Professional deformation makes me leave deformed rants on a great website

I was leaving a rant on a Polish graphic designer's blog about the poor usability of a flash-based site they have produced.

The website Voices from the Center covers an amazing project by Janeil Engelstadt, an American artist who spent time at the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts and Design as a Fulbright Scholar. She interviewed people around Central Europe on the end of Communist Rule - very topical since we are doing a lot of soul searching for the 20th anniversary of the "Tender Revolution" (that's what we call the Velvet Revolution here in Slovakia).

My mother sent me a link to the site and I first couldn't understand why. Later she showed me the site, since both she and my father are interviewed there. I enjoyed browsing around but I shared her frustration with the user experience - a Flash site by obviously talented graphic designers but with little regard to conventional usability principles (this is not my first Flash rant, of course).

I was frustrated enough to leave the rant and the authors were nice enough to reply, saying they disagree, since the site isn't strictly informative and aims to encourage exploration.

Of course, my professional bias made me respond again: drawing on Nielsen I argued that a more usable website would better encourage exploration (and sharing of this great content).

By the same token I admitted that they would find many of the sites I am involved with ugly. I tried to explain that harping on usability was for me what we call a "professional deformation" in Slovak. I realised though that this expression did not have the right meaning in English. I googled for the right English equivalent, since I 've had a need for this phrase repeatedly. I came across this great discussion on wordreference - shows that there really is no functional English equivalent. The best they come up with is saying you're biased by your profession, which I guess is a reasonable substitute but does not quite cover the connotational meaning of the "deformed" or "distorted" professional. You can lose a bias but once something is malformed it is harder to put right.

So apologies to the talented Poles for party crashing their blog and kudos (and some link love) to Janeil for Voices from the Center.

Landline over mobile

Although the number of landlines in Slovak households is declining I still maintain mine. I pay some 400 Slovak crowns per month to Slovak Telecom, mainly for the sake of older members of my family who feel a lot more comfortable calling my landline than calling my mobile.

While there are financial considerations (i.e. calling mobile phone numbers from a land line phone in Slovakia remains pretty expensive) there are also some privacy considerations: calling someone's home telephone and reaching them means you will not be catching them in the supermarket checkout line, at a busy traffic intersection or in a cinema.

For me another advantage is that I know only very few people have my landline number and I can be pretty sure that it is the family calling (and the occasional telemarketer who I simply hang up on).

Many new businesses these days do not bother to install landlines - probably to save the money and hassle they provide a mobile phone number as their primary contact number. I would argue that this may be shortsighted for some, especially those who interact with an older clientele. There are lots of mainly older people who remain distinctly uncomfortable both calling a mobile phone in general (perhaps because they are used to the anonymity of landline calling from the time landlines did not have caller ID) and especially calling a mobile from their land line telephone.

If I were to operate a business that expects customer calls I would probably try to offer at least a mobile and landline contact number and perhaps even consider having a separate mobile contact with the several mobile operators. From a practical perspective having a contract with each operator allows to economise on outgoing calls. But also this maximises the chance that customers wishing to reach you by phone will be comfortable doing so.

What prompted this short writeup was my recent experience trying to make a hairdresser appointment. On the website the only phone number provided was a mobile, I phoned and said I would like to make an appointment. The lady on the other end surprised me a little: "Could you call back in about 10 minutes? I am away from the salon right now." Now that would ever happen with a landline...