Monthly Archives: May 2011

VMware

could I have an acquisition with that, please?

A couple of weeks ago, I said that VMware is out to hire half the Valley.  On the user experience team, we’ve hired four or five new people in just the six months that I’ve been here.  VMware currently has a zillion job openings, and now we’re about to triple the size of our main campus.

But that wasn’t quite right.  We’re actually out to either hire or acquire half the Valley.  Just look at the past few weeks.  We’ve acquired SlideRocket and Socialcast, plus Shavlik.  That’s three companies in six weeks!

Nadyne, user experience, VMware

why I work for VMware

When I moved to VMware last year, I was often asked by friends and colleagues why I chose to leave consumer apps for enterprise apps.  There’s a lot of different reasons, but VMware’s CIO summed up one of them very well in this interview with the Wall Street Journal:

You’re at home and you have Facebook, you have Twitter: great UI, you’re able to collaborate, there’s no training classes for that. You go into the enterprise and you’ve got Soviet-era interfaces and they’re horrible. What we have to do as IT professionals, is take that consumer experience which is easy, bring that into the enterprise and help businesses actually be much more productive.

Yup, that’s it.  There’s a great opportunity for me here at VMware to help people be more productive at work.  I don’t necessarily think that we’re going to get to a Twitter UI, but there’s awesome things that we can do with things like the Horizon App Manager that make the lives of both end users and admins a lot better.

VMware

Gigaom: “VMware is the new Microsoft”

I just escaped the Dubiously-Evil Empire, and now Gigaom tells me that I really didn’t in their article “VMware Is The New Microsoft, Just Without an OS”.  Gigaom looks at VMware’s history, acquisitions, and recent launches to conclude:

With VMware holding the keys to the hypervisor layer and management, then the platform layer, and even the cloud applications layer with email from Zimbra, and presentations from Slide Rocket, why do I need Windows?

Hopefully this means that my VMW stock will continue to go up, unlike all of the MSFT stock that I still have …

Nadyne

do you think this is Twitter spam?

3 Comments

I’d like you guys to weigh in on something.  A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation on Twitter about Mac personal finance software.

I’m an old-skool Quicken user.  I’ve got more than 15 years of data in Quicken.  I manage everything in there: chequing and savings, credit cards, mortgage, 401(k)s and IRAs, employee stock grants and purchases1, even my life insurance.  When I was a Linux user, I maintained a Windows partition only for Quicken and games.  When I became a Mac user in 2001, I imported all of my Quicken for Windows data into Quicken for Mac so that I didn’t have to maintain a whole OS for one app.  Ever since that switch, I’ve never been entirely satisfied with Quicken for Mac.  I’ve tried several different apps in the intervening years, but haven’t been able to find an app that fully supported my extensive use2.  Even the latest version of Quicken, Quicken Essentials for Mac, doesn’t meet my needs.  So I’m still using Quicken 2007.

I follow Andrew Laurence on Twitter, and we had the following exchange on Wednesday:

@atlauren: Quicken Essentials, iBank, or MoneyDance? Go!
@nadyne: how hardcore are you? Quicken Essentials sucks if you try to do serious tracking, or if you’re an existing Quicken for Mac user.
@atlauren:Currently Quicken/Mac/2007. I basically use it for statement reconcile, transaction dload. Direct Connect/QFX is important.
@nadyne: QEM doesn’t support QIF downloads, but does support OFX. I use Q07, tried QEM, and went back to Q07 even though it’s so buggy.
@atlauren: Hurm. Most my institutions use OXF/DirectConnect. One does OXF/WebConnect. One only does OXF for Quicken/Win; Mac has to use QIF.
@nadyne: The last time I tried iBank and MoneyDance, they didn’t have enough support for my use. But that might’ve changed.

The next day, we got the following tweet:

@IGGmarketing: Full-featured iBank 4 imports from Quicken, has reports, budgets, iPhone sync, free trial.

This felt like spam to me, so I went and checked out their twitter stream.  Most of their tweets were identical to that one, with a few that were responses to questions.  So I responded:

@nadyne: It’s so full-featured it’s got spammers and everything! Isn’t that something to be proud of.
@atlauren: Blocked and reported. sigh.
@nadyne: at least they were kind enough to remove themselves from consideration, I suppose
@IGGmarketing: Sincere apologies but in doing my job there’s a big diff between “spam” and entering a public discussion via social media.
@nadyne: When you send a form tweet that doesn’t address the conversation, it’s spam.
@IGGmarketing: Just sharing relevant info. Granted I lose a certain amount of nuance in 140 characters. But I never disguise my ID, intent or bias.
@nadyne: that’s the point: your tweet wasn’t relevant to our conversation, and is the same tweet you use for any mention of Quicken
@nadyne: the issue isn’t a lack of nuance, but rather a lack of consideration

So, what say you?  Were they spamming, or did I overreact?  I’m really curious what y’all think.

  1. No options, though. I’ve only ever had stock grants from my employers. ↩
  2. Which, I must say, is fine.  If my usage isn’t part of their target audience, I’m okay with that. ↩
Horizon

VMware Horizon App Manager is launched!

