Monthly Archives: January 2014

user experience

when user interviews go bad

The Cranky Product Manager asks what to do when you’re stymied when interviewing a user.  In her example, she asks a broad question, and the user responds with a list of details that they want fixed in the application.

I think that scenario is familiar to everyone who has ever tried to interview users.  I usually handle this situation by reviewing the list and trying to understand what brought us to the point where this is the interaction that the user wants to have with me.  Are there items on their list that are so important to them that these items block them from being able to consider anything else?  Are there categories of problems on their list that tell me that there’s a bigger problem to solve here?  Are they trying to accomplish a workflow that we didn’t consider or didn’t get right?  Is the overall problem one of death by a thousand papercuts?  If I can identify a trend in their list, I can make more headway in making user experience improvements that go beyond filing 23 bugs.

Another option in handling this is “tell me more”.  “Tell me more about item #3 here.  Can you show me what happens?”  This gets them talking about the context of item #3, and puts it in perspective of what they’re trying to accomplish when they run into the problem that they’ve identified that they want you to fix.  It can give you the insight that you need to address the underlying problem.

When you receive a list like this, you must be open to the feedback that you get, analyze it carefully to understand what the problems are, and make informed decisions about the next steps to take (which might or might not be doing exactly what is outlined by the list).

user experience, vSphere

“why I like the vSphere web client a lot!”

I missed this post over the holidays: “why I like the vSphere web client a lot!”  There’s a couple of things in it that are near and dear to my heart, such as Mac support1, Works in Progress2, and tags3.

  1. I’ve been advocating for this ever since I joined ↩
  2. Internally, we still call it by its original name, TIWO (tee-whoa): Things I’m Working On. ↩
  3. My first major research project at VMware was about tags. ↩
Nadyne

San Francisco and wage disparity

There’s been a lot of attention in San Francisco about wage disparity, ever-increasing rents and housing values1, and the attitudes about them.  It’s very easy to see it play out in person if you live here.

From the sidelines, you can see it in the press.  Take two pieces from the San Francisco Chronicle, written just a few days apart:

‘Techie’ term draws derision from tech workers, in which tech workers2 complain about being called “techie” by non-tech workers, and non-tech workers complain about the behavior of tech workers.  (This article has an amazing example of the blinders that tech workers can have about their position here, where one self-identified entrepreneur said, “Whenever you get a mass migration of a new wave of people, you get a negative connotation from the people who were there before – like Mexicans in the Mission. The new wave always gets a bad rap.”  I really can’t accept that highly-paid tech workers can be reasonably compared to mostly low-wage manual laborers.

Protesters block Google bus in S.F. Mission, in which local advocates protest the use of public bus stops by private buses shuttling employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley tech companies.  The latter incident has spurred much discussion amongst tech bloggers.  There have been some pretty reprehensible posts written about it.  It was hard to choose the worst of the lot until a poorly-written piece on Pando labeled as satire came along.

Jason Calacanis has written an excellent response to this, in which he points out that “[a] society can best be judged by how the most privileged regard and treat the most vulnerable and weak”.  I agree: I think it’s incumbent on those of us who have been lucky enough and privileged enough to have our skills valued so highly consider how we can make our communities better places for all of us, not just those who can afford an ever-increasing cost-of-living.

  1. Which is generally good if you’re already a homeowner, but much less so if you’re an aspiring homeowner. ↩
  2. Yes, you can see my bias here ↩
Apple, user experience

consistency matters

2 Comments

There is an inconsistency in two things that I use frequently, and it trips me up all the time.

In OS X Mavericks (and previous versions1), when using the Finder, there’s one keyboard shortcut that I use all the time.  If you have a long list of folders and files, you can go to the parent folder and type the first letter of the file that you want.  It will jump to the first file that starts with that letter.  I have lots of folders with lots of files in them, and I use this all the time so that I don’t have to scroll.2  For example, if you have a folder with a lot of files in it, and you want to jump to “nadyne.txt”, you can select the parent folder (say, Documents) and then type an N.  You’ll be taken to the first item in the list with an N, and have much less scrolling to do.

However, in iTunes 11, if you want to jump to the first item in the list that begins with an N, the focus has to be on the list itself.  For example, if you want to jump to “Neko Case” in your artist listing, you have to have focus there, and then click N.  To be consistent with the Finder, you would need to have focus on the parent object of “Music”.

I don’t really care which behavior is the winning behavior, I just wish that the two were consistent.  I trip over this all the time, and it drives me utterly batty.  (And yes, I’ve submitted the Radar: 15750167.)

  1. I can’t say how far back.  Muscle memory says that it’s far back indeed. I can’t remember when it didn’t work this way on OS X. ↩
  2. I use this even more frequently now that the arrow buttons have disappeared from scrollbars, but that’s another post for another time. ↩
career

thoughts on career fairs

Career fairs are hard events.  They’re hard for me as someone who is there to evaluate candidates to fill positions that my company has open, and I certainly remember them being hard when I was in college and looking for a job.  Now that I’m on the hiring side of the table, I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned that might help someone on the please-hire-me side of the table.

