Interested in Everything (Design Eye for the Usability Guy)

One of the things that bugs me about myself if that I can get interested in anything, and at times it seems like I'm interested in everything. While this may be good from an open-mindedness point of view, it usually means that I feel like I have too many things to read, too much to do, not enough time, etc. It's not enough for me to just be a programmer all day, which could easily fill all of my free time with various books on the subject. I also feel the need to write, teach, and practice music (drums mostly).

But wait - there's more! I've always been interested in UI design and usability, but I never had much of a chance to do anything with it back in my old QA job. Now I actually get to design things I've gotten back into it, and I feel sligtly upset that my dream major from college does actually exist - I just didn't know about it at the time. Grr.

Ok, back from the tangent. Blogs have allowed me to get back into the swing of things pretty quickly, but of course it gives me other interests. Like web page design. I don't think I've ever created a good looking web page (thank goodness for Blogger templates and .Mac), but that doesn't stop me from being interested.

Anyway, on to the link and the origin of this post. There are some really great sites out there that talk about usability in web page design - Design By Fire, Superfluous banter and others. A few of these guys got together to redesign a post from Jakob Nielson's site, and you can find the results in a post on Design By Fire. It's pretty funny, if you're into that sort of thing.