The lives of others

In work we have usability labs, which consist of a participant room, an observer room and a one-way mirror between the two. We peer through the glass and into the participant room, watching and learning as perfect strangers sit at a computer and do their best to use the products we’ve spent forever developing. It’s always often a fascinating show. Things we guess participants will have difficulty with, they fly through, and things that we assumed would be simple turn out to be difficult and confusing.

It can feel weird to watch people in this way, but I have to say I enjoy being a paid voyeur.

I enjoy it so much that sometimes, when I’m on the shuttle bus going home, I choose a reverse-facing seat so that when I look out through the window I can see backwards towards the oncoming cars.

The perspective this affords blew me away when I saw it first. Sitting backwards, you get to see the people who you are sharing the freeway with. No longer are the cars just boxes of anonymous boxes metal, slowing your journey home. Now each contains a little story of its own, asking to be guessed at.

Almost all the cars have only one person. Some people stare forward into the mid-distance, their thoughts elsewhere. (It’s the same stare that you see on people looking at computer monitors; here it is on me.) I imagine those people are listening to National Public Radio or whatever, or just processing their thoughts from the day. Other single drivers are totally rocking out to their favorite music, head bopping, hands banging off the steering wheel. Others are talking — perhaps to themselves, but more likely on the phone, I guess. I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen some people listening to language lessons, their lips whispering back the phrases played to them over the CD. You can tell them from the people having phonecalls, because the people having phonecalls are much more animated and their eyes much more alive. The cars with more than one person bring a never-ending variety of stories, from couples laughing or arguing to parents listening to their children tell stories on the way home from soccer practice, to groups of teenagers heading up to the city for the evening.

Whatever they’re stories really are, guessing at them has helped transform for me an otherwise mundane journey into a showcase of the lives of others. And to anyone wanting to peer back into the shuttle’s smoked glass window, here’s a peek.

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This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.