I’m coming up on six months with VMware (!!!), and it seems that life is settling down into routines. I recently got asked what life is like as a researcher at VMware.
I’m currently actively working on three different projects:
- Zimbra web client usability study
- vCloud Director contextual inquiry
- vSphere/vCloud/more longitudinal research
Today, I’ll have a bit of each of these. As of this writing (10am), I’m anticipating that most of my day will be spent split between vCD and Zimbra, but we’ll see what happens.
I take a combination of Caltrain and VTA to get to work. VMware pays for all of my public transit costs, it only takes a few minutes longer to get to work than it does if I drive, and it’s a great excuse to buy a cup of coffee at Red Rock on my two-block walk to the train station. What’s not to like?
I usually don’t have meetings on Monday mornings, and today is one of those Mondays. The morning starts off with email. I’m one of those Inbox Zero sorts, so the first order of the day is getting as close to that as possible. A few of the items in my inbox are things that will get handled as I go through my to-do list for the day, so I leave them there for now.
First order of the day is to get ready for a Zimbra usability study that I’m running next week. Most importantly, I need to start to recruiting participants, so I spend the morning putting together a survey to find participants that meet my criteria (in short, they regularly use email, calendar, and address book for business purposes). Once that’s sent out to some potential participants, it’s time for lunch.
After a VMware cafeteria lunch of aloo gobi and a samosa, it’s time for another email check and a couple of steps closer to Inbox Zero. A couple of the mails that I received were from Bugzilla. I submitted some fit’n’finish bugs for one of our applications late last week, and I got some questions about those today. I spent a half-hour doing a bit more research and getting screenshots to further illustrate the issues that I observed. I’m pleased to note that a couple of the bugs that I had submitted were pulled into an earlier release than I had previously requested.
Just as I wrapped that up, one of the interaction designers on my team popped by my office to ask a question about the survey that I’m using to screen participants for the Zimbra study. We had a quick chat about the study, my goals for the study, and what kind of participants I’m interested in. He was especially interested in the difference between two questions that I asked and how that differentiates between potential participants. I opened up the survey results to date and quickly showed him some of the anonymous results to help him understand what distinction I’m drawing and why it makes a difference. (Sorry, I can’t say more about this without disclosing too much about the study!) I love having such an extensive user experience team who are highly invested in what’s going on, even when they’re not involved with the project that I’m currently working on. It’s such a great environment.
Then it was part of the non-sexy part of being a user researcher: doing all of the work necessary to run the usability study. I checked out the usability lab to make sure that I’ve got everything I need there (and grabbed a picture of the VMware turtles, who were out sunning themselves when I walked past their pond). I also spent some time getting a couple of test accounts set up, sending mails to those test accounts, and populating the calendar. I even pressed a few members of my team into service and got them to send mails to my test account, so that not everything is coming from me.
With that done, I spent some time prepping for the vCloud Director research that I’m kicking off. I worked on the discussion guide for the study, and sent off a flurry of mails about getting participants scheduled.
I wrapped up my day with my weekly 1:1 meeting with my manager. We talked about my upcoming projects, the open positions that we’re hiring for, and some ideas for future research directions. Then I came back, made it all the way to Inbox Zero (yay!), finished up this post, and caught the bus home.