Monthly Archives: April 2012

software

unintended consequences

In software engineering, things that you think are a joke sometimes take on a life of their own.  To wit: the humble origins of the blink tag.  A bunch of Netscape engineers got together for beers in Mountain View one night, where one lamented that none of the HTML extensions would work with Lynx.

There were two unintended consequences to this beer-fueled conversation:

  1. The blink tag was coded up that very night
  2. The engineer who made the lamentation met the woman who ultimately became his wife.

You never know what will come out of happy hour conversations.  They often have unintended consequences.

Mac

James Dempsey and the Breakpoints album coming!

It warms the cockles of my little geek heart to know that James Dempsey and the Breakpoints are in the studio recording a song tentatively titled “Endian Reservations“.

Longtime WWDC attendees have probably seen James perform before.  For your geek pleasure, here’s the classic “MVC Song”:

Edited on 5/2 – James emailed me to let me know that “Endian Reservations” is a song, not the album title, so I fixed that.

Nadyne

oh, Sony, how can you get it so wrong?

A few months ago, I was deeply in love with PopMarket.  It’s a daily deal website for music, and I went through an intense phase of buying lots of music from them.  But then it became clear how bad this relationship was for me, in the form of a botched order.  Last September, I ordered a three-album set, one of which was a double-disc version of Janis Joplin’s seminal Pearl.  When I got the order, I discovered a manufacturing error: instead of Pearl, the discs inside the packaging were of Earth, Wind, & Fire.

I wrote to PopMarket, got an almost instantaneous response where they sent me a replacement, and thus entered the rabbit hole.  The replacement had the same error, and then the replacement for the replacement had the same error.  After a few weeks of trying to get them to either send me correct discs or refund the order, I gave up.  And I haven’t ordered from PopMarket again.

Last week, I got an email saying that my order of Johnny Cash’s The Legend had shipped.   This is one of the albums that I had ordered, back in those heady days, but I received it months ago.  I thought that their system must have hiccuped and sent a confirmation mail out again, so ignored it, but then the album showed up on my doorstep.  So I wrote to them again, asking (a) what to do with this album that they’ve entirely inexplicably sent me, and (b) whether they have any intent at all of sending the order that they still haven’t completed.  The response is rather opaque:

I’m sorry for any inconvenience that may have caused. I’ve forwarded your message to our warehouse department for review. As soon as I receive any further information I will let you know via email.

Err, yeah.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t hold my breath on that one.

I still get the daily PopMarket emails, and sometimes I want to click through to order, but I always hold myself back.  I’ve learned my lesson.

Nadyne

Weebly has an obvious security flaw

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A long long time ago, back when Gmail was still in invite-only beta and invites were actually difficult to come by, I snagged nadyne@gmail for myself.  This has provided years of unintentional entertainment.  I’ve amassed quite the collection of other Nadynes who forget their email address or make a typo when entering it.

Today, via a new Nadyne, I learned about a website called Weebly.  If you’re not familiar with it (I wasn’t before this), it’s a website and blog creator.  Since that other Nadyne got her email address wrong when she created her website, I got the confirmation email.  The confirmation email included a link called “auto-login to Weebly”.  I clicked it, and found myself logged in to Weebly.

Yes, that’s right: without entering a username or password, I was able to login to someone else’s Weebly account.  What fantastically bad security.  I can’t possibly be the only person who has received such an email erroneously.  Weebly should require the user to enter their password when they’re logging in from a browser that they’ve never used before, even when clicking on the link from their confirmation email.  This is such a basic security mistake that I couldn’t trust them with getting their security right elsewhere.

I can do anything that I like with her website.  Since I don’t actually know this other Nadyne’s email address, I posted something to her new site saying that I’ve changed her password and that she needs to update her account information with a new password and with her accurate email address.

This collection of other Nadynes has given me a long list of websites that I won’t do business with as a result of their bad security.  One particular website actually emailed me, in plaintext, another Nadyne’s complete information: her real name, address, phone number, SSN (yes, really!), and credit card number.  Usually I just email the Nadyne in question to let her know that she needs to (a) update her account to reflect her real email address, and (b) be careful about doing business with a company that will send out so much personally-identifying information via email.  Perhaps it’s time to mine this for a new series of blog posts.

