{"id":615,"date":"2011-11-07T13:09:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T21:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=615"},"modified":"2011-11-07T13:09:40","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T21:09:40","slug":"creating-a-space-where-relationships-can-be-built","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/07\/creating-a-space-where-relationships-can-be-built\/","title":{"rendered":"creating a space where relationships can be built"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I chaired the first (but not the last) VMware User Experience (vUE)<\/a> conference. \u00a0Throughout my planning and scheming to get vUE going, my goal was simple. \u00a0Since this was our first time getting together, we had to have the opportunity to actually take advantage of it. \u00a0We had to be able to learn about each other, to share with each other. \u00a0Every decision came back to that question: how does this get people talking to and learning from each other?<\/p>\n

The first idea that I had was to have everyone do a quick introduction of themselves.<\/p>\n

\n

Hi, I’m Nadyne Richmond, I’m a researcher, and I’ve been here for a year. \u00a0I work on projects all across VMware. \u00a0So far, I’ve done research on vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Horizon, Zimbra, Aurora, and some things that don’t have names yet. \u00a0Outside of work, I’m currently reading Reamde<\/em>\u00a0by Neal Stephenson. \u00a0I live in downtown Mountain View with my husband and our two cats.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then I imagined 60 of those, and thought that there was a high chance of me falling asleep. \u00a0Worse, though, I wasn’t sure if that actually imparted any information that I or anyone else cared about. \u00a0I thought that it might not meet my goal of helping people really get to know each other.<\/span><\/p>\n

That idea evolved into what became the meat of the program: 5-10 minute talks from as many people as possible, in which they talked about their user experience in some way. \u00a0I explicitly left this open for interpretation, and I really liked the breadth of talks that came out of it. \u00a0The very first of these talks was from one of the newest designers on my team, in which she discussed the differences between what she learned in design school (where you get to start with a problem and decide how to go about tackling it) and what design is like in the real world (where the problem is well-established, and you’re coming into the project in the middle of its cycle so all of the decisions about how to tackle it have long been made). \u00a0The last of these talks was from one of our most senior designers talking about a future direction for VMware and how he’s going about it.<\/p>\n

To help ensure that we had time to actually talk amongst ourselves, I made one other decision that was at least slightly controversial: mealtimes were sacrosanct. \u00a0I received lots of requests to do something with the meals. \u00a0“Let’s show a movie!” “How about a design exercise?” “We should have a working lunch.” \u00a0I turned down each request. \u00a0They were great ideas, and I tried to incorporate them elsewhere. \u00a0But I didn’t change the (lack of) structure for the meals. \u00a0The meals were only for socializing.<\/p>\n

Together, the technical program and the socializing time were scheduled with the intent of creating a space where relationships can be built. \u00a0The technical program gave us something to talk about. \u00a0Actually, it gave us several different something<\/em>s to talk about, since there were so many different short presentations. \u00a0You could talk to the presenter and get more information about their topic or their product, you could talk to the people around you about the presentations, you could\u00a0commiserate\u00a0with a presenter about how hard it actually is to stick to a very short time for your talk. \u00a0The socializing time was built in to make sure that we could actually have those conversations, as informally as possible. \u00a0I didn’t just want people to have to go back to their offices and email people — that’s too formal, and would result in fewer relationships actually getting built.<\/p>\n

Another thing that we did to help build relationships was to give people something to create. \u00a0Every attendee received a 4″ Munny doll<\/a>, which is a white vinyl doll that you can draw on or otherwise decorate to your heart’s content. \u00a0We set out a bunch of multi-colored Sharpies, and let the attendees do the rest. \u00a0Some folks did some truly awesome things with their Munnys. \u00a0At the end, we took a group shot of the well-decorated Munnys. \u00a0This was a great ice-breaker, and helped make more conversations happen.<\/p>\n

Was vUE successful? \u00a0Based on the feedback so far, the answer appears to be a resounding “YES!” \u00a0I can’t tell you how relieved I am. \u00a0I was well aware that I was asking for a lot of people, to put aside their work for 2 days (or more, for those who travelled to be here). \u00a0Creating vUE was a gamble, and I wasn’t sure if all of the decisions that I had made would actually mean that I met my goal of getting people to build relationships across the company. \u00a0There’s definitely some things to do better in the future, of course. \u00a0Overall, though, I’m immensely happy with how everything worked out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I chaired the first (but not the last) VMware User Experience (vUE) conference. \u00a0Throughout my planning and scheming to get vUE going, my goal was simple. \u00a0Since this was our first time getting together, we had to have the opportunity to actually take advantage of it. \u00a0We had to be able to learn … Continue reading creating a space where relationships can be built<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ux","category-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}