Opinionated About Web Usability

I walked out of work forty minutes early today. I was beaten, and shaky, and out of my element.

Just earlier, I had decided that I am not confrontational enough. That I don't know how to argue, stand up for anything, or be passionate. Today was designed to reinforce that realization. The background is that we've built a mostly stand-alone app that will serve up tasks for people to do on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It was supposed to be a [Ruby on] Rails application, as opposed to the core of Remix, which is really just a Ruby application and only kind of takes advantage of the Rails part.And there's no UI, just XML and JSON is all we expose to the rest of the world.

I love Mechanical Turk. I love the things that Rails supplies. So I love what this app could be. Today, block by block, all that got torn down. With each assault on the app, I was there, defending, but it didn't matter. It isn't that I wasn't heard, it was that it didn't matter. First, it was a dumbing down of the search engine, to the point where it borders on hard to use. That resulted in going from a one-click task to a multiple click-copy-paste task. The last conversation was in the context of removing all JavaScript - further reducing the ease of use.

I think part of it is that I empathize with Turkers somehow. Like they really are my employees, that we need to treat them well. I'm also the only guy on the team who has done more than a few minutes of turking. When Steve decided that last time that we needed to do something else, and Mike backed him up, and Glenn and Colin sat silent, I was alone. I was fighting a fight that may have been totally crazy, and I knew that. I am not yet the guy who fights for the crazy thing. Or rather, I'm no longer the man who fights for crazy things. Arguably, I was that man back in high school. Arguably, it caused me a lot more trouble at work than it was worth.

Now, I'm the guy who runs away with tears in his eyes because he doesn't want to produce crap.