Monthly Archives: February 2013

user experience

Austin Govella’s manifesto for user experience design

Austin Govella has just updated his manifesto for user experience design.  There’s a lot in it to like, but the last point really resonates with me:

Create better organizations to enable better design.

Your design activities don’t change. Change how you work with your team. Change how you work, so your goal is always a better organization instead of a better product. Change how you accomplish the design, so that you are always improving your team’s design literacy.

I think that everyone in user experience at least occasionally struggles with working with people who don’t understand design and how design makes better products.  I think that Austin is right that it’s our job to help make our organization better.  Just as we in user experience need to understand our technology and our users so that we can make a better design, we also have to share our knowledge about user experience and design and our users and how our technology fits into our users’ lives to help everyone in the organization do a better job of making products to meet people’s needs.

user experience

the limitations of click analytics

Dan McKinley, an engineer at etsy, has an awesome blog post titled Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics.  He makes a lot of great points about when to use, and when not to use, analytics.  This is the single most important sentence in the whole post:

It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics. Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake.

I’ve now got this bookmarked for the next time this comes up in conversation, which I anticipate will be within the next week, and quite possibly today.

Nadyne

comment wisdom

This is so true that it deserves to be engraved on every laptop, tablet, and smartphone that has been or ever will be produced:

@AvoidComments: Thinking of reading comments? Instead, call your oldest relative. He or she will appreciate your time much more than comments denizens will.

This obviously doesn’t apply to anyone who comments on this blog, for y’all are devastatingly intelligent and erudite.  You always advance the conversation and make deep meaningful points1.

  1. Except for when you don’t, and that’s one of the reasons that comments here are moderated. ↩
Nadyne

Lifehack: use your phone’s address book to avoid scam calls

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Scam calls are a fact of life.  The Do Not Call registry has cut down on it some, but shady companies operating overseas don’t pay attention to this list.  But with just a teensy bit of effort on your part, you can readily ignore scam phone calls.  This requires a telephone with an address book and caller ID.  And it’s dead simple.  Here’s what you do:

  1. Create a new entry in your telephone’s address book named “Scam” (or whatever else you’d prefer).
    1. Optionally, if your address book supports pictures, give it a picture.  I use the no symbol: my phone’s screen is big and bright, so it gives me a visual indicator that I can see across the room when my phone rings.
    2. Optionally, if your phone supports ring tones, give your Scam contact a silent ringtone.  Here’s one for you in different formats and lengths.
  2. Whenever you get a scam call (for some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of the Windows malware calls lately1), add that phone number to your Scam entry in your address book.
  3. Whenever you see Scam on your phone, smile widely and don’t pick up the phone.

You could go a step further and assume that anyone who isn’t in your address book is probably a scam caller, or just someone who you don’t want to talk to.  In that case, and if your phone supports it, you could set your default ringtone to silent (either its silent setting, or using a silent ringtone — I prefer the latter, since my phone vibrates when it’s in its silent mode), and then assign custom ringtones to those whose calls you want to ring.

I know that this doesn’t feel like it’s a big thing, but your Scam address book entry will get long over time. I’ve only been doing this for about four months, and I’ve already got 15 telephone numbers in there.  I wrote this post because my phone just rang, and I looked up and saw that it was a scam, and smiled to myself in satisfaction that I didn’t have to interrupt what I was doing and get annoyed by someone trying to sell me carpet cleaning or Windows malware removal or whatever other method they’re trying to employ to part me from my money.  I just checked my caller history, and Scam shows up in there many times over the past couple of weeks.  All of those are calls that I haven’t answered and that haven’t wasted my time.

  1. Remind me to tell you about going along with one of these calls once. ↩
user experience, VMware

hiring UX researchers

(Edited 2013-03-04: We’re no longer accepting applications for this role.)

My team at VMware, which works on user experience across VMware’s product portfolio, has an opening for a UX researcher who has recently (within the past year) graduated from college, or who will receive their degree this year.  Interested in learning more?  Ping me.

We’re also hiring UX designers and UI developers, and I can point you in the right direction if you’re interested in those roles, as well as answer any questions that you might have about working for VMware.

Nadyne

Future Nadyne and Current Nadyne

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Recently, someone told me that they admired how confident I am and how I take on new challenges.  She asked for some advice on how to be more confident.  I gave her two pieces of advice: fake it til you make it, and talk to your Future Self and ask her what would be better for her.

The first is relatively easy: pretend to be a confident person.  It gets easier over time, and there will come a day when someone says that they admire you for your confidence even though you know that there are plenty of days when you have to remind yourself to keep your head up.

