One of the strange things about doing user experience work on software is that there’s often a considerable lead time. The disconnect felt odd when I was working at Microsoft and I had finished my work on Office:Mac and had moved on to future releases long before the new version actually hit store shelves. And, of course, I knew intellectually that it would happen when I left Microsoft to join VMware. I knew what I was working on, and I knew all of release plans at that time, so I knew that my work wouldn’t see the light of day for some time. Even so, knowing that it would happen doesn’t make the disconnect feel strange when there’s no-one around to share the joy.
book review – “Bit Literacy”
As someone who is a geek, and as someone who has done extensive research into how people manage their time (with a focus on how various electronic devices fit into their time management practices), it’s fair to assume that I’m not the target audience for this book. But I’d heard good things about Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst, and I got a free copy somewhere, so I figured I’d give it a go. What a mistake.
Bit Literacy is a self-help book, and it feels like it. It spends the first few chapters trying to convince you that you have a problem and that only this self-help book can solve it. With some minor search-and-replace, I bet I could take any Dr Phil book and turn those first few chapters into the first few chapters here. The tone for the rest of the book is just as preachy, and just as arrogant.
The book is both unoriginal and misguided. The email chapter is nothing more than an overview of getting to Inbox Zero, a concept that isn’t his but the author doesn’t give credit where it’s due. The to-do list chapter is an seemingly-endless ad for the author’s website for to-do management (an issue which mars the rest of the book, although not as completely as in this chapter). The chapter on file management was so misguided as to make me laugh out loud. Likewise, the author’s statement that we should use a service like delicious.com to manage bookmarks because it’s somehow open is obviously bunk, given the Sturm und Drang associated with Yahoo!’s decision to cut support for it1.
I was surprised at the author’s pervasive anti-Microsoft stance. I’m (obviously) a Mac girl myself, and I have no skin in the Windows/Mac game at this point in my life. I haven’t used Windows in any appreciable manner in something like 15 years. But the constant digs were both needless and inaccurate. For example, there’s a cheap shot at Outlook 2007 for Windows that whinges that the help file for how to create a new to-do is too long. Sure it is, since it lists every single step, including both changing to the task list view and all of the optional steps in the process (like setting a due date and changing the reminders). Go document your own process to that level of detail and see what that looks like.
What really annoyed me was that the author obviously came to write this book with no understanding of why people manage their time the way they do. This fault firmly puts it in the camp of many self-help books: no understanding of the underlying causes, but a layman who is convinced that their arbitrary solution is actually The One True Solution. In this regard, I view Bit Literacy as being rather too similar to books that propose cabbage soup diets as weight-loss methods.
The single piece of advice that I found useful in the book was the admonishment to take lots of pictures, and then delete not just the bad ones but also the ones that are only mediocre. If you take a lot of pictures of a given event, then you’re more likely to get some really great ones. Then you keep only the really great ones. It’s hard to get over the hump of deleting good-but-not-great pictures, but he is right that there’s little need to keep them.
As someone who has extensively researched time management, I think that any given person’s solution is going to be tailored to their usage. As a result, when considering the various approaches out there, you have to consider their underlying principles and not just the methods that they use to try to implement those principles. In reading books like Getting Things Done, while some of the specific tools haven’t been useful to me, the principle has been useful. For example, I’ve got my own way of getting to Inbox Zero, and I find that concept to be essential in how I manage my digital life. I didn’t feel like Bit Literacy had an underlying principle other than “do things my way”.
As I was writing this, I half-remembered something from Hurst, years ago. It was a discussion of The Page Paradigm, in which Hurst takes a simplistic view of how websites should be designed. Peter Merholz did an excellent job of responding to this in The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst. The comments thread is a good read too, and has further discussion about where Hurst went off-track. In the comments thread, Merholz says this:
All that said, Mark’s argument ends up being flip and facile, an effort to grab attention without addressing some of the very real complexities at stake.
… which, I think, is an excellent description of this book, too.
- I am a Delicious user, but not for things that I care about. I mostly use it to keep track of recipes that I intend to try. ↩
junior user experience researcher wanted
Are you interested in a job as a UX researcher? My team is looking for a junior researcher. This is a great position for someone who has just graduated (or is just about to graduate) from a UX, HCI, or similar degree programme, or someone who has a year or two of experience. We’ve just started looking, so I don’t have a job description to link to yet.