At most career fairs, the employers are going to speak to dozens of candidates.  At some of the larger engineering career fairs that I’ve attended, we have walked away with hundreds of resumes.  That’s just one career fair at one university.  Now imagine how many career fairs our University Relations staff go to.  (For us engineers, we usually only go to one or two career fairs per year.)  We get a lot of resumes out of these, and we have to figure out which candidates we’re going to call back after we’re done with our career fairs.  Here are some things to do to stand out at a career fair.

  1. Spend the time now to get your resume into great shape.  Your resume represents you.  It should be clear, well-written, and underscore your unique combination of education and experience that makes me want to hire you.  If your university has any resume-writing resources, take advantage of them.  If not, get your friends and a trusted faculty member to review your resume.  A resume that has typos in it says that you don’t pay attention to details. A resume that lists every single Computer Science course that you’ve taken does not tell me why I should hire you.  A resume that says that you play intramural lacrosse makes me wonder why you think this is something that you want me to know.
  2. Tell me whether you are looking for an internship or a full-time position, and when you are available for this position (summer internship? full-time position starting in September?).  It saves me from having to scan your resume and guessing.
  3. Explain why you are a great candidate to work at VMware.  This tells me that you’ve done research on my company, which is always a good start.  You should tell me what from your background matches up with goals for my company.  Even better is if you’ve looked at some of our open positions and can thus reference skills that we often look for.  Also make sure that you look at our locations.  You should know the location of our headquarters and our other primary offices, and you should be comfortable with living in one of those places.
  4. I’ve got a standard spiel that I have ready to go for candidates at career fairs.  I’ll tell you about the company, where we’re located, what kind of work we do, why it’s awesome to work here, what kind of career opportunities we have, what our internship program looks like, and so on.  A candidate who already knows all of that, and we can get into details about why you would be awesome for us and who has specific questions for me about why they should come work for us is a candidate that is more likely to get my attention at a career fair.
  5. You should talk positively about your experience so far.  If you can take something difficult and tell me what was positive about it (“I learned a lot about how to handle uncomfortable situations with others in our group project when one of the team members was unable to meet their commitments”) makes me think that you’re resilient and can solve problems.
  6. Talk to your professors, your department administrator, and professional campus groups about companies that will be visiting.  For example, when I visit a campus for a career fair, I’ll often give a talk to a department or a class that is relevant to the user experience jobs that I have open.  You’ll have an additional opportunity to talk to me, it’s usually a smaller setting than the big career fair and so you have more time to make a positive impression on me, and you’ll learn more about the company and the work we do.

Here are some things that reduce your chances of being successful at a career fair.

  1. Ask me what my company does.  I’ll tell you (as I said, I’ve got that standard spiel), but this tells me that you didn’t do any research before you walked up to me.  You’ve lowered my expectations about you, and you’ll have to work harder to convince me that you’re a great candidate.
  2. Be unsure about what you want out of an internship.  It’s valid to say that that you’re exploring options, but that means that you should be able to tell me what kinds of questions you have about software engineering careers and how you think an internship will help you answer them.
  3. Start off by telling me that you don’t use my company’s products.  Since I work for an enterprise software company, I don’t expect that candidates at career fairs will have experience with our products.  Instead, tell me why you’re interested in working for a company that makes enterprise software.  (While “I really need a job” is an answer that’s probably true and I certainly remember that feeling, please come up with something better.)
  4. Don’t stuff a resume in my hands, ask for a t-shirt (or whatever other swag we’re giving away at that career fair), and then leave without talking to me.  That resume goes to the very bottom of the pile.  If you really don’t want to work for my company and just want a t-shirt because free clothing is a good thing when you’re in school, come around at the end of the career fair.  If we’ve got extra shirts at the end of the career fair, we’re pretty likely to give them out to anyone who asks, so that we don’t have to ship them back to the office.
  5. Don’t assume that talking to a woman means that you’re talking to someone who isn’t technical.  It’s perfectly okay to ask what I do.  Assuming anything about me, or any of my colleagues who are working with me at the career fair, tells me that you’re likely to make assumptions in the work that you do, too.  Invalid assumptions cause lots of problems in software development (“no-one will ever enter invalid data here” is the root cause of many bugs).  Doing this leaves me with a very bad first impression of you, and since our time to talk at a career fair is very limited, that very bad impression is likely to stick.
  6. Don’t have any questions about what it’s like to work at my company.  Remember, this isn’t a one-way interaction.  It’s not just about the company deciding whether they want to hire you.  It’s also about you deciding whether you want to work for the company.  As we talk, you should ask follow-up questions if there’s something that you hear that you want more details about.  You should also have questions about the company, the team, the product, or the working environment.  Not having questions tells me that you’re not necessarily as interested in working for my company as other candidates who did ask me questions are.

Our interaction at a career fair is limited.  There’s a lot that you can do to make that interaction very positive.  The more positive that interaction is, the more likely you are to move forward.