When folks ask me if I’m familiar with the area, I usually answer, “Mostly, I lived here ten years ago for ten years.”. Yeah, it’s been quite awhile. If I knew it would take this long for me to move back would I leave again? Definitely – the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve met in the last ten years have been invaluable.

So I’m certainly glad to be back! I notice the changes and wonder…

• If Portland was a foodie town when I left, it’s gone gangbusters since. Nice.

• I’m living in a different neighborhood, make that a different town, this time. My husband and I bought a multi-family in So. Portland, right across the bay, and have a view of the east end of the Portland skyline from our living room window. That, the ash tree in the yard, the Victorian architecture that remains, and being within a mile of the beach, the bakery, the grocery store, downtown and Bug light park more than sold us on this place.

• I’ll be doing freelance work and working from my home studio on web development, as well as doing design of various sorts. And I’m so ready for this, look forward to it, and have several projects starting next week!

• My husband Ray will continue to commute until he finds suitable work in this region, or just decides he’s had enough. We’ve been living apart with his commute for over 2.5 years so figured if he was commuting to either Hanover or Portland, it was still a long commute two times per week, so we decided to move where we want to be and make it work.

• Speaking of, more on the “making it work” part in a couple of months. Bigger stuff planned.

• There’s a heck of a lot of New Yorkers here – not that it’s a bad thing – I’m NY born and raised, but the influence is definitely noticeable in the styles, food and stores.

• Maine coast summers are so much cooler and less humid than inland summers. Very nice.

• Crime is up in Maine… different from when I lived here, and also from where I moved recently. Don’t get me wrong – I had two bikes stolen when I lived on the Eastern Prom in 8 years – 10 years ago – but drug crimes seem to be the issue now as I read it in the news everyday.

• With WMPG, WYAR, WPBN, and WCLZ, who needs XM?

So with that, I am back and sooooo happy to be here! It took a while, but here we be.

“Usability is an afterthought, if we have time.”

In fact it had my head spinning, so much that I felt a little sick.

Unfortunately many of the software products used by higher education institutions obviously lack the involvement of a use-centered design professional. It is painful to see and have to use some of the products used in higher ed, and elsewhere, that fall severely short of meeting the grade of proper process-flow, design and intuitive response.

Many times, I have come upon web tools that don’t do what’s expected. For instance, not being able to use the back button on the browser on many a college’s jobs postings site. For an example, see jobs.dartmouth.edu, do a search and try to use the browser as you normally would. And what’s sad is a majority of institutions use this for their employee recruitment process.

I could think of many systems that have the user confused about which is the next button to click, what needs to be completed to make the tool do what it needs to do. It’s kind of like the carnival midway fun-house, who knows what’s next if I take a step, perhaps the floor will move, or maybe I’ll be staring at a multitude of mirror images of myself. There’s a serious lack of concern in building these systems to make the user understand what still needs to be done before their submission is valid.

Take for instance a colleague who was in the process of submitting an application for professional certification, and thought she had completed the process by the deadline when she hit submit on the organization’s website. She received confirmation, yet came to find out through returning to the site months later that her application was not completed in time for the deadline, and that five years worth of experience she had not entered because the organization’s website had failed to send up proper flags and checkpoints for completing the application should have ben submitted days ago. She is now planning legal action because of this. Just a simple notation, an alert box, saying, “Your application is not valid until all dates of experience and information is entered” was all that’s needed.

So in web and software development, it is still the Wild West. Sure, we may have corralled content into content management systems, and everyone knows security is always on people’s minds and an important part of many a website nowadays, but the user experience and the proper use of web standards to ensure a proper experience in the browser for all users is still an afterthought.

Businesses are placing so much importance on their websites to take over where paperwork has left off that they’re treating the web as a replacement for years-old tried and true processes without putting thought into whether their system makes sense to their customers and fulfills the requirements that then paper process did. How often have you gone to your bank’s website and had a confusing, let alone frustrating experience, navigating around their clunky system? And yet somehow, when I see they’re advertising to “Apply for a loan in an instant” that I am somehow going to feel confident in their system accepting and processing my loan when the account interface looks startlingly unlikely to be able to support any transaction of it’s kind.

With all this movement away from paper processes toward the web, I predict in the not so distant future that we’ll see more complaints – and lawsuits – where an organization is at fault for not providing a proper, easily understood website with proper process flows, alerts and notifications.

So then usability and user-centered design will be at the forefront, not an afterthought, as organizations get hit where it hurts the most – in the bank account. Not until then does it seem will we have serious consideration by Information Technology professionals for the users perception and understanding of web-based systems. Until then, it’s the Wild West. Or maybe a fun-house.

