4 Weeks Old Today…

My wife and I gave birth to our first child Emma Primrose.  4 weeks on and despite less sleep life is wonderful.  It is amazing to watch the change in her each day as she learns about the world and adapts to her environment.  

Emma already has her own blog where she co-writes with her ghost writer about her life so far

jnd

Don Normans web site is called jnd.org and if you look close enough on the home page there is a reference that says What does “jnd” mean?. jnd refers to Just Noticeable Difference. Don explains it as “In the field of psychophysics, that branch of experimental psychology that studies sensation and perception, a jnd is the amount that something must be changed for the difference to be noticeable, defined to mean that the change is detectable half the time. My goal is to make a noticeable difference — many jnds worth — in human-centered technology.”

What jnds are you going to make today?

Rediscovering an old friend

When I look back at the things I did at University and in my first job it is interesting how the things I am doing now are not so different. If someone asks I would say things are much different but what occurred to me is how the things that interested me in the past are still important to me now.

For example, at University I studied Accounting and Finance and for my final year thesis I wrote about Japanese Lean Management techniques and how they had been applied at Nissan in the UK and productivity and quality was higher than in their Japanese factories. Today I am championing Lean development within a software company. Kaizen, change for the better, is a term that caught my attention when I wrote the thesis and has stuck with me and even though it is not something I expicitly refer to at work it is the essence of what I am trying to encourage each day.

One of the most enjoyable topics covered during my post graduate study on Business Systems Analysis was Human Computer Interaction. I remember reading a lot about the topic and in particular the writings of Don Norman. Just today I was reading a post from the Agile Usability newsgroup where they referenced an article by Don Norman on Usability in Agile projects. Funny how things come together.