the user experience of lost luggage

Last week, I travelled to my hometown to visit my family for Thanksgiving.  On the way home, the airline lost my luggage.  Lost luggage is a bad experience all around.  It’s been some time since my luggage has been lost (of course, I also usually don’t check bags), so I was surprised at how bad the user experience is for this occurrence.

There’s no status indicator for the luggage coming off the plane.  You’re left to guess whether all of the luggage is off of the plane.  This is especially difficult when you’re directed to a baggage claim that’s in use for multiple flights.  It’s not really a lot easier when it’s just a single flight, though, since luggage appears in fits and starts.  In any event, you have to guess whether you’ve waited long enough for your luggage to fail to appear.

Then it’s time to chat with the lost luggage guy.  I consider that job to be akin to tech support, since you never call tech support when everything’s going well.  There’s probably a queue, and it’s slow-moving.  But this guy at least has some status information to share.

Problem is, his status information isn’t necessarily correct.  In my case, he said that my bag had been placed on another flight.  That other flight had originally been scheduled to leave before mine, but had mechanical issues and would instead land 45 minutes after my flight.  I elected to wait to get my bag, learning an hour later that his status information was wrong.  My luggage wasn’t on that flight, either.  After checking again, his status information said that the luggage was lost.

Then I was directed to a kiosk to enter in my information for the bag to be delivered.  I was appalled at how badly-designed it was.  Amongst the questions that it asked was whether they could use a courier service like FedEx or UPS to deliver my bag.  My reaction to that was that it meant that I wouldn’t see my bag until the next day, since the fastest shipping that they advertise is next-day delivery.  I selected “no”, but then it didn’t tell me how or when my bag would be delivered.  I was just prompted to enter my name, address, phone number, and email address.  All of this is information that they already had on file.  Instead of making me suffer through entering all of that data using the on-screen keyboard, it would’ve been nice if they had simply displayed the already-known information and asked me if that’s where I wanted my bag delivered.

At home, the bad experience continued.  The website showed that my bag’s whereabouts where unknown.  I finally got a call from the courier company, 6 hours after I’d landed, saying that they could deliver within a couple of hours.  They did.  Even after I had the bag, the website continued to show that my bag’s whereabouts were unknown.

In short, the lost luggage experience violates several user experience principles:

  • show status information
  • (corollary: show correct status information)
  • provide accurate progress indicators
  • minimise the amount of data entry required from the user

While none of these will make my luggage appear any faster, at least this would make me feel more confident in the ability of the airline to recover from their error and deliver my luggage to me in a timely fashion.

book review – “Being Geek”

I’ve been reading Michael Lopp’s blog, Rands in Repose, for some time.  Lopp has a pretty good geek resume, with experience at Symantec, Borland, Netscape, and Apple.  His blog is one that I always read.  He’s got a great gift for distilling lessons out of his experiences.  Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook is mostly a compilation of his blog posts, with some new essays added to help define the overall arc of a geek’s career, from starting at a new job to deciding to move on to the next one.

Looking on my own experience in tech companies, I think that his advice is often spot-on.  There have been times when I’ve read one of his blog posts after a difficult situation and found myself understanding it better.  He’s got a keen eye for detail and for understanding the nuances of geek behaviour, as well as all of the interacting forces that come into play when you’re working for a big geek company.  I’ve gone back to read half-remembered posts that I felt were pertinent to a given situation.

I found it amusing that Lopp says in his introduction that he’s not writing a book that gives you ten steps for anything, or that will define the five characteristics of a top leader, but most of his essays are structured in just that form: distill a situation into some archetypes, identified by Capital Letters or catchy names for people and their foibles.  For an occasional blog post, I don’t mind this style; as a book, this structure got rather repetitive.  While I love the blog, I found that I couldn’t read the book for more than a half-hour without losing interest because the style just didn’t work for an actual book.

