My first love in computer science was programming languages, so I’m sure that you can imagine how my little geek heart turned cartwheels upon finding Stef’s free online Smalltalk bookcase. I have some downloading to do …
Monthly Archives: November 2012
user experience and The Oatmeal
The Oatmeal has a great comic about being making things for the web. It resonated with me, a lot of it applies to user experience too.
Inspiration isn’t something you can schedule, harness, or control. It arrives when it arrives. For designers, this means that you have to be prepared for inspiration to strike at any time; for researchers, this means that inspiration from design analysis arrives when it arrives.
The seeds of inspiration arrive from unexpected sources, and these seeds might not come to fruition for quite some time. You have to experience things, and this experience informs what you do in the future.
Ideas from others can spark new ideas in you. Others will tell you what you should design or research. Their ideas are worth listening to. You might not follow through with their suggestion, but their idea can lead to you seeing something else more clearly, and thus doing an awesome design or completing some awesome research.
Idea generation is like a river. New stuff comes in, old stuff flows out. You’ve got to keep up-to-date on new user experiences and new research to keep your river flowing.
There is such a thing as destructive feedback. Not all feedback about user experience is created equal. If you take it at face value, it can just be destructive. In user experience, it’s your job to tease out useful feedback from destructive feedback.
I hate it when this happens
I just found out, via an article in The Atlantic, that there was a whole conference dedicated to notetaking, called Take Note, and it happened on November 1-2. I would have loved to have gone — I did a whole bunch of research about notetaking when I was working at Microsoft. Some of the results of that research went into OneNote for iPad and OneNote for iPhone (both of which were released after I left the company).
It’s interesting to note1 that all of the speakers are academic, not from industry. I would have loved to have heard what the academics had to say about it, as well as been able to hear from others in industry about their experience in creating technology to support notetaking.
- Pun unintended, but I’ll let it stand. ↩
a tactical error
In my post about equality in blog comment spam, I made a tactical error. I mentioned certain well-known brand names. That post has gotten an immense amount of spam, more than 30 keyword comments in under a day.
Which is sad, because they’re not actually brands that I care about. I think Uggs are ugly, and the idea that there are actually wedding Uggs makes me question humanity’s role on this planet. So if you actually want to spam me and have a chance of me clicking on it, it needs to be about Fab1 or Eileen Fisher. Or it needs to be for a most awesome sofa that is not a sectional and is not brown or grey2, since that’s something that I want and haven’t been successful in finding.
free VMware videos
We’ve just released a website that has more than 50 videos about vSphere, vCloud Director, vFabric, Site Recovery Manager, and more. It’s a great introduction to VMware solutions to help you learn more about what we’ve got to offer.
I’ve been watching a few of them in my spare time to learn more about some of our products that I haven’t yet had a chance to touch, as well as to see how we’re talking about our products to our users. They’ve been pretty useful to me, I hope they are to you too.
equality in blog comment spam
Once upon a time, it used to be that my blog comment spam was all about (ahem) enlargement. Today, when I cleaned out my blog comment spam, I realized that it was all about products for women: Ugg boots, Hermes handbags, and perfume.
I’m not interested in either enlargement or Uggs, but I wonder if I’m slightly happy that the comment spam isn’t just for men any longer. Yay, equality?
experiences at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
This year, I got to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the first time. I was excited at finally being able to go: I’d been aware of it for awhile, but it kept on conflicting with other things. Besides being able to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Systers mailing list, I was part of a panel presentation about influencing without authority.
I got my first undergrad, in CS, in 1998. There weren’t a lot of other women in my program. I have a second undergrad in math, and a MS in technical communication — which, as a program, had more women, but I was in the human-computer interaction track, which had fewer women. I also used to be an Emergency Medical Technician. All of this is to say that I’m used to being the only woman, or maybe one of two or three women, in the room. I’m used to having to hold my own with a bunch of guys, and I’ve long since come to terms with that.
Being at Grace Hopper was weird for me. It sold out this year, so there were ~3600 other technical women there. I’ve never been in a room with that many technical women before. In one meeting with my previous employer, I actually had a meeting where it was all technical woman, and we took a picture to commemorate it because none of us had had such a thing naturally happen before. Being surrounded by so many technical women was just fantastic, even if it did feel very odd to me at first.
Grace Hopper also skewed pretty young. Of those 3600 attendees, ~1500 were students. The content of the conference reflects this: there were plenty of sessions aimed at students (both graduate and undergraduate), as well as sessions for people who were just starting out in their career. I wish that I had known about this when I was an undergrad, because I would have loved to have had access to resources like this instead of looking around the handful (or less) of other women in my CS and math courses and wondering where the rest of the women were. There was also some great material for people who were senior leaders, which I appreciated because I’d very much like to be in a position to take advantage of that material someday. I kind of felt like I fell into a donut hole: there were a lot of women who were 25 or younger, and there were a good number of women 45 or older, but I didn’t feel like there were a lot of women in my particular tribe there: mid-career professionals who were looking to figure out how to continue growing their careers. There was some material there. Of the sessions that I felt were appropriate for me in my mid-career, my favorite session was “Women, Thought Leadership, Mentorship, and Sponsorship”.
One of the things about presenting at a conference, and also being there representing your company, you’re not really an attendee of the conference. I mean, I got to go to sessions and all of that, but people were always coming up to me to introduce themselves either because they were interested in something about my company (say, the awesome swag that we included in the bag, or a job there) or because they were interested in or had a follow-up question about my session.
Another thing about being a presenter, especially when it’s your first time, is that you’re nervous before the session, so you don’t get to immerse yourself in the conference. At least, I didn’t, maybe others are better able to do that. And then there was the session itself. My session was right after the keynote. My fellow panelists and I arrived early, skipping the morning’s keynote so that we could chat and make sure that we were all prepared. This meant that we didn’t know that the keynote ran over, so we went from an empty room with a handful of people there for our session at the time when we were supposed to start, and then suddenly the room was so full that our room monitor had to turn people away about 10 minutes after the start of the session. We had a good discussion, not to mention some awesome questions (and I’ve got a bunch of blog posts to write as a result of those questions).
Overall, Grace Hopper was an awesome event, and I’m really glad that I attended. I need to put some more thought into what I’m looking for as a mid-career technical woman, where to find it, and how I can help create that.