We have some other user experience openings, including:
If you’re interested, email me with your resume, and tell me which position you’re interested in and why you’d like to join me at VMware. And, of course, you can email me if you have any questions, too.
iPhone notifications and time zones
Before I went on vacation, I cleaned up my calendar. I declined meetings organised by others that I wouldn’t be attending, and I deleted my own events that no longer applied. This was mostly to remind others that I was on vacation, but also to ensure that my iPhone calendar only had stuff relevant to my vacation on it.
I missed one event, which is my team’s weekly meeting. This led me to notice a not-entirely-unexpected display bug with the notifications on my iPhone. The event on my calendar is in my home time zone (PST, GMT-8), and I was in another time zone (AEDT; GMT+11). The event fired at the right time, adjusting for time zone.
The notification itself has an error in the display: it shows the time for the meeting as being “yesterday”. Which it kinda is: the meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 4pm, but it is Friday at 9am in the time zone that I was in. The notification system should be smart enough to tell me when the meeting is in my time zone. I’m not necessarily near my phone with the notification sounds off, so I can’t tell just by glancing at the notification when the meeting is. The notification looks like it’s firing a day after the event, but it’s actually firing at the right time.
Notifications are only useful if I know what they’re notifying me of and what action I should take. By showing “yesterday” when an event is actually occurring now, I think that I’ve missed a meeting when I haven’t.
back in the saddle
I’ve been on vacation (as evinced by my whinging about trying to make a purchase overseas, as well as my administrivia). I left the office on December 14, and today is my first day back in the office. After being gone for nearly a month, I wasn’t sure what to think about getting back in the saddle. On one hand, being out for that long is all but guaranteed to lead to frightful numbers of unread email. But on the other hand, VMware shuts down for the week before the New Year. And I’m the newbie on the team anyway (I joined VMware on November 8).
When I got in this morning, I found that I had 345 emails waiting for me in my Outlook:Mac inbox. Today’s task has been to go through them. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post for Mac Mojo about how to find your way out from all that email. It was focused on Entourage, as well as my email usage at the time. As I went through my mail, I thought about how my strategy differs now.
Pre-trip, I still set my OOF message (and yes, I do still think of it as OOF1) even though VMware’s terminology is PTO2. I created an event named “vacation” on my calendar, which shows my status as “out of office”. During my trip, I didn’t check my email at all (!!).
After my trip, though, I find that my strategy has changed. I used to look for high-priority and flagged messages first. I don’t seem to get any messages that are marked as high-priority, nor ones that are flagged. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of VMware culture, or simply an indication that I’m still a newbie and thus not deeply involved in matters yet. I did deal with calendar invites, but that was quick and painless. It was so quick and painless that it didn’t really feel like a separate step.
Next up, I did something that I haven’t done before: I did some keyword search. For example, I searched on “PTO” to find messages from others on my team who were also taking time off. I glanced quickly over them to see if anyone was still out of the office, and then was able to quickly delete a bunch of mail. The goal of this step is to quickly get rid of stuff that I know isn’t relevant any longer. While this might not sound like a big deal, it makes it easier to focus on the mail that does matter.
Then I sorted by sender. Mails from my manager (and her manager) are the ones I read first. Some of those were dealt with immediately, some were read and deleted, some will need further action on my part. The goal was to identify either low-hanging fruit (to get it done and out of my mailbox), or to identify high-priority things that I need to deal with immediately. The next tier of email are from people on the team for my first major research project here, which kicks off in a couple of weeks. The goal is the same as that for my manager: handle the high-priority stuff, delete the stuff that I don’t need, create to-dos for stuff that will need further attention from me.
Then I go back to conversation view. I have to admit that when I resisted using conversation view in Outlook for quite some time, and it took the PM who was responsible for that feature to come to me and ask me to use it3 But now, I find conversation view to be indispensable, and so much easier to use than the implementation in Entourage:Mac 2008. It’s a lot faster to identify threads of conversation that I don’t need. The preview pane shows me the first line of each mail in the conversation, so it’s very quick to blast through an entire conversation and decide what action I need to take. (Confidential to Ryan: Thanks! I owe you one.)
I haven’t done a category search yet. Being new to the team, my category list hasn’t evolved like it was when I was at MacBU. There, I had categories for each application team, and I could sort on category because I knew that I was more interested in mails about PowerPoint and Outlook than I was about Word and Excel. Here, I don’t yet know the full extent of what I’ll work on, so I don’t have a big category list yet. My category list will continue to evolve, since it’s just too useful of a tool for me to give up. But for now, I can’t use it as a filtering mechanism.