Honestly, I was hoping for more.  The blog is excellent.  I hoped that a book would use the blog as a starting point and give more consideration, more depth, to the topic at hand.  But it’s not there.  If, like me, you’ve been reading his blog for some time, I can’t really recommend this book.  You’ve read most of it before, albeit in a different order.  The new pieces don’t really add that much.  If you’re not a reader of his blog, this book is a good look at moving through your geek career.  I’d recommend adding his blog to your reading list while you’re at it.

Here’s a list of the blog posts which are included in the book.  I think this is complete, but I might be wrong if something got re-titled or my search-fu was weak.  Also, I didn’t do more than a cursory glance when looking for the blog posts, so it’s possible that blog posts were updated for inclusion in the book.

Now that I’ve catalogued the posts that made it into the book, I see that the book has 41 essays, of which 27 are listed above.  That means that 14 essays are new content, about 1/3 of the book.

acclimatizing

Everyone, from friends to family to previous colleagues to new co-workers, asks me the same question: “how are you acclimatizing?”  Having been here for not even two weeks yet, I’m never entirely sure how to answer that question.

So far, life is mostly about figuring my way around.  I’m learning about VMware’s extensive portfolio of applications, like vSphere and vCloud.  I’m learning more about the applications that I already knew, like Fusion.  Part of learning is both about where the applications stand now, and what their roadmaps look like for the future.  While this part is time-consuming, it’s also pretty straightforward.

Another pretty straightforward task is learning about the new cadence of my day and my week.  Humans are, after all, creatures of habit; all of my habits are now broken.  I haven’t yet figured out the best route to drive from my home to campus, although I have figured out the best train/bus combination that gets me here in a half-hour.  Thursdays seem to be given over to team meetings, although Wednesdays are entirely meeting-free.

Somewhat less straightforward is figuring out how everything fits together.  VMware is a company that has seen staggering growth in the past few years, so I’m probably not the only person trying to figure this out.  The company has grown in size (this page says we’re currently at 8200 employees) and grown the number of applications.  Some of this growth is organic, some has come through acquisitions (such as Zimbra).

Thus far, acclimatizing is about gathering information.  As a researcher, this comes naturally.  The more interesting question will be in six months, to see how much I understand this company and my place in it.

week one at VMware

The first week of a new gig is a lot of hurry up and wait.

First of all, there’s the hurry-up-and-wait of setting up new computers.  I have two: a MacBook Pro and a Dell running Windows Server 2008, both of which needed software to get going.  I installed Office:Mac 2011 on my MBP, and I have to tell you that it was a weird feeling to be using the official 14.0.0 build instead of a daily build or a private build from one of the developers.  I haven’t run Windows Server in ages, so there was a lot of installation necessary so that it would run the apps that I want (such as OneNote (hi Dan!)).

Second, there’s the hurry-up-and-wait for access to everything.  There’s systems, networks, and mailing lists.  There’s benefits, business cards, and the gym.  There’s even little electric cars available to drive around campus, which requires a driving test from one of the receptionists.  Plus I’ve learnt that there’s a beer bash every Friday, so at least a little bit of Friday was spent waiting for that to start!

There’s also a lot of hurry-up-and-wait to try to figure out who is who on my team.  Before I started here, I had plenty of contact with my new manager.  There’s her manager, and another manager at the same level as she is.  There’s the other user researchers.  There’s the team of interaction designers (have I mentioned that we have some openings available for interaction designers? search our jobs site for “interaction designer” and ping me if you’re interested … ), all of whom have different projects that I need to learn about.

This week is about settling in some more.  I think I’ve got my computers set up with everything I need to work, although I’m sure that I’ll stumble across more things that I need as I go along.  I’m starting to meet with teams.  I’ve got lunches scheduled with various people across the company, some of whom have worked at MacBU in the past.  I might even get some real work done.