The second requires more introspection.  When presented with an opportunity, a challenge, or a difficult situation, I think about what will make Future Nadyne happier.  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I have the carrots or the fries?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I take the opportunity to speak at this conference?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I go to the networking meetup?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I let this jerk steamroll over me?

Thinking about Future Nadyne makes Current Nadyne a better person.  Doing this doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t mean that I’m successful in everything that I try.  But it does mean that I take the time to truly consider whether I should or shouldn’t do something, and my consideration is based on what is best for me, not just on what is most comfortable for me.

user experience

use body language to improve your user research

I came across a great blog post from Design Staff about how body language can impact your user research.  It’s a great post about reading the body language of the participant in your user research to see if they’re uncomfortable, and what you can do with your own behavior and body language to try to make them more comfortable.

I always try to start out my research by reminding participants that we’re looking at early design thinking, and thus they can be frank with their opinions.  I also try to be encouraging without being leading, and I’m definitely grateful for the time that they take to share their thoughts with me.  I try to be good with body language, but that’s probably the hardest one to know if you’re doing the right thing.

iPad, iPhone, Mac

Mac users are the original BYOD

During MacIT last week, my fellow advisory board members and I gave a panel session titled “Things You Should Know: Mountain Lion”.  During my slot, I talked about the evolution of BYOD.  I couldn’t cover as much as I wanted during that time, and lots of people talked to me after the session, which gave me even more ideas about this.

The modern roots of BYOD can be traced to the iPhone.  People started buying their own iPhones and using them side-by-side with their corporate-issued smartphones.  When the iPhone gained Exchange ActiveSync support in 2008, people started ignoring their corporate-issued smartphones and doing more and more corporate work on their iPhones.  Additionally, people who never had corporate-issued smartphones now started using their personal iPhones against corporate resources.  IT had to adapt to this influx of new and unsupported devices.  Some companies began issuing iPhones (and other smartphones as well, as more competitors to the iPhone appeared).  Still others decided that it was better to let employees buy their own phones, and their IT infrastructure would just have to support it.  Bring Your Own Device suddenly became a thing with its own acronym and its own policy.

BYOD has plenty of advantages, both to the employee and to the company.  Employees get to buy hardware that they like to use.  They can consolidate onto a single device and not carry around two smartphones.  Companies and their IT departments now have fewer devices that they have to manage.

Just about the same time when we started to take BYOD seriously, and when companies were creating official policies about how they would handle BYOD, the iPad came onto the market.  It was a natural extension to BYOD to allow these new tablets onto the corporate infrastructure.  As with the iPhone, the iPad also paved the way for other tablets to follow suit.

Now, we’re seeing BYOD extended to laptops.  Companies are starting to allow their employees to bring their own laptops.  Those of us who have been Mac users for a long time look at BYOD and realize that we’ve been doing BYOD for years and years, we just never put a name on it.  If we did put a name on it, it was “sneaking around”.  Mac users have been using their personal laptops for work purposes for years and years.  Sometimes it was just when working at home, other times it was bringing it to work and figuring out what was necessary to get it to work on the corporate network.  These clandestine Mac users would trade information amongst themselves about what works and what doesn’t, what software was necessary to make everything look okay, and how to be a Mac user and not look like you were a Mac user.

I know a number of Mac IT admins who got their start in companies that were willing to look the other way when Mac users brought their laptops to work.  They became known as the IT person who could help out the Mac users, either by helping them with the right settings or software to be more functional on the corporate network, or who were willing to make the right tweaks to the infrastructure to support Mac users without impacting everyone else.  They didn’t start as Mac IT admins, and they didn’t even necessarily start as Mac users themselves, but they helped out and learned a lot by doing.  The MacEnterprise mailing list got its start several years ago, and has always had a sizeable element of trying to figure out how to get Macs to work in an environment that, at best, doesn’t support Macs, and, at worst, might be actively hostile to them.

For us longtime Mac users, BYOD has helped engender a lot of changes to IT that makes it easier for us to be Mac users.  The cloud, SaaS, virtualization, and virtual desktops have all made it possible for us to easily access data and applications that we had to fight our way around otherwise.  IT has had to adapt to support all of this.  On one hand, a heterogeneous environment can be more difficult to manage; on the other hand, happy users and a more flexible and adaptive environment can be easier to manage.

It’s a pretty awesome time to be a Mac user in the enterprise, and I think that it’s just going to get easier and easier from here.  It’s also a pretty awesome time to be a Mac IT administrator, since these skills are in high demand as more companies decide that it’s time to adapt to a changing workforce and an ever-changing array of devices that must be supported by their infrastructure.