/Cancel we have a guest essay by Carolyn Snyder where she describes her own childhood has helped form the foundation of her work in usability.

For those of you who don’t know Carolyn, she is the author of Paper Prototyping — highly recommended.

It’s a challenging time for the usability profession, no doubt. Many people are still unaware of (or worse, profoundly uninterested in) what we do for a living. The job market, at least in the US, has been tough for usability specialists the past couple years. More insidious but perhaps more deadly, we threaten to tear ourselves apart from within, fighting (albeit politely) over methodologies, certifications, or points of protocol such as whether it’s appropriate to have observers in the room during usability tests.

So let’s pause for a moment to reconnect with the joy of usability.

Ever read a book titled “The Joy of ?” (There are several; don’t leap to conclusions which one I’m talking about One thing I’ve noticed about such books is that the methods they describe require a fair amount of work if you do them right. But your efforts are rewarded by that elusive and satisfying feeling of joy.

Two new translations have been added. A German translation kindly provided by the German Chapter of Usability Professionals Association’s Anja Glauch and a Russian translation provided by UIDesign Group’s Alexey Kopylov and Platon Dneprovsky and Usability.De’s Andrei Sedelnikov. Enjoy!

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