Monthly Archives: May 2012

Microsoft

not everyone hates Clippy

4 Comments

I shall now share a dirty secret that I learnt during my time at Microsoft: not everyone hates Clippy.

People love to hate on the poor guy, including a crazy rumor that there was a child found in the Word:Mac code who was terrorized by Clippy. And check out the comments thread for the video for Again and Again, where Clippy is just dancing his little heart out, but haters gotta hate.  Microsoft tried to give him a new gig with Ribbon Hero 2.  I even stumbled upon a JavaScript implementation of Clippy today, calling the poor little guy a “failed Microsoft technology”.

But not everyone hates Clippy.  I learned this in a most unexpected manner.  You see, the Office:Mac website allows people to submit feedback.  When I worked there, I would go through that feedback every few weeks to see if there was anything in there that would be helpful to me as I was working on my research.  And one day, someone sent in a request for the return of Clippy.

That person gushed on about how useful Clippy was and how they truly missed Clippy.  Specifically, they wanted the cat version of Clippy which was (if I recall correctly) unique to the Mac version of Office.  They even offered to pay extra for a version of Office that included him.  I, of course, forwarded that message along to our marketing team to let them know that they were missing a huge opportunity to create Office:Mac Special Clippy Edition, but strangely that mail went unanswered.

So remember that, the next time you hate on Clippy.  You might just be talking to someone who wanted Clippy back so badly that they actually took the time to write to Microsoft to ask for his return.

user experience

bad research about LinkedIn and profile photos

5 Comments

This morning, I woke up to something that made me quite cranky: bad research.  Business Insider posted an article titled This Heatmap Proves That Looks Are The Most Important Thing On Your LinkedIn Profile, which refers to a study done by TheLadders titled Keeping an eye on recruiter behavior (pdf).

The heatmap, which was created by using an eyetracker to determine where users look on the screen and how long they spend their time there, is an awesome example of bad research.  The article shows exceptionally bad analysis from Business Insider.  Here’s how it goes off-base:

  1. The heatmap ignores all known research about how people read screens.  In short, people scan the screen, and they start scanning in the upper-left corner.  In some 2006 research from the Nielsen Norman Group, they say that web users tend to scan pages using an F pattern.  Any designer who has been designing for more than ten microseconds knows that the upper-left corner is the most prime real estate in their design.  Given that LinkedIn’s profile pictures are in the upper-left corner of the profile, it is no surprise at all that the heatmap shows that it’s where everyone starts.
  2. The heatmap ignores research about photographs on webpages.  To again point to the NNG, they published some eyetracking research in 2010 that shows that photographs of real people get the most attention on some types of websites.  So again, it’s no surprise that the heatmap shows that a real photograph gets the most attention.
  3. The research does nothing to determine if moving the photograph elsewhere would have an impact on the amount of time that’s spent viewing the photograph.  The research that I cited in the second point implies that it wouldn’t, but it also appears from the report that all of the photographs that were used in their research started in the upper-left and continued on down the leftmost column, which is where the eye tends to fall naturally anyway.  To prove that the amount of time spent on the photograph is disproportionate, they would have had to do a separate eyetracking study that used a mockup of LinkedIn profiles where the photograph was placed elsewhere and compared the results.
  4. The assertion of Business Insider about attractiveness aside, the research doesn’t appear to have actually considered the attractiveness of the person in the photograph.  The research did not compare profiles with less-attractive photos to those with more-attractive photos.  They just proved that recruiters spend time looking at the picture, not that attractiveness had anything to do with it.
  5. The research doesn’t discuss profiles without photos.  Do those profiles not get as much attention?
  6. The research did nothing to prove that there is a difference in outcomes.  They had recruiters look at the profiles, but it doesn’t appear that they were doing it with a specific goal of finding someone to contact about a position.  To prove that the photograph matters, as Business Insider asserts, you would have to show that people who are similarly qualified but have a better photograph are the ones who are selected to be contacted by the recruiter.  And you’d have to do this across at least three types of profiles: ones with an attractive photo, a not-attractive photo, and without a photo.