Let the user beware.

Multitasking

I learned some new things about multitasking as a human being – when the option isn’t there, I focus. The iPad makes me do this because switching between applications breaks my train of thought as I wait for the application to load. However, multitasking will be a new feature coming in iPhone OS 4, so I’ll be back in the saddle again.

I used the iPad this week at a conference where I was taking notes on it with Evernote, twittering with Tweetdeck, checking email on occasion, looking up discussion topics on the web in Safari, and bookmarking to delicious. It wasn’t bad, and again, forced me to focus on one thing at a time.

The Keyboard

I’m a “Thumber.” Period. That means I can type pretty darn fast with my thumbs, something learned on my Palm Treo, which I further developed on the iphone. In portrait view – it’s just easier. Landscape view it’s a bit wide, but if I can put the iPad on my lap and let my fingers fly in traditional typing mode, that works too. So the keyboard is much better than I expected. My wrists do get a work out from holding it up and thumbing in portrait mode.

Remember the Microfiche?

Well, I used to get motion sickness when whizzing through microfiche on those projectors back in college, and have had the same experience several times when installing apps, navigating the iPad and watching movies. I think it has something to do with the amount of space the iPad takes up within your field of vision as well as vibrant patterns behind whizzing icons. I switched to the “slate” background and it’s been better.

Note taking, Google Docs

Google docs are an interesting experience.. and not at all editable like on a laptop. Spreadsheets are also interesting on the iPad and are turned into an editable form. They’re not easy to edit but it’s possible. I’m debating about buying Pages and Numbers. The three apps, including Keynote are $9.99 a piece through the App store.

Evernote is Awesome

Evernote is pretty darn slick.. super slick in fact. I’ve been using Evernote for about a year now and love the tool and the iPad app is very nicely done and now have it syncing with two laptops, an iPhone and the iPad.

Watch Movies on Netflix

The iPad app for Netflix is fantastic. I can watch streaming Netflix movies like I do on my laptop. Pretty amazing, and crisp. So watching a movie in bed on the iPad is pretty darn comfy.

Streaming Audio through Safari

Though streaming off of Pandora or the Public radio Tuner isn’t possible without the ability to multitask, one thing I can do is play streaming audio through Safari while using other applications on the iPad, something that is possible as well on the iPhone and iTouch but that I had never tried. THAT was very cool.

Location Aware

It does amazingly well with finding my location on wifi. I was impressed when I loaded the Weather Channel application and it knew my location.

Apps Cost More

So if the device is bigger, the apps must cost more, right? Right. For some reason prices compared are 3x, 4x or more expensive than the iPhone version. I don’t understand this as the functionality doesn’t appear to be more but the apps cost more.

Books

I still like paper books, but there’s something nice about being able to read in bed at night, in the dark, without a book light. I’ve started reading books off the Guttenberg project using the Stanza (iphone native) app and it works fine as one can decrease the text size and fit more on the page with the iPad. It’s nice to have a library of ebooks at your fingertips, when you’re hanging out in a waiting room somewhere with a table of unappealing magazines in front of you, just whip out the iPad.

A few random ramblings:

You can fit 6 app icons in the dock. Handy.

Too bad flash isn’t supported as Aviary.com would be very useful over wifi.

Pcalc is a great calculator for free as the iPad doesn’t come with one, nor does it come with a clock application. I picked up a free one of those too.

It is super slick, did I say that already?

The BBC, The Weather Channel, and the Bloomberg apps are very nicely done and beautiful on the iPad.

The iPhone and iTouch apps that haven’t been recreated/updated to iPad versions aren’t too pretty. I’m sure versions are coming.

Reading PDFs I had saved to Dropbox doesn’t work too well as that app has not yet been recreated to an iPad version.

You can not print from the iPad… not yet at least.

Do I miss having the ability to connect to the Internet from anywhere at anytime on 3G? Not yet as when I’m using the iPad I’m usually sitting down somewhere, usually that has wifi (home, campus, hotel, coffee shop).

Motion sickness! Did I say that?

And it is lightening fast to load stuff.

So far I have not missed having an always-accessible internet tool with the iPad (3G) as I tend to use it in the house, at work, while traveling and any place I’ll be siting awhile, usually that has wifi. It is not an iPhone mobile device, and how I use it is not the same.

Overall, I’d say the iPad is a “lite” productivity tool, good for travel, reading around the house, and simple tasks. It is by no means a replacement for a laptop but handy accessing recipes in the kitchen, reading books in bed at night or keeping in my purse. Pictures and movies are beautiful, the touchscreen is nice and all the apps I have make life easier without really any troubleshooting and that is what’s going to make this tool fly.