usability > crumbs

Profile

Mariano Calle is an Usability Senior Consultant (responsible of IA and Accessibility services in the UPS Department of everis Madrid)

He studied Business Administration and Management which helped him have a wide vision of business. It’s four years since Mariano has been working on usability, accessibility and user-centered design, topics that, for him, are useful and necessary. Before dealing with usability Mariano was a web developer and graphic designer.

Previous projects

He worked for Telefonica, Movistar, Vodafone and Amena, carrying out projects of Architecture, user tests, developing models for functional test applications and even defining processes for mobile terminals.

He has also been at Terra, redesigning internal portals. In Correos, conducting assessments of accessibility and in public administration (with several projects focusing on user design and content managers).

Mariano spent one year in Mapfre, working in one of the largest computer projects that there are currently in Spain, updating the internal operational management of insurances.

In addition, he has worked for Santillana Network, Carrefour, TNT or the Thyssen Museum in training projects and e-learning, corporate presentations, multimedia content, etc..

Interview

Mariano has answered some questions about usability:

1.What do you like the most about usability?
Users will always surprise us.

2.What do you like the less?

Usability is a solution for bad design. Good design includes usability and doesn´t need two designers with different skills, one for graphic concepts and other one for interaction.

3.Do you think usability is taken in mind enough?

Everyday, usability consultants, interaction designers an HCI professionals have more career opportunities. It means usability is taken in mind by companies. But it is not easy yet to find good experts in web or mobile tools.

4.Tell us a bad user experience you have had

I don´t like Nokia phones.

5.Tell us a good user expreience you have had

My first time with an iPod. MP3 was very boring until Apple decided to reinvent the concept about listening music.
Nowadays, I like to discover new artists in songza.com.

Jordi Andrés Solsona was born in Lleida in 1983 and he is a multimedia engineer and a usability consultant since 2005.

When he was 21 he got his undergraduate degree in multimedia at the UPC university, Terrassa. Looking forward something more technical, he became a multimedia enginner at La Salle Ramon Llull, Barcelona.

In 2005 he became a fellow researcher and research manager at de UserLab’s Human Interaction Group, la Salle, focused on Multimodal Interfaces and development of new methodologies for Human Computer Interaction paradigms.

Since 2007 to nowadays, Jordi Andrés is an usability consultant at the User Perception Services. Specialized in both qualitative and quantitative user testing of software and website, and he also works on some information architecture and accessibility projects.

Jordi has answered some questions about usability:

1.What do you like the most about usability?

I like thinking that my job makes people live easier.
I also love seeing things before they get to their main target. I like to see them evolving, improving.

2.What do you like the less?

Usability is often underestimated, specially in this country. It’s frustrating when you work hard on something and when you see the final product you realize that many of the problems spotted are still not fixed. To sum up, people is not concerned enough.

3.Do you think usability is taken in mind enough?

Feel like i already answered this one:)

4.Tell us a bad user experience you have had

The last one was when I bought a train ticket via internet, i was going home that day and coming back to barcelona, where i work, the following day. I had no problems buying the tickets, but I had to print them in a machine located at the train station. I got there, typed my code and, surprise! that machine displayed that i bought both tickets for the same day.
I printed to tickets, just to try, and everything was correct. It happened that the machines only displayed the last travel date.

5.Tell us a good user expreience you have had

Everytime i use a google product