Terri Oda, a PhD in computer security, has an enlightening slideshow about how biology explains why there aren’t more women in CS. You should check it out.
Monthly Archives: August 2013
UX vs UI, explained via cereal
This blog post is amusing and yet accurate: The Difference Between User Experience and User Interface: Subtleties Explained in Cereal.
MacIT 2014 call for speakers
The MacIT 2014 Call for Speakers is now live. MacIT will be held in San Francisco, California, on March 26-29, 2014. In short, we’re looking for people who have experience as Mac system administrators who want to share their expertise and network with other Mac sysadmins.
Personally, here are some things for which I’d love to see MacIT proposals:
- creating heterogeneous IT environments — How did you go from a homogeneous environment to a heterogeneous one? What did you learn along the way? What would you do differently? What caused you to move to a heterogeneous environment?
- integrating Macs and iOS into enterprise IT — How did you manage the transition? How did you train your staff? What changes did you have to make to your infrastructure?
- Mac virtualization beyond the desktop — Don’t get me wrong, I love the Fusion team and use it myself, but there’s a lot more to virtualization than just running Fusion on your desktop. What are you using to provide a virtual Mac infrastructure? What kinds of applications are you using in your virtual Mac infrastructure? What kinds of users use your virtual Mac infrastructure?
The Call for Speakers has additional topic ideas, too. Don’t feel limited by what I’ve listed here!
If you’re interested in speaking at MacIT but aren’t sure if you’ve got a good topic, I’d be happy to chat with you and brainstorm an awesome topic for you. Just ping me.
VMware innovation, and we’re hiring
The Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies is out, and VMware is #3 on the list.
This feels like an excellent opportunity to say that my UX team at VMware is hiring. We’re looking for interaction designers and researchers to help us get to #1 on that list. Ping me if you’re interested.
Gmail gives the cloud a bad name
The cloud isn’t always an easy concept for people to grasp, even before we add in complexities like public cloud versus private cloud versus hybrid cloud. For a non-technical audience, I usually use webmail to help them understand the cloud. I can login to Yahoo! Mail, or Outlook.com1, or Gmail, from any computer in the world, and I’ll see everything the same on that webmail service. Since there are lots of webmail users, starting off with a known concept and explaining how it’s one type of cloud helps them grasp the idea.
The problem is that webmail in general, and Gmail in particular, is a public cloud. It’s a public cloud that you’re not paying for. Servers, storage, and bandwidth are not free. To pay for the resources that Gmail needs, Google shows you ads that it thinks are relevant to you. But now, Google has explicitly said that its users should have no expectation of privacy:
Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use Web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient’s [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, ‘a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.
Users can have a legitimate expectation of privacy of information that they voluntarily turn over to third parties. There’s plenty of data that I voluntarily turn over to a third party. Every conversation that I have with my doctor or my lawyer contains data that I’ve voluntarily turned over to them, and I have the expectation that they’re going to keep that information private unless I authorize them to do something else with it (say, use it anonymously as part of a medical research study). As a researcher myself, I get lots of sensitive data from the participants of my research, and I’m very careful to ensure that my participants’ sensitive data is not revealed to anyone. When I’m reporting results to my own team, I would never say “Eddie Dinel, Director of Program Management at VMware, said …”. Instead, I always say “Eddie, a senior manager at a technology company, said …”2. I make sure that the information that participants share with me is kept private.
If you’re using a cloud for sensitive data, you should be careful to understand what the privacy policy is of that cloud. Gmail has told you that you can’t expect privacy from them. This might or might not change your usage of Gmail, but don’t assume that their stance on privacy applies to every other cloud out there.
a different test of your product
I mentioned that you could do a quick test of your product by asking your users to describe it to you. There’s a related but different test of your product that you should do. Get the senior leaders of your application to describe, in a sentence or two, why people buy your product today. Make sure they focus on the version of the application that your users are using today, not the version that they’re working on.
Doing this by itself will tell you what your team thinks your app does and why people buy it. You’ll learn a lot if their answers are similar or disparate. If their answers are similar, then you’ve got a great starting point for making design decisions. If their answers are disparate, then a useful exercise is to understand what the points of commonality are and where the points of disagreement are, and then try to determine how to bring the team into alignment.
If you do this in conjunction with asking the same question of your users, then you can compare the answers of the two groups and make sure that they’re aligned. If they’re not aligned, then you’ve got the opportunity to help your team better understand what your users actually do, or want to do, with your application. If they are aligned, then you’re in an awesome position of being able to make an even better product in the future.
This is a very small piece of research that you can conduct, often just in hallway conversations, and is very illuminating. If I’m working on a product that I’m not familiar with, or with a new team, I’ll often start here to understand the landscape. It’s quick, it’s easy, and can form the basis of future research efforts.
the reading queue grows
Thanks to a post on a mailing list, I learned about the ACM Classic Book series, which includes PDFs of some of the books. My reading queue has just grown.
you can’t get it if you don’t ask
Last week, I applied a lesson that I often have trouble with: you can’t get something if you don’t ask for it.
During an all-hands meeting, our executives announced that they’re doing special t-shirts for VMware employees that mark when we joined the company. They said that we’d get an email so that we could choose our t-shirt size. The following day, the email arrived. And there were 8 sizes to choose from, XS through to 3XL. There were no options for women’s t-shirts.
I grumbled to myself, annoyed at having yet another t-shirt that I won’t wear at any time other than at the gym or when washing my car. I grumbled some more, annoyed that we were actually being asked for our t-shirt size, and it’s not like t-shirt vendors don’t have women’s shirts. Then I heard more grumbling, from a couple of women on my team, and another couple of women on my hallway.
Grumbling doesn’t solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem is to ask. (Actually, as I said to a friend, I decided to start rabble-rousing.) I asked: I posted a request to our internal social network and asked if we could get women’s sizes. I posted it at 10am on Wednesday morning. I sent the link to a few of the people who I had heard grumbling too. By noon, there were already 50 “+1” and related comments on my post. By the time I left the office that afternoon, there were more than 100. And the next day, there was a post from the relevant team saying that it was going to be addressed. For those women who had already selected shirts, or who had posted to the thread, they received an email asking them if they’d like to select a different size. For everyone else, they received a new email to let them know that women’s t-shirts were also available.
You can’t get something if you don’t ask for it. I asked, and I got it. Thank you, VMware, for helping out.
women at ComicCon
I don’t generally follow ComicCon events, but this article about the “Women Who Kick Ass” panel there caught my attention, especially this bit:
“We gotta start writing,” [Michelle Rodriguez] said again. She meant women. “Writing, and directing, and producing the kind of content we want to see. Because otherwise, nothing’s gonna change.”
There’s a lot of parallels to the experience of women in tech. Look at my own employer’s executive leadership: out of the 15 people on that page, only 2 are female, and neither of them are in technical roles. It feels like we can do better, especially given that one of our co-founders was female.
I agree with Rodriguez. This is one of the points that I tried to make in my talk at Women in Advanced Computing: if we want more women in technical roles, we have to stay in technical roles, and we have to keep on reaching for more and more senior roles so that we can have a technical female executive.