So as many of you know, I left Bank of America and took a contract with IBM’s Lotus forms UX team. The position is based out of Durham but I live some 150 miles away just north of Charlotte. Luckily the fine folks at IBM allowed me to work from home.

Initially I was really unsure how this was going to work. I had concerns that being at home would be too distracting and that I would struggle to keep productive. I’m happy to say that concern was unfounded. What I discovered was that without the hassles of getting ready for work and driving into the office I was more focused and productive.

However what I do miss is the interactions between colleagues that you have in a traditional office environment. I like impromptu work discussions and the ability to get to know your coworkers on a more personal level. Granted you can do the same in a distributed work environment but I’m used to having most of the team in one location and a few members remote. It’s quite a different experience when I am one of the remote members.  So far it’s been a good learning experience.

Oh yes, I miss my chair. Bank of America had us sitting in Herman Miller Aeron Chairs. My home office chair isn’t nearly so nice.

Here we go again with the website thing.

I have discovered that after wrangling with interaction design and usability all day I am not at all interested in doing more of the same when I get home. However I do like having a web presence. As such, whatever I use for web publishing needs to be super simple or I just won’t do it. Imagine that, a usability engineer advocating simplicity. Shocking, isn’t it?

So the last iteration of humanpackmule.com was in Joomla. Granted Joomla is rather powerful CMS structure and yes I still use it for my Koi club website (www.pkwsonline.com) but the admin tools are clunky and a bit of a pain to get setup. Once you learn it it goes rather smoothly but the ramp was a bit higher than I liked. Mostly due to the fact that once I get home my motivation to continue working drops considerably. Available themes are ok, but it will take more effort than I want to expend to learn the structure to code my own themes. I found myself just finding themes and making do by tweaking.

In short, I am just like the users I design for.

This leads me to Wordpress. I’ve dabbled with it and a simple blogging tool appears to fit the bill. We’ll see how this goes.