1 Comment

One of my first projects upon joining VMware was to give some user experience love to Project Horizon.  Today, we have launched VMware Horizon App Manager 1, which is the first piece of Project Horizon.

So what is the Horizon App Manager?  It’s a portal that allows end-users one-click access to cloud apps that their providers have deployed.  On the backend, it hooks up to Active Directory (or others).  What this means for the end user is that they don’t need a billion different usernames and passwords for all those cloud apps that they use.  For admins, they can quickly and easily deploy apps to users, also leveraging their existing Active Directory setup.  For example, they can say that everyone in the “sales” AD group gets access to Salesforce, or everyone in “engineering” gets access to WebEx.

I think it’s pretty spiffy.  If you’re interested in learning more, check out our site for Horizon App Manager.  There’s also already a bunch of coverage in the tech press, including:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include our three-minute overview video, filmed right here on campus:

  1. I just realized that its acronym would be vHAM. I think this means that this is going to have to go un-acronymed. ↩
user experience

Q&A: how do you prep for a usability study?

When I mentioned that I was going into the lab to do a usability study, I got a mail asking:

How do you prepare for a usability study?  What materials do you produce?

In this case, I got a request from the Zimbra team to help them understand the behavior of their users.  I met with the team a few times to understand their needs, and then prepared a research plan.  For this study, the research plan was a single page.  It contained the research questions and how I planned to answer them, as well as a discussion of the type of users that I will recruit to help us answer these questions.  Once the team bought off on the research plan, I got down to the real work.

First, I produced a draft of the task list.  The task list is the list of stuff that I’m going to ask my participants to do in the study.  Creating a task list is at least as much art as it is science.  You have to create tasks that feel natural and appropriate for the environment that you’re studying, and you have to avoid leading language.  In the case of Zimbra, this isn’t exactly easy.  I was interested in several scenarios in the calendar, but here are some words that I can’t use in a task list: meeting, appointment, event, recurring, repeating.  How do I tell a participant to create a meeting without actually telling them a word that they’ll see on the screen as they do the task?

The task list had several iterations.  I iterated on it a couple of times by myself.  Once I felt like I had a good draft, I sent it to the Zimbra team to ensure that I wasn’t missing something that we wanted to study.  I met with my fellow researchers to ask them for feedback on it.  I did a pilot study to check for time and flow (more on that in a minute).  All of this got incorporated into the final task list.  For this study, I ended up doing three major revisions of the task list from my first draft through to the final document that I used in the study.

The task list turned into the moderator script.  The moderator script is a superset of the task list, and it covers everything that I say during the study.  It also notes the different ways that a participant could complete the given task.  Having this information immediately at hand helps me to follow what the participant is doing during the study.  It also makes it easy as I’m taking notes, since I can just jot down that the participant took Path A through the interface.

Then there’s a bunch of ephemera associated with simply running the test.  I use a checklist between participants to make sure that I get the testing environment set up correctly for each person.  I’ve got an end-of-day checklist too, which reminds me to do things like print off any needed materials for the next day’s participants, ping those participants to remind them what time they’re scheduled to come visit my lab, and send any schedule updates to the team.  For my own note-taking purposes, I create a Word document for each participant, which contains all of the notes that I take during that participant’s session.

I also have an observer survey.  I ask any member of the team who comes in to observe a participant to note their top three observations during the study.  This helps me if I miss something.  It also allows me to see the study through the eyes of someone who isn’t necessarily well-versed in a usability study.  Their comments often help me to craft the report of research results afterwards because I have some additional insight into how they see both their application and their users.

I always do a pilot study before I actually begin the study.  If I’m running the study on live code that isn’t going to change during the study, then I do this the day before the study is to begin.  If I’m using a prototype (paper, Flash, Flex, whatever), then I do it a few days before the study is set to begin.  This pilot allows me to make sure that the testing environment is working properly, the study flows properly, and everything fits into the allotted time.  I always uncover one problem during the pilot study.  It never fails.  If it’s live code, then the issue is usually just with my task list, which I can update quickly.  If it’s a prototype, then an issue in the prototype usually takes a little bit more time to fix, which is why I do the pilot earlier to accommodate for that.

Then I conduct the study, which is the easiest part of this.  During the study, I don’t do much other than collect data.  I save that all for what happens after the study, which is probably a blog post on its own (if there’s any interest, that is).

Nadyne, VMware

6 months!

2 Comments

Six months ago today, I joined VMware.  I’m still here!  So far, I’ve had an opportunity to work across a broad swath of our products, including vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Project Horizon, and Zimbra.  I’ve used surveys, interviews, standard usability studies, focus groups, and contextual inquiries.

It’s been a pretty cool ride so far.  I wonder what the next six months will bring?

user experience, Zimbra

back in the usability lab

1 Comment

This week, I’m getting back to my roots.  It’s been some time since I’ve done a standard discount usability study.  I often use other research methods and let newer researchers carry on with a standard usability study.  I’m in the lab to learn more about Zimbra.

As of this writing, I’m about halfway through my study (12 participants scheduled, 1.5 hours each).  I walked into this with some thoughts about issues that I might observe.  As ever, I found new issues that I didn’t guess in advance.  Which is, of course, the point of running the usability study, and is one of the reasons that I love being a researcher.