Monthly Archives: January 2012

VMware

intern season is coming!

1 Comment

Intern season is fast approaching.  If you’re in school, now is the time to consider where you’d like to spend your summer.  A VMware intern from last summer wrote about the top five reasons to love interning at VMware.  Of course, my user experience team is hiring interns.  Check out our intern job description, and ping me if you’ve got any questions.

If you’re studying at the University of Michigan, I’ll be there on Thursday, February 2.  First up is a networking breakfast and information session with the School of Information.  In the afternoon, I’ll be at the engineering career fair.  Stop in and say hi!

Apple, VMware, vSphere

installing VMware ESXi 5 Server on a Mac Mini

One of the things that I’ve learnt about VMware is how awesome our users are, and how willing they are to share their knowledge and expertise.  So it didn’t come as a surprise to me when I came across a detailed write-up of installing VMware ESXi 5 Server on a Mac Mini.  Anyone who’s familiar with our hardware compatibility guide knows that this isn’t a supported configuration, so you’re using this at your own risk.  But I know that there are folks out there who are willing to hack at things, so have fun with it — and I’m sure that the authors of that post would appreciate any tips or insights that you have if you give it a go.

As for me, I’ve been wondering about updating the Mac Mini that serves as my home server.  Is this enough to push me over the edge?

development

lessons from a long career

At every geek company that I’ve worked for, most people send out a good-bye email to their team when they’re moving on.  Today, one of my colleagues from my previous team posted a going-away mail from someone else who’d been on that team since the dawn of time.  He included lessons from a long career at Microsoft.  I have to admit that this is my favorite lesson:

6. At some point, you will have to resolve a bug by saying, “If the user does something that dumb, they get what they deserve.”

There are nine other pieces of wisdom on that list, so you should go check it out.  #7 on that list is one of the absolute rules of the universe, second only to gravity.

Mac

OS X tip: reboot your Dock

2 Comments

I’m a Dock minimalist.  There are only three applications that live in my Dock: mail, web, IM.  Everything else is launched via Spotlight search.  I like having an uncluttered Dock, and I like that my Dock only ever shows the applications that I have open.

Every once in awhile, my Dock will stop updating itself.  It won’t show when I’ve launched an application that lives in my Dock, and it won’t show additional apps that I’ve launched.  When this happens, it always throws me off to discover that I’ve got an app open that isn’t showing in m Dock.

Thankfully, there’s a quick fix for this:

  1. Launch Activity Monitor, which is located in /Applications/Utilities/
  2. In the list of open applications, select Dock and then click the Quit button in the toolbar.

After you’ve done this, your Dock will disappear for a couple of seconds.  It will relaunch itself, and the newly-launched Dock should now be correct.

user experience, VMware

giving back more than we take

This morning, Paul Maritz sent mail to all of VMware talking about where we’re going in 2012.  There’s a lot in it, and I really like seeing this kind of honesty and transparency from my CEO.  In it, he added a core VMware value: giving more than we take.

In my year-plus at VMware, I’ve been doing a lot of that.  I’ve spent a lot of time mentoring others on my team to help them improve their research skills.  I also created VMware’s first internal user experience conference, vUE.  I’ve also just started a series of UX tech talks (which probably deserves a post of its own), the first of which happens at the end of this month.

My goal is to help my organization exemplify user experience excellence for the whole company.  In short, I’m doing two things: modelling user research excellence for my team, and helping our user experience team come together to share expertise and identify areas where we can collaborate and build a better VMware-wide user experience.  As a side effect of these efforts, I want to create a community for our user experience professionals across the company.  This is also part of giving back: I want to build a lasting user experience community where awesome user experience people want to work.

There was a lot for me to like in Paul’s memo.  This particular piece resonated with me because I feel like I’m ahead of the curve.  It’s awesome to see our CEO recognize the importance of efforts like mine.

user experience

the elevator pitch for user research

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Michael’s company’s holiday party.  I got caught flat-footed by Michael’s boss, when he asked me the basic question, “what do you do?”  “I’m a researcher at VMware,” I answered blithely.  “What do you research?” he asked.  And this is where I made my mistake: instead of the elevator pitch for user research, I instead answered the question as if it were about what products I’ve worked on.  But that wasn’t the answer that he was looking for, which Michael realized more quickly than I did.  “User experience,” he helpfully pointed out, which at least pointed his boss in the right direction.

User experience is a term that still doesn’t have widespread understanding, even when you’re standing in a roomful of Silicon Valley software engineers.  This is more true for research than design, since most software engineers have at least encountered an interaction designer at some point in their career.  Researchers are more rare.  There’s only three of us at VMware, so I’m never surprised when someone doesn’t know what a user researcher does.  Over time, I’ve developed my elevator pitch for what I do as a user researcher, but I somehow didn’t give that answer this time.

My current elevator pitch is this:

I study how people use things, and figure out how to make it better.

Sometimes I replace “things” with “applications” or even “our products”, but I like “stuff” better because it’s less precise.  There are words that I deliberately don’t use in that pitch, such as “user” or “usability”.  I also make sure that I connect the study with the outcome of making improvements.  It also opens the door for additional conversations, if the questioner is interested.  But if not, it’s a reasonable encapsulation of what I do and why I do it.

And next time, I’ll remember to use it, even when I’m surrounded by my fellow geeks.

Nadyne, travel

my bag of holding

5 Comments

A few months ago, Rands in Repose had a great post about a bag of holding: the necessities of his laptop bag.  This post resonates for me strongly, since I feel like I’m always in search of a great bag.

Like Rands, I settled on two bags.  I have my everyday get-to-work bag, which is currently an Eco Portile Grande by Zaum.  I love that it’s cherry red, since I’m bored with plain black bags.  It’s a messenger bag, and it’s pretty minimal.  It has room for my laptop, iPad, iPhone, a small bag of cables, my wallet, and not much else.  This is perfect for just getting back and forth to the office: it’s light, it’s comfortable to carry, and it holds the necessities.

However, it doesn’t work as a travel bag because it doesn’t zip closed, so I’m not comfortable just stuffing it under a seat or in the overhead.  Things will fall out, and I’ll either lose something or have to dig around for that pen that fell out.  It takes a few too many motions to get my laptop out of the bag for security screening.  Also, if I pick up anything, it probably won’t fit very well into my messenger bag.  Overall, it’s just not a good bag when I’m travelling.

My travel bag is a backpack.  It’s currently the VMworld 2011 backpack, which is quite well-made for conference swag.  I settled on a backpack for travelling because it makes getting around an airport a lot easier.  It’s also got the right number of pockets, and in the right locations, which is necessary for finding that one thing (wallet, phone, pen, whatever) very quickly.  It’s big enough to hold a lot, even a day or two of clothing, but still be carry-on size and still fit under my seat.  I also like that it’s VMware-branded, since it gives me an extra little boost of credibility when I’m conducting research.  If I’m talking to someone who was at VMworld (or who wanted to go but couldn’t), my backpack starts off the conversation, which functions as an icebreaker.

But this isn’t a daily bag.  It’s so big that it’s overkill for my daily needs (which is mostly just iPad+iPhone+wallet), and I don’t need all of that space.  Plus, I have to admit that I like that my daily bag is more stylish than the VMworld backpack.  The VMworld backpack wins lots of points on practicality, but it’s not winning any style awards.

So: two bags, each for their own purpose.  I can switch between them at a moment’s notice, which makes life that much better.