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Monthly Archives: September 2011
one year of blogging here
This morning, I thought to look back to see if I’d reached a year here at nadynerichmond.com, and I have! Monday was my one-year anniversary of this blog. I’d been blogging for five years before that on my old blog. Moving here got me onto my own server and domain.
In the year that I’ve been blogging here, a lot has happened. I shipped Office:Mac 2011, which included the application that I’d spent the most time on, Outlook:Mac. After the release of Office 2011, I decided to try my hand at something new, and accepted a new position at VMware. In my time with VMware, I’ve learned a whole lot about virtualization, the cloud, and so much more, and I’ve got to do some awesome research along the way.
My crystal ball refuses to give me information about what might come for this blog (or anything else) in the future. Is there something in particular you want to see here? Comments and email are, as ever, welcome.
greasing the skids
One of the things that I like about working at VMware is the effort that the company puts into greasing the skids for its employees. There’s a lot of little things that are done to make my life easier.
One of them is our Helpzilla. It’s how pretty much everything gets done around here. Order hardware? Helpzilla. Book a big conference room? Helpzilla. Can’t get Flash to update? Helpzilla. Reconfigure your office? Helpzilla. Each of these are very different tasks, but there’s a single entry point to all of them. For me, this makes my life so much easier. I don’t have to remember which website to go to when I need to do something. I go to the same place every time, fill out the same form, and everything magically happens. There’s a single place where the history of a request lives, so it’s easy to add more details or find out the current status.
Another one is our desktop support folks. On each floor of all of the buildings on main campus, there’s one office with one or two support folks. They’re responsible for handling a lot of the computer-related Helpzilla requests, but they’re also the keepers of lots of useful things. Lost your dongle to connect your Mac to the projector? Stop by their office and get a new one. Need a USB key? Swing in and pick one up. Lots of the little things can be handled like this, with no requests or paperwork or approvals. It makes life a whole lot easier.
A couple of weeks ago, the battery in my MacBook Pro began failing. I put in a Helpzilla ticket to order a replacement. The shipping of the battery was the slowest thing about the experience. The battery arrived, and one of our desktop support guys was in my office the next morning offering to take care of replacing the battery for me. How awesome is that? I only had to finish up what I was doing and live without my laptop for a bit while he magically made everything happen.
Thanks, VMware!
(I suppose I can’t write a post about liking working for VMware without mentioning that we’re hiring. My team has interaction design positions open; ping me if you’d like to know more. We’ve also got a whole bunch of other positions open, including development, test, and program management. Ping me if you’re looking for a referral!)
switching to SlideRocket
I’m an early adopter. Tell me there’s some new hotness out there on the web, and I’m there to check it out. I might or might not continue to use it, but I’ve always checked it out. One of my favorite things about working in high tech is that I get to be an uber-early adopter. I get access to projects that we’re working on before they’re in beta, so I get to play around with them and hopefully offer ideas for improvement (or at least find some bugs so that they get fixed before they’re out in the real world).
VMware has been great about feeding this addiction to early adoption. We’ve acquired some great companies lately, and they’re ones with products that I’ve been really excited to start using. Earlier this year, we acquired SlideRocket. Switching away from PowerPoint is hard, especially given how long I spent as a member of that team. But my strong desire to use VMware’s products as much as possible means that I took the plunge.
Switching to SlideRocket has been surprisingly easy. My deep knowledge of PowerPoint hasn’t hindered me from picking up how to best use SlideRocket quickly. I also like that it makes including web-based content easy. Want a YouTube video? Done. Want a live Twitter feed? You got it. It’s not magic, but it’s so slick that I don’t care.
So far, my favorite thing about SlideRocket is the ease of sharing my presentations. I create a lot of presentations. In my PowerPoint days, sharing a presentation meant that I was emailing it as an attachment, or perhaps storing it on my wiki. This, of course, resulted in exceeding my mail quota with all of these attachments. With SlideRocket, I share a link and a password to access the presentation. My mailbox quota appreciates it.
an example of why I hate the Apple Store
A few weeks ago, I found myself in the Apple Store in downtown Palo Alto. My mother-in-law wanted an iPod Shuffle. Now, I usually order my Apple gear online because I hate the Apple Store, but she wanted instant gratification, so we headed into the store.
In the store, she spent a few minutes deciding which color she wanted. When she selected the green one, we went to one of the info-iPads to get one brought to us. The system kept on returning errors, so we still had to find an unoccupied employee to get it. It took a few minutes to get someone’s attention. Once I told him what we wanted, he said that it would take “a few minutes”. While we were waiting, someone else approached that employee to get an iPhone accessory that wasn’t available on the store floor either.