What I find especially amusing is that the original research from TheLadders says this:

LinkedIn’s profiles had higher levels of visual complexity, and their ease of use suffered substantially as a result. Advertisements and “calls-to-action” created clutter that reduced recruiters’ ability to process the profiles. Finally, eye tracking-based “heat maps” of LinkedIn profiles showed that recruiters fixated for an average 19% of the total time spent – on profile pictures, instead of examining other vital candidate information.

TheLadders’ recommendation is that you use their profile service instead of LinkedIn’s, and also that you have your resume professionally written, which (conveniently) is a service that they provide.  So we’re not exactly talking about unbiased research to begin with, although the assertions made by Business Insider are pretty unrelated to the original research.  I can only hope that Vivian Giang, the author of the Business Insider article, only saw that heatmap of the LinkedIn profile and somehow didn’t have an internet connection so that she could spend the three seconds necessary to find the original research.

Bad research and bad analysis, all wrapped up in one package.  How appalling.

VMware

exhausted

I’m working at home today, recovering from RADIO.

RADIO is an internal VMware event, and it stands for Research And Development Innovation Off-site.  It’s a huge event intended to get our R&D org thinking about how we can innovate around the company.

I just got home from it, and I’ve got to admit that I’m exhausted.  I was invited to speak there, and gave a talk about how engineers can better learn about our customers.  I also ran a birds-of-a-feather session on a similar topic.  But my exhaustion isn’t just from the preparation (and, I’ll admit, nervousness) from my sessions.  It’s from the sheer amount of awesomeness that I’ve seen going on around the company.

A lot of companies talk about supporting innovation from within the ranks of its team.  VMware delivers.  First of all, the whole of R&D is encouraged to submit their ideas and develop them.  We have features and products that were first suggested at RADIO.  Second, the RADIO folks put a huge amount of effort into helping those who submitted their ideas work on them to get them to a place where they’re ready to be shared with a wide audience.  Everyone who submits gets to go to the event, and other people around R&D get to come if they win a ticket in the lottery.  Attending RADIO is completely paid for by VMware itself, and it doesn’t even come out of our departmental budget.  And we’re given three days to bask in all of this: presentations from our fellow engineers about their awesome ideas, and plenty of time for breaks so that we can meet each other and discuss it.

And now it’s the day after RADIO, and I’ll admit that I’m exhausted.  My plans for today involve going through the mail that built up while I was at RADIO, and thinking about what I learned while I was there.

women

Q&A: is “mansplain” sexist?

4 Comments

In my earlier post about sexism in CS, I used the term “mansplain”.  Sam emailed me about it, saying (in part):

I really enjoyed your recent blog post about sexism in CS. As a man in CS it is good to be reminded of such things and to be both cautious and aware of them. In particular I like your optimism and your examples of how you work to achieve a better situation.

I’m not convinced the use of the word mansplain does much beyond switching the sexism back the other way, however. If I were to write a blogpost and use the word womansplain I am sure I would get at least one nasty email, and it would be justified, as it’s not really appropriate for the message. This is because it would be ascribing certain undesirable traits to women writ large, etc, I’m sure you see where I’m going.

It’s an interesting point, and I’ll admit that I haven’t really decided what I think about it.  I was using “mansplain” as a convenient shorthand for the type of patronizing and condescending explanation that a sexist man is wont to use when speaking to a woman about a technical concept.  Perhaps this is a reflection of what I read, but I felt that the word was well-used enough (and self-descriptive enough, certainly in context) to be clear about exactly the behavior that I was describing.  On the other hand, the only instances that I was able to come up with when searching for “womansplain” were parodies of the former, and only a handful of them at all).  Is it sexist to create a portmanteau with man- at all (some interesting examples here)?  Or is it that the behavior described is one that is itself sexist?

Since I haven’t made up my mind about whether the use of “mansplain” is sexist, I decided to turn to an expert.  David Crystal is a noted linguist and has published many books on the English language and its evolution.  In his blog, he often takes on questions about words and phrases.  I wrote to him to ask:

I’m curious about your opinion of the portmanteau “mansplain”, for which Urban Dictionary has several definitions variously involving a man giving a patronizing and condescending explanation.  Inasmuch as a linguist is comfortable commenting on language being sexist, do you think that this is?  Is there a litmus test of sorts that one might be able to apply?  For example, is the reaction to a simple replacement (eg, “womansplain”) such a test?

