Monthly Archives: December 2010

user experience

the user experience of shopping overseas

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I’m currently on vacation in Australia.  I’ve been here several times before, and lived here for a few months in 2000/2001.  This time, I’m here with my husband, visiting his family for the holidays.  We’ve been to Melbourne, driven the Great Ocean Road, seen the Grampians1, and are now back in Sydney for the remainder of the trip2.

Shopping here, or rather completing a purchase here, is quite different than what I’m used to.  In the States, when I use my credit card, it’s almost unheard-of for the salesperson to compare my signature on the paper with that on my credit card.   I’ve made quite expensive purchases at home, such as furniture or a computer, and not had my signature or identification checked.  I’m almost never asked whether I’m using a debit card or credit card.  Here, the credit or debit card is the first one asked, and I have to remember to just hit the OK button instead of entering a PIN.  Likewise, every single salesperson checks my signature, no matter how small the transaction.  Yesterday, I was in a grocery store purchasing drinks, and the self-checkout didn’t accept cash.  So I put the five bucks on my card, and someone still came over to check my signature!

This is all pretty minor, and is never a big deal.  It does show how well I’ve been trained in the US shopping experience.  But this week, shopping in Myer (a large department store), I found a user experience in shopping that ticked me off.  I tried to purchase a hat, having an ability to sunburn that’s unequalled by mere mortals.  At the checkout, I swiped my credit card.  After not entering my PIN, I was then presented with a statement of how much that this would cost in US$, and asking me to hit OK to accept this and CLEAR to not accept it.  So I hit OK.  Then I got the receipt, where they were actually charging me in US$ instead of letting my bank do the conversion.  I wouldn’t mind this if their exchange rate wasn’t so bad, and if they weren’t charging me a 2.5% commission to boot.

Aside from the exchange rate and the commission that isn’t disclosed in advance, this is a really bad user experience.  I don’t mind that they detected that my credit card is American.  When Myer’s credit card machine showed me the US$ amount, I thought that it was simply a courtesy, and that hitting CLEAR was giving me an opportunity to back out of a transaction if I didn’t realise how expensive an item was after the conversion.  The question is worded poorly on-screen.  What I learnt later, only through trial and error, was that hitting CLEAR actually results in a charge in the local currency instead of my home currency, and thus my bank will do the conversion.

As a shopper, we’re well-trained to hit OK on all prompts.  CLEAR is a button that you only hit in the case of an error on your part, such as accidentally entering an incorrect number in your PIN.  You never move forward in a transaction by hitting CLEAR.  Overloading CLEAR in this case results in additional confusion.

Furthermore, Myer appears to be the only shop doing this, so the purchasing experience is completely inconsistent with what happens when I purchase something in other shops.  Their salespeople have no idea what the credit card machine is trying to communicate to me, either.  The one who rang up the hat tried to tell me that I’d been charged in AU$ instead of US$.  Of course, the receipt wasn’t exactly clear about what was happening either, so I can’t blame her for being confused by it.

Overall, the experience left a really bad taste in my mouth.  Between the bad exchange rate and the commission, it feels like they’re taking advantage of tourists.  I have to wonder what happens to the large number of Japanese tourists that I’ve seen in Melbourne and Sydney, who might not fully understand the English on the receipt.  This experience with Myer has resulted in me skipping their stores entirely, and simply shopping at David Jones instead.

Before I left America, I researched my existing credit cards to learn which one had the best fee for purchases overseas.  In the course of this research, I discovered that some other credit cards had changed their fees since I last looked, and found a few that don’t charge fees at all for overseas purchases.  I ended up getting a new Visa card from PenFed, which both uses a fair exchange rate and has no fees for pretty much everything.  Since I’m so happy with this credit card (their customer service has been exemplary so far, and the lack of fees has now made it the only card that I’m using here), I vastly prefer relying on them to handle my international purchases.

And no, I didn’t buy the hat.  I went to David Jones and purchased one from a shop that I don’t feel like is actively trying to take advantage of tourists.

  1. Complete with a plague of locusts. ↩
  2. If you’re interested in what I’m seeing in Australia, I’m posting some pictures to twitter.  I’m sure I’ll post the rest to Facebook when I get home. ↩
VMware

corporate culture

Corporate culture is a sticky thing.  VMware, like many other companies, has a whole page dedicated to its culture.  But the official statements about corporate culture, such as VMware’s statement that we have a “culture of excellence”, don’t really do a lot to tell you about what the culture is really like.

One piece of the culture that I’ve noticed is that everyone just uses first names to refer to executives and senior management.  If someone refers to Paul, they’re usually referring to Paul Maritz, our CEO.  But it’s said casually, making a newbie like me wondering if there’s a Paul on my team that I just haven’t met yet.

This is quite different from Microsoft, where many people are referred to by their email address.  For example, if Steve Ballmer comes up in conversation, he’s called SteveB.  Even Bill Gates is called BillG.  It’s so ingrained in the culture that people will often sign their emails as “NadyneR”.  I know another ex-Microsoftie who’s said that she still trips up and signs her emails like that instead of just with her name.

I’m sure I’ll get used to just referring to everyone by only their first name instead of using a surname or at least an initial as a differentiator, but I’m not quite there yet.

Nadyne, VMware

one month!

