Monthly Archives: July 2013

user experience

“your app makes me fat”

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Kathy Sierra has returned to the world of blogging after a 6-year hiatus, and her first post on her new blog is stellar.  It’s called “Your app makes me fat”, and it’s a fantastic piece about cognitive load — that is, how much brain power you have to put into completing a task.

She talks about how cognitive load not only impacts how our users interact with our applications, but also how it impacts the lives of our users.  It’s a great reminder that our user experience doesn’t stand by itself.  Instead, our user experience is just a part of the day for our users.  We often talk about “death by a thousand paper cuts”, and I think that we forget that those paper cuts still hurt even when our users leave their desks.  After all, who hasn’t gone home after a bad technology day at the office and been unable to focus on anything else because they were so drained by what they’d experienced that day?

It’s a long post, and there’s a lot in there to think about.  Make sure that you’re ready to settle in, read the post, and think about her points.  I know I’m going to have to re-read it at another time when I’ve got more energy to focus on it.

Nadyne

happy sysadmin day!

I think that it’s an excellent idea to unilaterally declare that a day is a special day.  Some sysadmin somewhere in the world apparently agrees with this, and thus today is Sysadmin Day.

Based on some of the sysadmins that I know, I think that today will be spent randomly unplugging network cables and drinking heavily1.  Also, don’t forget to turn it off and on again.

 

(That’s from The IT Crowd, which I highly recommend. The first season DVDs have geek subtitles (l33t, rot13, Klingon, etc) which are extremely well-done.)

  1. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to how, or if, this is different than any other given day of the week. ↩
Mac, user experience

the user experience of red

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Jeff Carlson wrote a post about the battery gauge of his spiffy new MacBook Air.  The newest generation of MacBooks have amazing battery life.  There’s a strange downside to this battery life, though.  Here’s a quote from Jeff:

Working on the new 2013 MacBook Air, I noticed that the battery gauge in the menu bar had slid into red. Typically that means a scramble to find the power adapter, but then I clicked the button […]  17% battery still left—with an estimated 3 hours 23 minutes of battery charge.

A red battery indicator on my Mac used to mean that I needed to get plugged in quickly.  Not drop-everything quickly, but sometime in the next half-hour or so.  The red battery indicator usually meant that I could finish out a meeting if I was careful, but that was about it.  Now, though, I’ve got a retina MacBook Pro.  A red battery indicator usually means that I still have three hours of battery life yet.

Users are trained that a red icon indicates that there is a problem that needs to be addressed soon, and that not addressing it soon means that there will be consequences.  Apple hasn’t considered this in expectation in the current battery indicator.  Red no longer means that I need to fix this soon.  Now that my expectation for what red means is broken, I have found that I stop paying attention to the battery indicator.  I’ve increasingly found myself getting the dialog telling me that my Mac needs to be plugged in very soon or it will have to power itself off.

Apple has made amazing strides in battery technology.  I can easily get more than 8 hours of battery life on my rMBP without paying any attention to conserving the battery.  As a result of this improvement, 20% of battery life remaining is no longer a cause for concern.  Apple needs to reconsider the point at which it warns me that my battery is low.  The warning needs to be early enough that I can complete whatever I’m currently working on, but not so early that I disregard it as something that needs action from me.

user experience, VMware

job posting: senior UX researcher

My team at VMware has an opening for a senior user experience researcher at our headquarters in Palo Alto, California. We are responsible for user research across VMware’s product portfolio. A senior researcher on the team is responsible for working with teams to understand their needs, creating a research plan to address those needs, conducting the research, analyzing the results of the research, communicating the results of the research, and continuing to evangelize the results of the research. Additionally, the senior researcher will proactively identify research needs and conduct research that will help us address long-term needs of the organization and put us ahead of the curve in understanding our users, how they use our applications, and how we can better meet their needs, desires, and aspirations.

If you are interested in this role, please email me with a cover letter, resume, and (preferred but not required) link to your portfolio.

My team also has openings for senior interaction designers.  You can email me if you’re interested in that role or have any questions about it as well.

women

are you really a geek?