So now it’s time to get through the rest of my inbox. In an attempt to make this feel more manageable, I’ve been doing it in 15-minute increments. I’m starting with the most recent and working my way through. The goal now is to only touch any given email once. When my 15 minutes is done, I take an email break: knock something off of my to-do list, have a conversation with someone, or just walk to the kitchen to get a fresh glass of water4. I’m sure that I won’t get to Inbox Zero today, but I’m going to have made a lot of progress towards that goal.
- This is an elderly term meaning Out Of Facilities, even though the menu has long been changed to “Out of Office”. ↩
- Paid Time Off ↩
- I’m a big believer in eating your own dogfood. He knew that, since he knew how many bugs I’d submitted. So he asked me to dogfood that particular feature. I agreed, reluctantly. ↩
- Email is dehydrating! ↩
administrivia
Two (entirely unrelated) points:
- Comments to this blog are moderated, mostly to avoid spam. I generally post comments as soon as I see them, which means within a few hours. However, when I’m on vacation (as I was from 12/14 through today) and am thus not attached to a computing device like I usually am, moderation of comments is delayed. Sorry for the delay!
- I’m looking for an analytics plug-in for WordPress. On my old blog platform, I was able to immediately tell how people were viewing my blog (RSS, directly reading the blog, link from elsewhere, search terms, etc). I entirely miss that, since it gives me great ideas for future content. Anyone got a recommendation?
the user experience of shopping overseas
I’m currently on vacation in Australia. I’ve been here several times before, and lived here for a few months in 2000/2001. This time, I’m here with my husband, visiting his family for the holidays. We’ve been to Melbourne, driven the Great Ocean Road, seen the Grampians1, and are now back in Sydney for the remainder of the trip2.
Shopping here, or rather completing a purchase here, is quite different than what I’m used to. In the States, when I use my credit card, it’s almost unheard-of for the salesperson to compare my signature on the paper with that on my credit card. I’ve made quite expensive purchases at home, such as furniture or a computer, and not had my signature or identification checked. I’m almost never asked whether I’m using a debit card or credit card. Here, the credit or debit card is the first one asked, and I have to remember to just hit the OK button instead of entering a PIN. Likewise, every single salesperson checks my signature, no matter how small the transaction. Yesterday, I was in a grocery store purchasing drinks, and the self-checkout didn’t accept cash. So I put the five bucks on my card, and someone still came over to check my signature!
This is all pretty minor, and is never a big deal. It does show how well I’ve been trained in the US shopping experience. But this week, shopping in Myer (a large department store), I found a user experience in shopping that ticked me off. I tried to purchase a hat, having an ability to sunburn that’s unequalled by mere mortals. At the checkout, I swiped my credit card. After not entering my PIN, I was then presented with a statement of how much that this would cost in US$, and asking me to hit OK to accept this and CLEAR to not accept it. So I hit OK. Then I got the receipt, where they were actually charging me in US$ instead of letting my bank do the conversion. I wouldn’t mind this if their exchange rate wasn’t so bad, and if they weren’t charging me a 2.5% commission to boot.
Aside from the exchange rate and the commission that isn’t disclosed in advance, this is a really bad user experience. I don’t mind that they detected that my credit card is American. When Myer’s credit card machine showed me the US$ amount, I thought that it was simply a courtesy, and that hitting CLEAR was giving me an opportunity to back out of a transaction if I didn’t realise how expensive an item was after the conversion. The question is worded poorly on-screen. What I learnt later, only through trial and error, was that hitting CLEAR actually results in a charge in the local currency instead of my home currency, and thus my bank will do the conversion.
As a shopper, we’re well-trained to hit OK on all prompts. CLEAR is a button that you only hit in the case of an error on your part, such as accidentally entering an incorrect number in your PIN. You never move forward in a transaction by hitting CLEAR. Overloading CLEAR in this case results in additional confusion.
Furthermore, Myer appears to be the only shop doing this, so the purchasing experience is completely inconsistent with what happens when I purchase something in other shops. Their salespeople have no idea what the credit card machine is trying to communicate to me, either. The one who rang up the hat tried to tell me that I’d been charged in AU$ instead of US$. Of course, the receipt wasn’t exactly clear about what was happening either, so I can’t blame her for being confused by it.
Overall, the experience left a really bad taste in my mouth. Between the bad exchange rate and the commission, it feels like they’re taking advantage of tourists. I have to wonder what happens to the large number of Japanese tourists that I’ve seen in Melbourne and Sydney, who might not fully understand the English on the receipt. This experience with Myer has resulted in me skipping their stores entirely, and simply shopping at David Jones instead.