I wasn’t really expecting a response, but a few days later, he did write back!  (And I have to tell you that my little geek heart, which much enjoys linguistics and that’s how I came to be familiar with his work and an avid reader of his blog, was all a-flutter when I woke up to that email.)  Here’s what he said:

I think it’s too early to say whether mansplain and womansplain have evolved a sexist status, The definitions on urban dictionary can never be properly interpreted, as no information is given about source and context. There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy and invention. So I think we’re going to have to wait a while to see how usage develops. However, I don’t know what a test for such things might look like. Social attitudes to language aren’t usually capable of being tested in a ‘litmus’ sort of way.

I have to admit that I was hoping for a definitive answer, although I’ve read enough about linguistics to know better.

So, audience, what say you?  Do you think that it’s sexist?

women

another point about sexism in CS

The thing is, I always wince when I get the question about sexism in CS.  While I do generally think that things are better than they were when I started, when the question comes up in a public forum, someone inevitably comes in and attempts to disprove anything that you might say about improvements in the overall environment.

Let’s take a handful of comments from a single anonymous commenter in that thread:

  • “Be careful – don’t hire women.”
  • “this is the trouble that women cause and I therefore try to avoid hiring them for any roles where one requires steady temperament”
  • “If you are making a consumer product, evidently 50% of your market is going to be women and so it would be good to have a proxy customer.”
  • “most women bench less when it comes to intelligence”
  • “There are exceptional women, but on average, they are not the right candidate for a job that requires analytical skills.”
  • “men are typically better informed, more ambitious and more self confident than most women”
  • “the women were uber-stupid”
  • Women have “an overarching lack of understanding and a willing to understand. There is also a lack of self-confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out.”

On one hand, it’s nice to have examples to prove my point that a lot of sexism is grounded in ignorance and immaturity.  On the other hand, it’s disheartening to have so many examples.

This brings up another point about sexism in CS.  It’s not enough for women to be good engineers.  And it’s not enough for men to simply be not sexist.  Both of these are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.  There have to be men who are willing to stand up when they hear other men make sexist statements or engage in sexist behavior and say that it’s wrong and unacceptable.  Thankfully, there have been men who have been commenting in the thread about the misogyny, which does help improve the situation.  It makes it feel like I’m not the only one who’s willing to say that this guy’s comments are sexist and baseless.

If you’re going to go read the whole comments thread, gird yourself for unsubstantiated rumor and anecdotes without attribution or context from the anonymous commenter.  His comments could constitute a whole course in how to not debate.  However, for each point that he’s raised, I’ve spent some time doing research to see if his points are ones that are borne out by the data.  After all, I am a researcher and thus a data-driven kind of person.  The thread (sorry for the length!) has resulted in me learning some things about the gender gap, so I suppose we can consider that to be a silver lining in this cloud1.

Some of the most interesting things that I’ve found as a result of answering his comments are as follows:

  • Diversity Matters from the University of Michigan – There’s a fair body of work that has been done by researchers at UMich, and it is collected here.  The research therein is about diversity in general, and is not specific to either gender or software engineering.  It’s a good launching point for learning more.
  • “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” and the supporting online material by Hyde et al, which considers the gender gap in math scores.  The supporting online material discusses the differences in SAT scores in particular.

I find the research about the gender gap in STEM2 to be interesting.  The gender gap is real, and there are a lot of reasons behind it.  Sexism is only one of the reasons, but it might just be the one that’s hardest to root out.  In the interim, my original advice to women who are experiencing this sexism in CS stands: find your tribe, find the men who aren’t sexist, and find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It does get better.  Don’t let someone like an anonymous commenter on the internet keep it from getting better for you.

  1. Not cloud like my employer provides, that is.  The silver lining on my employer’s cloud is that they keep on paying me.  Hell, they’ve even promoted me to Staff. ↩
  2. science, technology, engineering, and math ↩
Nadyne

own your degree

Oh, Yahoo!.  Just when you think they couldn’t do anything dumber, they do.  It turns out that their newly-minted CEO, Scott Thompson, doesn’t have the degree that he claims to have.  He said he’s got a CS degree, when he’s actually got an accounting degree.  Yahoo! claims that this is an inadvertent error, except this so-called “inadvertent error” can also be found on his eBay bio from his days leading PayPal.

