a memo to Notifications Center (Mountain Lion edition)

Dear Notifications Center,

I hate you.

I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.

Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now.  And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”.  There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X.  There’s just those two options.  I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now.  In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11.  You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.

Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want.  I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications).  I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts.  There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me.  The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention.  Other than that: GTFO.

I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there.  My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago).  Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?

I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar.  Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time.  I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.

I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners.  But no, I can’t do that.  I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.

In short, feel free to FOAD.

No love,
Nadyne.

a retrospective of VMware user experience tech talks

In January, I started something new at VMware: a monthly series of UX tech talks.  This was a direct outcome of VMware User Experience 2011 (vUE 2011), which I created and led last year.  Its goal was to get our internal VMware user experience community together for the very first time.  It was a rousing success, with nearly 60 people from all corners of VMware attending.  One of the things that we learned as a result of vUE 2011 was that we wanted more opportunities for us to come together and learn from each other.

I just sent out the series of invites for the 2013 UX tech talk series, which made me think about all of the tech talks that we’ve seen in 2012. It’s been quite an awesome mix of topics. Take a look at this:

  • OmniGraffle for designers
  • Designing on the edge of chaos: An introduction to complexity science and how it can influence your approach to design
  • User experience the “Mad Men” way
  • Design for mobile
  • An introduction to Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge
  • UX summer intern projects
  • A designer’s guide to learning about our users
  • How do you know when your design is done?
  • The odd couple: user experience versus user interface?
  • Disney imagineering
  • Visio for designers

This tells me a lot about my fellow user experience colleagues across VMware. We’ve talked about some very hands-on topics, like how to use tools and how to conduct research, as well as some topics intended to make us think about what it means to be a user experience professional and how we can learn from other areas.

I also went back and looked at the conference reports that I get from our meeting conferencing tools, and the UX tech talk series had awesome turnout throughout the year.  Even better, the invitation list has only expanded as more and more people have become aware of this and wanted to have the opportunity to learn more. We started out with about 30 people at our first tech talk, and have only grown from there.

The 2012 tech talk series has been an amazing success, and its success is attributable to so many people. There’s Lisa, who stepped in to help me run this series when it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated! She’s done an awesome job of helping to line up speakers, giving feedback to speakers when they practice their talks, and keeping everything moving. There’s also my team’s assistant Joan, who works behind the scenes to manage the logistics of all of this (which is a surprisingly involved and time-consuming task). And, of course, there’s all of the tech talk speakers who have offered their experience and expertise to the VMware user experience community.

I can’t wait to see what UX tech talks we do in 2013.  And there’s vUE 2013 in the works too …

one of my favorite VMware perks

There’s a lot of awesomeness to be had in working at VMware.  One of my favorite perks is the VMware Foundation, which this year matches $3141.59 of charitable giving to approved organizations.  We also get 5 paid days of service learning, which we can use to volunteer time at approved charities.  (“Approved charities” essentially  means “any 501(c) organization”, so pretty much every charity is an approved charity.)

This year, here’s how I’ve taken advantage of this perk.  I’ve volunteered for two different organizations: Breakthrough San Francisco, and IDEO.org.  I’ve also donated to KQED-FM, the San Francisco Symphony, RAINN, and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.

I didn’t take full advantage of my service learning hours for this year, so one of my goals for next year is to fully take advantage of that.

it’s official!

It’s official!  I’m on the MacIT conference advisory board.  They get a girl and someone who knows enterprises, all wrapped up in one sarcastic package.  I’m not sure they realize what they’ve signed up for.

(Actually, I’ve been participating in this for months, but I’ve been excessively bad about getting a bio and headshot to IDG for inclusion on the website.)

the user experience of the end

SilarekI was introduced to Glitch, a beautiful MMO, a few weeks before it was announced that it would close.  Glitch was a lovely game with a fantastic user experience.  Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, got all of the details right.  The in-world experience was truly unique, imaginative, and beautiful.  And they did a great job with its interactivity, and even got keyboard interaction right.  Their visual language was gorgeous.  They did the best job that I’ve ever seen of integrating music into the experience.  But the game was also unsustainable: built on Flash, which brought even my brand-new MacBook Pro to a standstill sometimes, it just couldn’t deal with the number of players that it needed to be sustainable.

And when they announced that they were closing, they again got all of the details right.  They offered options to those who subscribed: refund, let the company keep it, or donate to charity.  They continued to introduce new elements of gameplay, including new areas of the world.  They introduced what was possibly my favorite type of animal, the helikitty.  There were quests that led up to the end of the world.  And in the last few hours of the game, they wrapped up everything very nicely, giving the staff and the players a nice way to say goodbye.

Also importantly, they allowed the artists who contributed to the game to continue to grow on their art and let it out in the world.  Art director Brent Kobayashi sells handmade Glitch pouches and art prints on Etsy.  Two Indiegogo projects appeared quickly: one for the music of Glitch, another for the art of Glitch.  Both hit their goals in under two hours.