Of course, this spurt of potential productivity happens just when VMware is going to be shut down for the week of Thanksgiving.  I’ve timed this pretty well: I work for two weeks, then take a week off (wherein I’ll visit Michigan to see my family for the holiday).  Then I work for another two weeks, and then take about four weeks off (wherein I’ll visit Sydney to see my husband’s family).  And then it will be the New Year, and time to really get down to it.

the gender language of recommendation letters

Having just gone through the process of getting recommendations to join VMware, I was very interested in this news out of Rice University: Recommendation letters may be costing women jobs, promotions.  The researchers found that, in letters of recommendation for academia, women were more likely to be described in communal terms (helpful, tactful, kind, agreeable) and men were more likely to be described in agentic terms (aggressive, confident, ambitious, intellectual).  Further, when scrubbing these letters of recommendation for names and pronouns, and controlling for other variables important in academia (number of publications, postdocs, etc), the letters that were more agentic were rated as stronger.

I’m trying to get my hands on a PDF of their peer-reviewed article to learn more.  In the interim, this brings to mind plenty of questions.  I wonder what would happen if you were to take these letters of recommendation and swap the genders.  We know what happens when you remove gender from them, but I wonder what happens if you take a woman’s recommendation letter and replace Jane with Jim.  If a man’s recommendation letter says that he’s “helpful” and “tactful”, how does that impact the perception of him as a candidate?  If a woman’s recommendation letter says that she’s “aggressive” or “intellectual”, how does that impact the perception of her as a candidate?

The researchers say that they’re going to next consider letters of recommendation for medical faculty positions.  I hope that they, or someone else, continue to extend this research to other fields.  Academia surely has a shortage of women, but speaking as a software engineer with degrees in math and CS, they’re not the only ones.  There were only a handful of women in my upper-division courses, and even fewer female professors.

joining VMware

On the flip side of leaving Microsoft, I have now joined VMware.  There, I’m going to conduct user research across the product portfolio.  I’m excited to have a geekier focus than I had at Microsoft — my two undergraduate degrees are in CS and math, so a geeky focus is perfectly in line with my own predilections.

Today was my first day, which consisted mostly of new-hire orientation.  When I went through Microsoft’s orientation in Redmond five years ago, there were ~300 people in the room with me.  Today, there were 10 people in the room with me, and another ~20 on the phone.  Size of the class aside, the orientation was pretty similar in structure to those I’ve had at previous employers: why you should be happy you’ve joined the company, the benefits options available, the checklist of things you should get done in your first couple of weeks.

I’ve been tweeting as I go through my new experience, so you can follow me on twitter here if you’re so inclined.  There, you’ll see exciting slices of my life such as the plastic pink flamingo I found tucked in some landscaping today, not to mention a picture of my new office.  Tomorrow, I plan to find the turtles, which I think are near the cafeteria.

leaving Microsoft

Today was my last day at Microsoft. In my five years here, I shipped two full versions of Office:Mac, as well a few other things like Remote Desktop and Entourage for Web Services.  MacBU has been a truly awesome team to work with, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together (especially in Outlook!).

I’ve been blogging since I started at Microsoft (you can see my first post on my old blog here).  I’m planning to continue to blog, although I have no idea how it will evolve in the coming weeks and months.  I think it’s safe to say that I’ll write slightly less about Outlook, though. 😉

I’m going to take a little bit of time off before starting my next adventure.  Watch this space to see what’s coming next!

Exchange Connections slides coming

Today, I presented two sessions with Bill Smith at Exchange Connections: Administering Macs in Exchange and Outlook:Mac 101. Once I get back to a better network connection, I’ll post my slides here. For those of you who attended the conference, the slides will get posted to the conference site as well.

I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the sessions, since this is my first time here.  We ended up with about 50 people in both sessions, with about half of those attending both.  So I was really pleased with it.  I’ll be waiting to see the conference evaluations to see if I’m the only one who was pleased.

Thriller flash mob

To take a teensy break from Office:Mac, here’s a video of a Thriller flash mob that took place in the cafeteria last Friday.  One of the zombies is someone I mentored (and you can read into that what you will!), and the eagle-eyed observer will see that I’m one of the people watching the zombies.