There
is Only One Sure Means in Life
The following is an
excerpt of a short story written by Larry O'Brien for the
forUSE 2002
conference.
"There is only one sure means in life," Deasey said, "of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money."
-- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
We were in it for the money, no doubt. In the Spring of 1999 in San Francisco, you couldn't not be in it for the money. Money was dripping from the ceiling tiles, bubbling up around manhole covers, and tooth pasting its way out of the speaker slots of the StarTac phones. And iMind Education Systems seemed as reasonable a way to scoop up a few bushels of cash as any. Heck, it even had a noble veneer: use browser-based software to distribute computing resources to the underpowered machines that dominate the nation's classrooms. That the CEO was a paranoid megalomaniac with a substance-abuse problem and the President spent those late nights not balancing the books but reading every piece of email that crossed the corporate servers? Well, you know nothing's perfect. The five thousand dollar prostitute the CEO charged as a business expense was nothing compared to the prospect of turning 50,000 lines of Java code into a multibillion-dollar valuation in sixteen months. At least he didn't give her stock options and dilute the pool. That would have ticked us off.
Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood flew down to New York City to meet us. We knew that our first client-side component was going to be a lesson-planning tool for K-12 teachers and the CEO insisted that, like all things we did, the UI be "world class." One of the reasons that I had chosen to work at iMind was that they had a dedicated CHI designer on staff at a time when they had only two programmers. Given that our end-users were going to be teachers, a group rightly suspicious of the technological "solutions" regularly foisted upon them, I felt that iMind seemed to have its priorities straight. In late July, when Drs. Christopher Gentile and Steve Thompson joined the company to guide the products from an educator's perspective, we realized that our prototypes, with interfaces designed to impress investors or technologists, were not going to serve our users.
So I prevailed upon Larry and Lucy, whose book Usage-Centered Design graced every bookshelf at iMind, to take a lunch. We flew in, they flew in, and we had appetizers. Larry and Lucy tried to put off the CEO, explaining that they were very busy, that our deadlines were impossibly short, and our scope impossibly broad. None of this fazed the CEO, who declared that price was no object and ordered another bottle of wine for our lunch. Larry tried again, stroking his beard and innocently wondering if, perhaps, Kindergarten teachers might not have different needs than 12th grade teachers. "That's why we need you!" Shouted the CEO, grabbing in the air towards Larry and Lucy as if to drag them bodily back with us, "I read User-centered Designing! It's world-class! Look, I've got a hun-five hun-a million dollars' worth of hardware in the back room of iMind! We're like a rocket ship on the pad! It's all fire and smoke and shaking now, but when we clear that launch tower - VOOM!" The CEO abruptly stopped and ordered us all to leave immediately so that we could catch the limo back for our 1:30 United flight returning to San Francisco. I think we had the same flight attendants who had staffed our morning flight. They looked tired. I had a middle seat and tried to eat the almost-complete serving of seafood risotto I had taken from the restaurant, but it was cold and gluey.
And yet somehow it came to pass that Larry and Lucy came to the Bay Area to design our lesson-planning tool...
© 2001-2003 Fabian.