As PCWorld says, it was a graceful exit.  I’m sad to see it go, but glad that I got to experience it.  Goodbye, Glitch.

ten reasons why I hate iTunes 11

I hate the new iTunes.  Hatehatehatehatehate it.

  1. My favorite view is gone.  I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs.  Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues:
    1. Songs – Impossible to scan, because there’s no differentiation between albums.  It’s just a laundry list of my music, which on my small iTunes library at work is 23,212 items as of this writing.
    2. Albums – This clearly wasn’t designed for someone who has a large library.  It’s also difficult to scan for something.  And yes, I do like scanning my library.  Searching is fine, but sometimes i just want to scan.
    3. Artists and Genres – These are the closest to the old view that I loved, but there’s so much wasted space here that it drives me mad.  I like whitespace, but they’ve crossed over from whitespace into wasted space.  Also, of course, this is per-artist (or per-genre), which isn’t a complete view of my music collection.
  2. I clicked on “auto-size all columns” in the main songs view, which gave me columns that are all massive, and there’s no undo.  Now I have to manually resize them.  This is okay since I’ve got my laptop connected to a 24″ external monitor, and I put iTunes into fullscreen mode on it so that I could see more than one column (because apparently I’ve got some songs and albums with long titles), but is nearly impossible otherwise.
  3. The fonts are all wrong.  I don’t know how the fonts got to be all wrong, but they are.  The kerning is wrong, the weighting is wrong.  I have no idea how you can make Helvetica look so horrible, and I assume that you have to work hard on doing so.  This contributes to being difficult to read and difficult to scan.  It’s especially noticeable when bold is used, which is in a surprisingly high number of places.  I don’t hate Helvetica as much as some folks do, but something’s wrong with its use in iTunes.
  4. Tooltips are gone.  Apparently they’ve forgotten one of Neilsen’s heuristics, recognition over recall. I have to recall what these buttons mean.  I used to be able to recognize them and have the tooltip there at the ready to help me when I couldn’t recognize them.  Looking at podcasts, for example, there’s four buttons immediately after the name of the podcast, and I had to click on two of them to see what they were.  Or, let’s consider the gear icon, which is mostly used for settings, except in the sidebar, where it’s “export”.  How can I recall what an icon means when it has multiple meanings?
  5. Buttons have lost their button-y look.  In most places, this isn’t an issue.  I don’t mind that the previous/play/next buttons in the main toolbar of the app are just icons and don’t have any kind of visual indication that they’re buttons.  Those three buttons together have a lot of meaning on their own, I recognize them immediately, and I’m okay.  However, in other places, it’s often difficult to tell what’s a button and what’s not.  For example, those four buttons after the name of the podcast have insufficient whitespace to immediately identify that they’re buttons.  Also, the play button out of context from its previous/next siblings just looks like an arrow (and that’s a glyph that I’ve seen in the names of songs and podcasts).
  6. … Except when they haven’t.  There’s still a few buttons hanging around.  There’s a nice bug “unsubscribe” button for podcasts, except it’s all in caps, just in case you weren’t aware that This Is A Button.
  7. The removal of the sidebar makes creating playlists a lot more difficult.  If you don’t re-enable the sidebar, the only way to add a song to a playlist is via command-click.  With the sidebar, you can just drag a song (or a group of songs) to the playlist on the left.
  8. In books, I’m now forced to care about the difference between “books” and “PDFs”.  They’re both stuff that I want to read, and a lot of those PDFs are books.  They might not be in a book-related file format like epub, but they’re still books in any way that I care about.
  9. Movies, TV shows, and podcasts have all added an “unwatched” (or “unplayed”, for podcasts) type.  This is inconsistent with all other views, because it’s the only view where I’m now viewing a subset of the available content.  Unwatched is now the default view, which makes this doubly annoying.
  10. Search is  s l o w.  I know I’ve got a big library and that I type fast, but I can click to the search box and type a whole song or artist name before a single character appears there.  Since I can’t scan my library anymore, search is important, and it’s all but unresponsive.

UGH.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners

I’ve been aware of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners for quite awhile, and I’ve always had the best of intentions for actually attending one.  But I’d never quite managed to actually make it to one, which is embarrassing to admit, given how many opportunities there have been.  I finally attended one when VMware hosted dinner #30 last week.  I knew all of the speakers, and it was on campus so I couldn’t make any excuses about it being too far away or me not leaving early enough.

I’m so upset with myself that I waited this long.  It was an amazing networking opportunity, to chat with women of all ages, working in all aspects of computing.  I got to meet other women in user experience, I got to meet other women interested in programming languages, I got to meet other women at other major companies.  It was awesome.  I had so many great conversations, and met so many people who I’ve been in email and twitter contact with since.  It was great.

Sadly, I can’t go to dinner #31 tonight (I’ve already got plans), but I’ve got my fingers crossed for the next one.