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This post about exorcising the spectre of the fake geek girl really hit close to home.  The post is a discussion about a panel at a recent science fiction convention.  With only a scant handful of changes, this phenomenon is one that women with tech careers recognize as well.  As a senior technical woman, I often find myself getting challenged about whether I’m really a geek.  Do I know the right languages?  Have I been a Mac user long enough?  Do I use the approved applications?  Do I read the right blogs and sites?  Do I have an approved opinion about [whatever the controversy du jour is]?

There’s always another test.  If I pass the first one, then there’s another one lurking.   Eventually, I will fail a test.  I don’t know everything about computer science, I don’t know every programming language, I don’t read every blog, my opinion doesn’t match up with your opinion on every single topic.  Failing one of those tests means that I have proven that I’m a fake geek.

I honestly can’t fathom the person who quizzes me about my geekiness.  You would think that my education (three degrees: MS and BS in computer science, BS in math) would speak for itself.  Or maybe my job at VMware, where I’ve reached one of the seniormost levels available to technical contributors1, would be sufficient.  Or maybe my time on the committee for OOPSLA, or as an advisory board member of MacIT, would be enough.  Maybe speaking at Google DevFest would prove it.  But it’s not enough.  It’s never enough.  For those who want to believe that there is no such thing as a geek woman, nothing is ever sufficient.

I’m glad to see others taking on the imagined problem of the fake geek girl.  I think if you call yourself a geek, you’re most likely a geek.  You might be a geek in a different way than I am, and each type of geekdom is just as valid as the next.  There’s no ranking of geeks2.  If you tell me you’re a geek, I’m going to take your word for it, and I’m not going to quiz you to find out where you just aren’t geek enough for me.

  1. <5% of R&D is at my level or higher. ↩
  2. Well.  Except for this, which of course I agree with as a mathematician. ↩
VMware

Things I learned today: VMware turtle edition

turtle pond
a cluster of VMware turtles enjoying the California summer sun

VMware is famous, at least amongst its employees and visitors to our main campus, for its turtle pond.  What I didn’t know is that we currently have nine turtles in our little pond.  None of the turtles were (ahem) developed here at VMware.  They’re all acquisitions, starting in 2007 with Rosie.  Rosie was an unofficial addition to the pond, but VMware adopted her wholeheartedly.  She soon had more turtles join her.  We’ve even updated the pond to be more turtle-friendly, adding more rocks for them for sunbathing purposes, and more plants for swimming around and hiding in.

We have, of course, named all of our turtles.  Rosie got her name from the restaurant from where we acquired her.  Other turtles have been named for their attributes, such as Houdini (who is a master of hiding himself away) and McQueen (who often escapes by scaling a wall).  Another turtle is Zilla, named after the Bugzilla that our development teams use to track bugs, issues, and feature requests for our products.

Our newest addition to the turtle family was given to us by one of our customers.  His name is from his home city of Portland.  I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll need to add another pond if we find ourselves with too many turtles.

women

the two-body problem for mid-career women

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During my talk at WiAC a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the two-body problem is one of the challenges that face mid-career women.  The two-body problem is about couples who both have careers.  Throughout your career, you have different opportunities that present themselves to you.  These opportunities have to be evaluated as to how they impact your career and the rest of your life.  This evaluation becomes more difficult when you are in a relationship, because “the rest of your life” is more complex.  There are more tradeoffs to consider, and sometimes furthering one party’s goals comes at the expense of the other’s goals.  Further, given that there are two people with two careers, this problem presents itself more frequently.

My husband and I are both software engineers, and the two-body problem is one that we face constantly.  For example, we have both passed on job opportunities that would require relocation or too much travel.  While the opportunity might have been great for our careers, it would have had too much of a negative impact on our personal lives.

In our culture, it had long been expected that a woman’s career would take the back seat to that of her husband.  Consider rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, winner of a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, whose New York Times obituary notes that she followed her husband’s career.  This expectation is changing, slowly, but it still impacts many women.  I’m lucky in that my husband doesn’t believe that my career is of lesser importance than his, and our families also feel this way.

For us, we handle the two-body problem by having an ongoing conversation about what we want, both personally and professionally.  We try to make sure that we’re equally balancing each of our career growth, as well as considering the impact of our professional decisions on our personal lives.  These are not easy conversations to have.  It can be hard to talk about what we want to accomplish in our careers, and it can be even harder to talk about places where we feel like we aren’t making as much headway as we want.  They’re hard conversations, but important ones.