About ten minutes later, my iPod Shuffle and the other person’s item came at the same time. The employee said to the other person, “do you mind if I ring her [indicating me] up first?” The other person said that yes, she did mind. I was unhappy since I had been waiting longer, but acquiesced because I knew that my transaction would take longer than usual1. Regardless, it’s bad customer service on the part of the employee to ignore the order in which we had placed our orders with him.
In all, what should have been a 10-minute transaction (including deciding on the color) ended up taking nearly 45 minutes. This is exactly why I hate the Apple Store: a quick transaction is never quick. I should’ve just gone to Target or Best Buy instead. While I would have forfeited the small discount I get on Apple hardware, I would have saved a lot of time.
- As a VMware employee, I get a small discount on Apple hardware, which would take a little bit of time for them to verify that I qualify for it and look up the code to use. ↩
VMware Fusion 4 is out today!
Hello world! Desktop virtualization just got a whole lot better with the release of VMware Fusion 4.
I’ve been using internal builds of Fusion 4 for months, which is one of the perks of being a VMware employee1. It’s been awesome to watch it come together. I’ve especially liked the performance improvements. As a 64-bit Cocoa app, it got a fair performance boost over Fusion 3 just from that. The development team has also done some performance tuning that’s turned it up a couple of notches too.
Personally, I’ve got a Win7 VM on my work machine right now. I keep on meaning to burn through a bunch of disk space and install a bunch of other OSes2, and with the Win8 preview out there, I’ll probably check that one out too.
Fusion 4 is $50 through the end of the year, and I hear that there are coupon codes out there (as of this writing, I see that there’s one in the comments of the blog post I linked above) to knock it down even further. Go forth and purchase!
the feeling of being new
A couple of weeks ago, a new member of my team1 came to me with a question. I couldn’t answer it, and wasn’t quite sure who could, but pointed her at someone who I thought would either know the answer or know where she could get it. She laughed and said that she felt like a tweenbot.
I wasn’t familiar with it, so she sent me to the website, which describes them as such:
Tweenbots are human-dependent cardboard robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, they rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
This is an awesome metaphor for being new to something. You know that you have a destination, but you don’t know how to get there, and you rely on the people who you meet to read the flag and aim you in the right direction.
giving up on Safari
I’ve been using Safari since its introduction in 2003. Upon the death of Internet Explorer for Mac, I switched to Safari exclusively. When other web browsers have come out, I’ve given them all a go, but I’ve always returned to Safari. Until now: Safari 5.1 has forced me to switch to Chrome as my browser of choice.
Safari 5.1 now behaves more like Safari on iOS. When Safari decides that you haven’t interacted with a page recently enough, it unloads that page to save memory. This doesn’t match up with my usage of Safari in any way. I often have several tabs open. Those tabs represent a to-do list of sorts. Some of the open are items that I simply want to read. Others represent an action that I need to take: fill out a form, write a new blog post, write my weekly status report.
Forced reloading breaks every single one of these to-dos. In the best-case scenario, the webpage that I’m reading hasn’t changed between when I started reading it and when Safari forces a reload of its content, so I haven’t necessarily lost anything other than my place on the page. Even so, I lose the context of what I was reading, and I also lose the time necessary for the page to reload. Occasionally, I lose the content of the page, if I’m offline when I’m trying to read the page but a forced reload has occurred.
In the cast of an action to take, the forced reload is even more irritating. I lose my work: the partially-filled-out form, the incomplete blog post, the status report that I forgot to commit to the wiki. At minimum, I lose the time that I invested in my half-finished work. Recreating that work is always a losing proposition.
I tried to live with Safari 5.1 for a few weeks. Slowly, I found myself trying out other browsers again. I tried Firefox again, but its inability to respect my system proxy settings1 and its incorrect handling of keyboard shortcuts like option-arrow2 have made me move to Chrome. I’m not sure if I really like Chrome yet, but it doesn’t break my workflows, and I don’t have the constant concern of losing my to-dos.
If a future update to Safari changes this behavior, I might try it again. But Safari has really broken my trust with 5.1, and I don’t think that I’ll come rushing back.
- My wired access in my office is via proxy, but wifi has no proxy. I switch between the two several times during the day: wired when I’m working in my office, wifi when I’m in a conference room. ↩
- When editing text, option-arrow moves you to the beginning or end of the line. Except in Firefox, where option-leftarrow is “back one page”. ↩
lost in tech support hell between Sony and Amazon
Several months ago, my husband Michael and I acquired a Sony Blu-Ray player. One of the benefits of this player is that it works with Amazon’s streaming video. I’ve had Amazon Prime for years, and haven’t yet had the opportunity to put their streaming video to work.
