Streetbuzz Interview
May 23 and June 16, 2005
Domenick Dellino: Website usability analyst, avid cyclist, manic home repair guy, anthropologist, student of consumerism, part-time gourmet cook, recovering Type A / obsessive compulsive.
Lives in Seattle,Washington, USA.
A STREETBUZZ INTERVIEW
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STREETBUZZ: Domenick, where and when were you born?
DOMENICK DELLINO: I was born in Spokane, Washington, in January 1953.
STREETBUZZ: Tell me about your family and childhood...
DOMENICK DELLINO: I was the oldest of eight children, four brothers and three sisters. I always say the reason I don't have kids is that I had enough of them growing up: I had three (siblings) in diapers at one time!
We had an adventurous childhood: camping, making forts, experimenting with rockets, chemistry sets, and microscopes. I was the smallest and fastest guy in my school.
STREETBUZZ: How was your school experience?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Well, I won the first place in the science fair in seventh and eighth grades. Seventh grade was for rocket demonstration of Chinese rocketry where I made black powder and I burned it in the grade school auditorium. Later I was called to the principal's office and the fire marshal came to talk to me. I impressed him with my knowledge of Chinese rocketry, how the Chinese were building rockets in 5230 BC, and so forth, so I deflected any trouble.
And then in eighth grade I made a computer - analog computer - with 50 lights each representing a match in the pile. You played this game where you had to choose between one and four matches. The object was to be the last one to pick out a match. You played and the computer always won. Well, except once or twice.
High school was mostly about girls and wrestling.
In college I majored in anthropology, took a few years off, and went back to grad school at the University of Florida where I continued in anthropology with a masters and doctorate; it took me about ten years.
STREETBUZZ: And after grad school?
DOMENICK DELLINO: That was the end of my academic career. I did catering for a year, I moved back to Seattle to be near my sweetheart Marcy Bloom and worked part-time for Nordstrom's catering while working on the dissertation. And then, in 1990, I got a job at Aldus doing tech support for PageMaker. I did that for five years.
I took advantage of the Adobe merger with Aldus to receive a severance package while I finished my dissertation. That took 6 months of 16 hours days. It was one of the hardest and most challenging things I've ever done. I finished after 5 years of being ABD (all but dissertation.)
I was consulting on various projects for two or three years - lots of desktop publishing work; I was the production editor of the Journal of Naturopathic Medicine and then I started working at Microsoft. I started as a technical writer and after a year I broke into doing usability research, which I always thought was the perfect blend of using computers and my love of anthropology.
STREETBUZZ: That brings us up to your current position I think?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Yes. A year at Saltmine, a year at the UW (University of Washington) teaching and serving as Assistant Director for the LUTE (Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation), and currently now I'm three years at WAMU (Washington Mutual Bank). I'm doing usability research as the Vice President of User Research and Testing for all of WAMU's public-facing websites. And I pretty much built the usability department. It's a lot of fun...I can't believe they pay me to do this, as they say. I do a lot of web design and customer research design.
STREETBUZZ: And there'Ss a woman named Marcy Bloom in your life?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Oh yeah, her (laughs). So after about seventeen years of knowing each other and eight years of living together, we got "M'd" (married); we don't use the word "married", we don't use "husband" and "wife", and we still call each other "partners." The greatest thing about our relationship is that we keep each other laughing.
STREETBUZZ: What are your favorite technologies?
DOMENICK DELLINO: It used to me my Makita drill and my Cuisinart. Then it was my Palm (portable data organizer) but they won't allow us to connect them to our PC's at work so now it's practically useless. Now it's my bicycle. It's only 1 1/2 years old but I've ridden so much that I've already needed to change my front chain ring and rear cluster and chain. I did it myself, I saved $400! I've ridden 6750.1 miles on two bikes in the 4 years since my quadruple heart by-pass. I'm quite enamored with beating the pants off the 30-somethings on the trails. I tend to be quite competitive in the saddle. It's become one of the ways I define who I am.
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STREETBUZZ: Please comment on usability - the thing you do at work.
DOMENICK DELLINO: The cool thing about usability is you get to be the user advocate. So oftentimes it's like battling the legal business rules and conventions that nerds like ourselves think are the way everything should work. And you get to simplify life for everybody. In a sense you get to play the rebel. I play a role of maverick and risk taker, pretty much to the hilt. And it doesn't hurt that I'm usually right. And usually I'm right because I learned what I know directly from users - not from books, gurus, or other nerds like myself. Well, actually, I've learned a lot from a number of my closest colleagues, too.
Lots of times there's resistance. You have to learn to get around that. You learn to be a diplomat while at the same time: "When in doubt, assume the authority" (that's my personal motto). So far that strategy has served me well.
STREETBUZZ: That segues to the larger world...didn't you just describe the approach that Bush and his crowd have taken?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Their approach is more about “The Big Lie.” Reagan took that approach, too. My approach is more about being the maverick and waving your arms in the air when something is unfair, too hard, or incomprehensible. And so why do I have such confidence? It's not because, I'm so smart, or know things or have design skills that others don't; as I said, it's that my knowledge comes from years and years of watching people in the usability lab struggling with what other people thought was good design. So my knowledge really comes from the users. And in spite of what anybody thinks, the beauty of usability research is that it shows you what works and what doesn't work for regular people. Yes, in an odd way, being effective in my world requires some of the same tricks the Republicans use. They are such good spinmeisters. They know how to speak to their constituents—what touches the heartstrings of Middle America—they play to the crowd. In my world, it’s more about being diplomatic and actually marshalling real data to get your point across.