VMware

a very green VMware

One of the things that I think is pretty awesome about VMware is how green we are.  The person behind our green efforts is our lab manager, Doris Lippitt.  Doris is the person who secretly makes everything at VMware work: she knows everything that’s happening on campus at any given point, she knows how to get anything done, and she somehow makes sure that it’s all very very green.  It’s quite cool.

In honor of Earth Day, VMware Careers is doing an interview with her about our green efforts.  Go check it out!

user experience, VMware

Q&A: why should I work for VMware?

During interviews, I often get asked by candidates why they should work for VMware.  There are lots of reasons to do so, but here’s one of my favorite ones: VMware CEO Paul Maritz was just ranked in the top ten CEOs by Glassdoor.com.  Their ranking is based on employee reviews.  Having trust in your CEO is a great thing, and is definitely a great reason to work here.

The user experience team at VMware is still growing.  Here’s a job description for a senior interaction designer; we’ve got other positions in interaction design and research, for both new college hires and experienced hires.  Ping me if you’d like to learn more or would like to apply.

user experience

Q&A: what applications should I know for a career in user experience?

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This week, I got asked a couple of questions about applications for user experience people.  One was from a researcher asking which applications they should know how to use, another was from a designer worried that they don’t know how to use Flash.

Three minutes on the internet will reveal plenty of UX people who have very strong opinions about the applications that you should know.  Sometimes they’re advancing the idea that you don’t need to use a heavy-duty application, but rather that a (relatively) lightweight application can do the job.  For an example of that, check out the power of Keynote by Paul Woods.  Sometimes they’re putting a stake in the ground and advancing that there is only one true way, such as this reference to someone who won’t hire designers who can’t code.

I generally don’t care about specific applications.  Job ads often list a  bunch of applications, and I know that I’ve written job ads myself with a list of apps, but I don’t think that anyone needs to know every single app on that list.  A candidate should probably know at least a couple (and I’ll get to why in a minute), but knowing the whole list isn’t necessary (or even necessarily useful).

What matters for user experience is communicating with your team. Using the right application is a method of communication.  If you’re working closely with a development team that tracks everything in Bugzilla, you need to use Bugzilla too.  If you’re working with a design team that loves OmniGraffle, you should learn how to use OmniGraffle.  If you’re working with a PM who never seems to have any application other than PowerPoint open, you’d better make sure that everything you send to them is a .ppt file.  If you don’t use their application of choice, then you’re decreasing the chances that they’ll open your file or pay attention to your work.  You’re negatively impacting your communication.

For researchers, I rarely care about specific applications.  They’re nice-to-have, but they’re not need-to-have.  Email, a word processor, and a presentation app are absolute requirements.

For designers, I think that you should be a wizard in at least one design application, and you should be proficient in another couple.  Knowing more than just one application shows me that you’re flexible and adaptable.  I especially like it when you can tell me that one application is great in this case, but another application is great in this case.  And I want to know how you’ll get up-to-speed doing designs in a new application too, since it’s all but guaranteed that you’re going to have to learn a new one.

For researchers, I don’t think that you need to be a wizard in a design application, but you should have at least a reasonable knowledge of a couple.  You’re going to be communicating with designers, so just as you need to be able to communicate with that PowerPoint-lovin’ PM, you’re also going to have to be able to communicate with your team who loves OmniGraffle.  When you get a mockup from a designer that doesn’t quite work for your usability study that starts in 10 minutes, you can tweak it yourself.  It makes your life as a researcher that much better to be able to use the design app(s) that your team prefers.

Leaving aside the basics of email, word processing, and presenting, I don’t think that there is any application that I think that every single UX person should know.  The application is the tool.  I care about what the outcome of using that tool is, but — so long as you’re willing to use other tools when necessary or appropriate — I don’t care what tools you use to do the job.