Today is my one-month anniversary at VMware.  So far, other than the usual housekeeping sorts of things like getting my benefits and 401(k) going, I’ve met dozens of people from all corners of the company.  I’m immersing myself in all of our applications.  I’ve even started to earn my keep around here, and have completed my first project (a heuristic evaluation).

Happy anniversary to me!

Nadyne, Outlook

the evolution of my category list

I started using Entourage:Mac when I joined the MacBU in 2005.  As my mail changed from a steady stream to a rushing river, I evolved some techniques in Entourage (and later in Outlook) to handle it.  One of my techniques was the use of an extensive set of server-side rules to filter my mail.  My goal was to have only mail that was sent directly to me in my main inbox.  Anything that was sent to a list of people would go into a subfolder.

The other technique was to use colour-coded categories.  My category list evolved over time.  When I left Microsoft, I had one category for my user experience team, one for each application team, another one for general MacBU stuff, one for colleagues on the Office for Windows team, one for travel stuff, one for my personal contacts, and so on.   I had about 20 categories.  The categories were all colour-coded (for example, my PowerPoint category was orange and my Excel category was green).  This allowed me to tell, at a glance, what’s in store for me.  If I opened my inbox and saw a lot of yellow, I knew that there was something going on for Outlook.  If I opened my calendar and saw a lot of magenta, I knew that I was going to be heads-down working on user experience stuff.

I’m still using Outlook:Mac (of course!), and I imported my contact list.  But suddenly I don’t need all of those categories anymore.  All of my old categories for my work at Microsoft don’t apply any more.  I collapsed all of my old Microsoft contacts into a single category.  I created a new category for my new user experience team, as well as a general VMware category for all of these people that I don’t know yet how they fit into everything.  Now, my categories are: business, personal, services, SPLASH, travel, UE, and VMware.

I tried to go category-less when I started here to see what it was like, and that lasted for all of two weeks.  Categories help me keep track of and easily find things.  It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t glance at my inbox and tell the difference between mail from the people on my user experience team and mail from a developer on vCloud.  I couldn’t filter my calendar to only look see my flights.  I felt lost, and so the categories came back posthaste.

My category list will continue to evolve.  As I meet more people and learn more about the applications that I’ll work on, the list will change to accommodate all of these new relationships.  It might even be time to add a secondary category, “holiday”, to my list so that I don’t have to go through all of my contacts as I send my holiday cards this year.  (Which reminds me: I love sending holiday cards, so ping me if you want to be added to that list.  It’s somewhere between possible and likely that my holiday cards will be postcards from Sydney this year.)

Nadyne

help me set up my desk

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The hardware fairy gave me lot of hardware: a MacBook Pro, a Windows Server 2008 box (sitting under my desk), and a matched pair of 22″ displays.  I’ve also got an Apple Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad.  But I haven’t yet figured out the best way to make it all work together.  Here’s how my desk looks right now:

my desk, today

My MBP, which is my primary machine, is connected to the screen in the middle.  My server is connected to both screens.  The MBP has one keyboard/mouse connected to it, my server has another, which is annoying me.

I know that there’s hardware that can enable me to run two external monitors off of my MBP.  I had been dreaming of having three screens all together, so I put my laptop up on risers.  This is not working: with my MBP open, I can’t have it right next to my two monitors because the bottom of the laptop blocks the screen (and, conversely, the screen blocks access to the disc drive).  But having it separated from my monitors defeats my idea, and is annoying me in that I’m constantly turning my head to see what’s on the MBP’s screen.

I’ve got my server hooked up to both monitors, and that’s been nice to use.  I’m used to running Windows headless, so this is a bit of a surprise to me.  I’m going to be doing more on the enterprise side of things than I have in the past, so going fully headless doesn’t seem like it’s the right thing to do.  I’ve also been playing with integrating OneNote into my life 1, and that seems to be fitting into my workflow well.  So maybe I want to keep on using two monitors on my server.

Thoughts, dear readers?  Y’all are pretty smart, so I’m sure that someone out there has a good idea at how to best set up my working environment to totally rock.

  1. I’d started to use the web version of OneNote via SkyDrive, and I’ve really been liking it. ↩
Nadyne

the network effect

Living and working in Silicon Valley means that I’ve got an immense network of friends at the various companies here.  I came to VMware on a friend’s recommendation, so I started off knowing someone in the company.  I soon discovered that a couple of other people whom I’d fallen out of contact with are here.  Of course, there are also friends of friends.  I even got a Twitter introduction to someone on the Fusion team.  The network effect is immense.

I’ve been leveraging my network to help me acclimatize.  There’s a lot to learn, and much of what I need to learn isn’t something that you pick up through online training or in a meeting.  The real learning, about what makes the company tick and how everything fits together, happens in hallway conversations or over lunch.

They say that most people find a new job as a result of networking.  This is true, but it only goes so far.  Networking doesn’t stop when you get the job.  You learn about your new job through networking too.  The first few weeks at a new job are about extending your network.  If someone says that they want to have lunch, I take them up on it.  If a friend offers to introduce me to someone here, I follow through on that.  In these conversations, we figure out how our networks already collide.  We strengthen these ties, and create new ones.

My theory is that networking makes it easier to become a productive member of a new team.  I’m trying to execute on that theory now.  Check in with me in a few months to see how my theory stood up to reality.