STREETBUZZ: Speaking of Republicans...
DOMENICK DELLINO: Like any thinking person, I'm outraged at what's happening. I'm depressed that Bush got elected a second time, but it's no more of a shock than when Reagan got elected a second time. I always say after that happened in 1985 that I could no longer be surprised by how stupid the American people can be. But I never expected that they would elect someone that's even stupider than they are.
Well basically, I think that the blue states should secede from the union, and leave all the Midwesterners and the rest of those hicks to their own devices, get what they deserve. Of course, it's really a national division between people in cities and people in rural America - between the educated and those who believe everything their evangelical pastors tell them.
STREETBUZZ: That won't happen...no one is going to secede from the Union, right?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Bush's popularity is dropping as more and more of his lies become common knowledge and his Christian fundamentalist beliefs are exposed for the hypocrisy they truly are. So the D's (Democrats) will have a chance in 2008, but it's clear that a lot of the Republican party, too, is going to move away from Bush. And if John McCain becomes the Republican candidate in 2008, he will be hard to defeat.
STREETBUZZ: So you don't sound very optimistic...
DOMENICK DELLINO: As I say, if that many people think he's that damn golden - Bush, I mean - their beliefs aren't going to change overnight. The country is moving toward fundamentalism. People here care more about them whether gays are getting married than if they're own kids will be able to afford health care. Yes, it is true, they don't see the bigger picture, they don't see stem cell research progressing science, they just worry about somebody killing fetuses to get the fertilized cells for research. They're hypocritical 'cuz they complain about government spending money, about taxes being raised, but they allow the government to meddle in everybody's personal lives.
STREETBUZZ: How do you see the next 30 or 50 years for our race?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Grim. I see the Democrats as moving more toward the right, more moderate. They'll have to move to the right to eclipse enough of the voters to get elected. So by doing that, they provide all of the American people with fewer political choices. And it becomes true when people go to the polls and say there's no real difference, "why should I vote?" So where I see us moving is more toward conservative-only choices. That can't be good for the planet.
STREETBUZZ: Can you make a more global statement about the future?
DOMENICK DELLINO: I think all those things will be more of a reflection of that conservative viewpoint. There will be more drilling in Alaska, because of the conservative viewpoint. It won't be because the people want that, but because the corporations want it. Because the people who they elect will be in the pocket of corporate America, and that's what we'll get. Skyrocketing health care (costs), more people on the streets, more people falling thru the cracks, and more people in churches with their self-righteous attitudes.
And we'll continue to have to spend more on defense. There will be more conflict in the world, because we'll have to continue to defend our corporate interests offshore. I mean, Iraq and oil is the prefect example. It's very tied to people wanting big cars, we have insufficient oil reserves, and the U.S. economy will always be dependent on fossil fuels, so we won't tolerate "enemy" governments in countries that control a lot of the oil in the world.
It's no surprise that more and more people understand that we went to war in Iraq to guarantee strategic military control of the oil there. We wrestled that control from what we perceived as a hostile government (government of Saddam Hussein.)
It's coming to light that the cowboy (George Bush) had plans to wage war on Iraq even before he was in office. This is also coming out now in the memos between George and Tony Blair that have recently reached the press. And it's been publicized for a long time that it's always been a vendetta that George when we uncovered the plan of the Iraqis to assassinate his father.
It's always going to be true that corporate America never has as its interest to protect the environment. It's always about what's best for the corporate annual report, and the short term price of the stock -not about how many forests we didn't mow down, or how many pollutants we didn't add to the atmosphere. So I see the legacy we leave for our kids as pretty grim. Of course, the American people are also to blame. It's become the "Me generation" all over again. Fortunately, there are people who do care, but we're just the minority. I always say that Republicans are either greedy or uninformed.
STREETBUZZ: To use your own word, that's all pretty "grim." What do you do to keep from slicing your wrists?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Bicycle to work as often as I can. It’s just all about trying to live your life as a good global citizen. As Gloria Steinem would say, you want your checkbook register to reflect your values. She calls it checkbook activism. The things I buy are mostly recycled, I have a car that five years old and only has 28,000 miles on it. Meanwhile, I have two bicycles that are five years old and have over six thousand miles on them. I consider the odometer the most important part of my bicycle equipment, after the brakes, which I rarely use.
STREETBUZZ: What's the plan for the rest of your life?
DOMENICK DELLINO: I guess I'm gonna stay at this job until I don't enjoy it anymore, and then I'm gonna retire and live cheaply. And I want Marcy to try to retire as soon as she can. My goal is to keep riding and to continue bettering my time every year.
STREETBUZZ: Words of wisdom?
DOMENICK DELLINO: Always be honest, to yourself and to everybody else. It sounds so trite maybe, but if you really live your life that way, it just feels so much better.
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A STREETBUZZ INTERVIEW
omenick can be contacted at: domdellino@comcast.net
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