All Good Intentions ...

Hi there! Well I had all good intentions of getting back to blogging this week after the fraught times of my exams last week but hey, I hope you will forgive me if I was a bit slow getting back into it. We are going away to Brighton this weekend to visit some of Mike's family who live down there, so I guess this week will be a bit of a write-off ... but I have been thinking of you all, at least :-)

So, just to update you, I have been working quite well on my sampler this week and would have posted a WIP photo as you will see the difference in my progress, however my camera's battery is completely flat (my fault for leaving it on for too long, grrrrr!!) so I will try to post a photo when I get home tonight. I am enjoying sewing it at the moment as its all the green leaves (4 different tones) so its nice and restful!

Work has been manic beyond belief. Today I am going to be running some usability trials. This involves visiting people in the workplace, running a demonstration of a new release of software (in this case it is the software that runs the e-mail system) and asking them to carry out some tasks, timing them with the current version and the new version of the software and noting down the results. The reason we do this is to measure the benefits of using the new version - so, there may be a good benefit in a particular feature, or possibly our user may tell us "that's awful, I prefer it the way it was"! In which case I have to then take the feedback to our software engineers and they will modify or remove the feature. So, this part of my role is really focussed on the end-user (who often gets forgotten!! That sounds ironic, but it happens a lot). I love talking with and helping people so its the best part, as far as I am concerned.

You could say that my personal interests mirror my career interests because I enjoy being creative and also thinking of ways of turning things into something worthwhile in some way. I really admire software programmers as I am not talented in that way, but one thing they sometimes lack is the vision of how to model the software to make it user-friendly - they are focussed on "making things work", whereas there is a need to "make it functional for people using it" and that's where people like me come in!

Well, that's all my rambling for now - I hope that the sun is shining brightly where you are (if only in your heart!) and that we will catch up again soon. Happy crafting and creating - ENJOY :-D

Hugs
Ali xxxx