Own your degree.  Be proud of it.  My MS is in technical communication, and I’m clear about it on both my about page here as well as on my LinkedIn profile.  I can tell you why I got that degree1, but the fact of the matter is that it’s what my degree is.  In various interviews over the years, I’ve had to explain why my degree is technical communications instead of HCI or design or computer science or software engineering.  But that’s the degree that I got, and I’ve got to be proud of it.  There are things that I learned in my degree that are immensely useful, even if I was cranky about taking them at the time.  A course about how to edit technical content was one of those courses — given how much I have to write now, as well as edit work from others, this course has long since proven its worth.

There comes a point in your career where your experience and your accomplishments matter much more than your degree.  So don’t lie about your degree.  Own it.  Be proud of it, and be able to explain how it sets you apart from your competition who have a degree that’s more traditional to your field.

  1. it’s where all of the HCI classes were at my uni. ↩
travel, user experience

the user experience of buying airline tickets

I’ve been in love with the user experience of Hipmunk.  They’ve quickly become my go-to for flight searches.  I love their data presentation.  They show you, clearly and crisply, how long your flight will take, when and where your layovers are, and how much your flight costs.  And their default sort is by “agony”, which they say is a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.  Seriously: go try it.  I’ll wait.

My husband‘s mother is currently visiting, and decided at the last minute that she wanted to visit Las Vegas.  So I went to Hipmunk and looked at flights.  Neither SFO nor SJC were great.  I tried OAK, which I never use, just in case something awesome came up.

And something awesome did come up: $103 from OAK to LAS.  That was less than half than what I was seeing from SFO or SJC, so I booked it for her.

Now, one of the things that I like about Hipmunk is how good they are about showing me information that I care about.  This screenshot doesn’t show it, but they show which flights are wi-fi enabled.  I love that they show which airline handles each leg and what the layover looks like.

But this time, Hipmunk let me down.  They left out a piece of crucial information: Spirit Airlines hates its customers.  Spirit has a whole page on its site dedicated to its optional fees.  Somehow, in Spirit’s world, carry-on luggage has become optional.  It’s thirty bucks for a carry-on bag, and it took quite a lot of digging for me to determine what carry-on bag means.  This site says that it doesn’t include “personal items” like purses, briefcases, and small backpacks.

Baggage fees became the norm some time ago.  But carry-on fees are unique to Spirit, and Hipmunk should’ve disclosed that to me so that I could factor that into my purchase decision.  For that matter, given how utterly obnoxious it is to charge a fee for carry-on luggage, I think that should be considered as part of their “agony” algorithm.

Now, Hipmunk doesn’t actually do the sale of the ticket.  To complete the transaction, they sent me to Orbitz, which shows me this:

Orbitz flight results

Orbitz tells me that “additional baggage fees may apply”, which is what they say for pretty much every itinerary that you could purchase from them.  They had an opportunity to tell me about Spirit’s customer-hating policies, but instead they wimped out behind their generic link.  That generic link, by the way, takes you to a page where you have to select your airline to view their baggage fees.

At no point in this process was it disclosed that Spirit’s policies are quite different from other airlines, even though there were multiple opportunities to do so.  I only happened to find out about it because a news article went by on twitter which mentioned that Spirit is raising its carry-on baggage fee.  That prompted me to go look, and thus find out.  I’m glad that I found out in advance, otherwise my mother-in-law would be standing at OAK on Sunday paying $40 to carry her bag on board the airplane.

The carry-on fee fundamentally changes the cost of the airline ticket.  I think that the vast majority of travellers have both a personal item and a carry-on.  Personally, the only times when I’ve travelled with just a laptop bag as my personal item were the days when I would fly back home that night.  So if we add in $30 each way for her flight, the cost of the flight just went up 60%.  Yes, it’s still less expensive than the other airlines.  Had the real price of the flight been disclosed to me up-front, I wouldn’t be so cranky.  I’d still be appalled that there’s an airline doing such a thing, but I wouldn’t be upset about finding out about it after the fact.

Hipmunk, Orbitz: I expected better of you.  I hope that you update your results to show that Spirit behaves in this fashion so that I can know the true cost of the ticket when I book.

And now, I’m off to explain to my mother-in-law that she’s got to pay a bit more for her flight, and try to come up with a way to explain Spirit’s policies other than “pure evil”.