confirmed = (Houston * 2)

Ayup, I'm going to Texas again in a week or so to teach a 2 day usability workshop thing to a bunch of developers, and if I'm hearing right, a sprinkling of project managers. Should be interesting to say the least, most of these that I've given are geared towards making a case for adding "usability engineering" into the current workflow, and how to go about doing that in the best/least destructive manner. That's actually a pretty easy sell, once you start whipping out the statistics on gained productivity and the like.

But a bunch of deer-in-headlight-staring developers, who view artsy types as their enemy de jour? I'm thinking I'm going to need to have some usability booth babes to keep their attention. In a lot of these companies I've been exposed to since the .com collapse, the animosity seems to have gone way, way down, since people are actually grateful for having a job... but there are still often undercurrents. IE, developers feel marketing makes their life miserable, and vice versa. If they perceive you as coming to them as a messenger of the other camp, you have a bit of mud to slog through.

These groups just don't even begin to understand each other in most cases, and most of their communication takes place via various liaisons. Since they don't generally understand each other, or understand why each one of them needs certain things, it can raise all sorts of unnecessary problems, morale notwithstanding. But damn, it's generally worth the effort, as they often make the other side's job much harder than it needs to be and once the give & take between them starts it can really make things a lot more efficient for everyone.

The downside is that this is going to make for a very, very tight schedule until the end of December due to everything else I've got going on. I'm back in triage mode, and the lack of sleep starts to take a toll. Having your blood register 2% stimulants by volume isn't really conducive to a long life either, but that's how it goes.

The upside is that I think it's actually going to be a lot of fun, and a bit of a challenge to translate a lot of these concepts not in a way that they'll not only understand it, but to actually feel as those they've started to grok some of the underlying concepts. And sometimes when you're forced to look at concepts through a different point of view you end up gleaning additional insights yourself.