Before I left America, I researched my existing credit cards to learn which one had the best fee for purchases overseas. In the course of this research, I discovered that some other credit cards had changed their fees since I last looked, and found a few that don’t charge fees at all for overseas purchases. I ended up getting a new Visa card from PenFed, which both uses a fair exchange rate and has no fees for pretty much everything. Since I’m so happy with this credit card (their customer service has been exemplary so far, and the lack of fees has now made it the only card that I’m using here), I vastly prefer relying on them to handle my international purchases.
And no, I didn’t buy the hat. I went to David Jones and purchased one from a shop that I don’t feel like is actively trying to take advantage of tourists.
- Complete with a plague of locusts. ↩
- If you’re interested in what I’m seeing in Australia, I’m posting some pictures to twitter. I’m sure I’ll post the rest to Facebook when I get home. ↩
corporate culture
Corporate culture is a sticky thing. VMware, like many other companies, has a whole page dedicated to its culture. But the official statements about corporate culture, such as VMware’s statement that we have a “culture of excellence”, don’t really do a lot to tell you about what the culture is really like.
One piece of the culture that I’ve noticed is that everyone just uses first names to refer to executives and senior management. If someone refers to Paul, they’re usually referring to Paul Maritz, our CEO. But it’s said casually, making a newbie like me wondering if there’s a Paul on my team that I just haven’t met yet.
This is quite different from Microsoft, where many people are referred to by their email address. For example, if Steve Ballmer comes up in conversation, he’s called SteveB. Even Bill Gates is called BillG. It’s so ingrained in the culture that people will often sign their emails as “NadyneR”. I know another ex-Microsoftie who’s said that she still trips up and signs her emails like that instead of just with her name.
I’m sure I’ll get used to just referring to everyone by only their first name instead of using a surname or at least an initial as a differentiator, but I’m not quite there yet.
one month!
Today is my one-month anniversary at VMware. So far, other than the usual housekeeping sorts of things like getting my benefits and 401(k) going, I’ve met dozens of people from all corners of the company. I’m immersing myself in all of our applications. I’ve even started to earn my keep around here, and have completed my first project (a heuristic evaluation).
Happy anniversary to me!
the evolution of my category list
I started using Entourage:Mac when I joined the MacBU in 2005. As my mail changed from a steady stream to a rushing river, I evolved some techniques in Entourage (and later in Outlook) to handle it. One of my techniques was the use of an extensive set of server-side rules to filter my mail. My goal was to have only mail that was sent directly to me in my main inbox. Anything that was sent to a list of people would go into a subfolder.
The other technique was to use colour-coded categories. My category list evolved over time. When I left Microsoft, I had one category for my user experience team, one for each application team, another one for general MacBU stuff, one for colleagues on the Office for Windows team, one for travel stuff, one for my personal contacts, and so on. I had about 20 categories. The categories were all colour-coded (for example, my PowerPoint category was orange and my Excel category was green). This allowed me to tell, at a glance, what’s in store for me. If I opened my inbox and saw a lot of yellow, I knew that there was something going on for Outlook. If I opened my calendar and saw a lot of magenta, I knew that I was going to be heads-down working on user experience stuff.
I’m still using Outlook:Mac (of course!), and I imported my contact list. But suddenly I don’t need all of those categories anymore. All of my old categories for my work at Microsoft don’t apply any more. I collapsed all of my old Microsoft contacts into a single category. I created a new category for my new user experience team, as well as a general VMware category for all of these people that I don’t know yet how they fit into everything. Now, my categories are: business, personal, services, SPLASH, travel, UE, and VMware.
I tried to go category-less when I started here to see what it was like, and that lasted for all of two weeks. Categories help me keep track of and easily find things. It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t glance at my inbox and tell the difference between mail from the people on my user experience team and mail from a developer on vCloud. I couldn’t filter my calendar to only look see my flights. I felt lost, and so the categories came back posthaste.
My category list will continue to evolve. As I meet more people and learn more about the applications that I’ll work on, the list will change to accommodate all of these new relationships. It might even be time to add a secondary category, “holiday”, to my list so that I don’t have to go through all of my contacts as I send my holiday cards this year. (Which reminds me: I love sending holiday cards, so ping me if you want to be added to that list. It’s somewhere between possible and likely that my holiday cards will be postcards from Sydney this year.)