Five months ago, Michael made the ill-fated decision to try to actually set this up. He entered his Amazon account details. It didn’t work, and so he called Amazon tech support to try to figure out what’s going on. They told him that since I’m the primary holder of the Amazon Prime account, it’s my account that needs to be associated with the player. They walked him through the steps necessary to unregister his account from the player. It didn’t take immediately, so they said to wait a bit for it to filter through the system.
The next day, his account was still registered on the player. Thus begins tech support hell. In the past five months, Michael has called Amazon and Sony multiple times. Each of them says that it’s the other one’s fault. At one point, a third-tier support tech from Sony was in contact with Michael for about a month. That ultimately resulted in a conference call with engineers from both companies, wherein the tech from Amazon said that it would be fixed in a week. That was three months ago.
Every once in awhile, Michael will try again. His ticket is still open, and has new notes entered into it occasionally. But neither Sony nor Amazon has bothered to contact us, it’s always been Michael calling to try to learn whether there’s been any movement.
This weekend, Michael called yet again to see if there was an update. The tech on the phone was nice enough, and read through the most recent notes. They’re still working on it, in short, and there’s no update as to when it might actually work. After Michael hung up, he received an email from Amazon asking about his tech support experience. He clicked on “no, this didn’t resolve my issue”, which resulted in this webpage:
I don’t think that we needed another example of the ineptitude of Amazon’s tech support. It’s bad enough that this issue has been dragging on for five months. But really, this link arrived from Amazon within ten minutes of the end of the call, and Michael was online and so noticed it and clicked on it immediately. That’s one way to avoid getting negative feedback: pre-expire the links on your feedback emails.
We can’t get trade in our existing Blu-Ray player because his account is still somehow associated with the player. No amount of unregistering it has worked, and both Sony and Amazon have supposedly reset it in their systems multiple times. So we’re stuck with this player, unless we want to take the risk that someone will get access to Michael’s Amazon account through the player.
It’s been a pretty frustrating experience all around. Thankfully, we’ve got our Netflix subscription working through our Xbox 360, and we’ve never had problems with it. Too bad Sony and Amazon can’t work together as seamlessly as Netflix and Microsoft.
user research begets more research
A truism of my job is that user research begets more research. There’s two major reasons this is true: you always have more research questions than you can answer in any given amount of time, and you always learn something when you’re conducting research that you want to learn more about.
The first problem is the most apparent when you set out to do research. You begin by identifying what questions you want to answer. Your list of questions grows as you identify themes and trends. As you share your research questions with others, they have more questions to add to it.
Once you feel like you’ve got a good list of questions, you then have to prioritize them. Some questions are more important than others. When I’m prioritizing my list of research questions, I try to determine what action will be taken if I answer a given question. If I think that it would simply be nice to know a given piece of information, then it’s immediately struck from my list. I craft my list such that every research question has something actionable that comes out of it.
Once the prioritization is done, then you have to decide what methodology you will use to answer those questions. The methodology that you will use is dependent on many factors that are external to your research questions, such as the time that you have available, your budget, access to appropriate users, and support from your management. Even in the best of circumstances when you have an infinite budget, lots of access to the right people, and lots of time, the methodology that you choose is unlikely to answer all of the research questions that you have identified. There are a lot of factors in play, and you’ll have to make a decision about the best way to proceed. You will have to leave some of your research questions unanswered, oftentimes with the hope of being able to revisit them at a later point to answer them.
As you’re conducting your research, you will learn new things. This is, after all, why you’re conducting your research in the first place. Inevitably, your new information will create new research questions. Sometimes this will happen early in your research, and you’ll have an opportunity to tweak your methodology in an attempt to try to answer this new question. In this case, you have to choose whether your new research question is one that you can answer using your current methodology, and whether it’s more important to answer this question than one of the ones that you’ve already identified. You might have to remove an existing research question to make way for the new one.
In many cases, new research questions arise as you’re analyzing your data. Perhaps you can’t answer one of your existing research questions because you need to know something else. Perhaps you learn something entirely new that you don’t understand, so you know that you want to conduct additional research about it.
Perhaps a different way to look at this truism is to say that you have to accept that you’ll never answer all of the questions that you can identify. I always have a running list of research questions. That list always gets longer. When I left my previous employer, I shared my running list of research questions with my colleagues in the hopes that perhaps it would be useful to them. One of the hardest things about leaving my previous position was the day that I deleted that running list of questions. I’d invested so much effort into my research there, and there was still so much left that I could learn. I put off deleting that file for days. Conversely, one of the most awesome days that I’ve had since I joined VMware was the day when I created my new running list of research questions that I’d like to answer some day.
Research begets more research. While I sometimes find it frustrating that I’ll never answer all of the questions that I have, it’s really one of the things that I love about my job: there’s always something new to learn. The day when I run out of research questions is probably the day that I’m taken off of life support.