Developing Usable Experiences

The official end of this blog

February 13th, 2012 6:48 am —  2 views
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As you can tell by the date on my last entry, I’m no longer actively posting on this blog.

In total, I authored 350 posts. There were 490 approved comments. The comment spam filter Akismet has protected this site from 40,523 spam comments.

This blog has been a useful outlet for me and place to ruminate on the lessons learned during 4 years in graduate school. With that behind me it’s time to move forward and accept that this blog has served its purpose and can be put on a shelf like an old, worn, journal.

Thank you for visiting.

That is all.

Good day.

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On Being a Protégé, Looking for Critical Numbers

September 21st, 2011 7:29 am —  39 views
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Earlier this year I signed up to be part of program where ambitious developer-types would be paired, through careful review, with others in the organization that had volunteered to be mentors. Both mentors and mentees1 had to go through a review process. After that, selections were made, pairings announced, and mentor and mentee were free to proceed.

I had the privilege of being appointed a particularly special mentor, the Vice President of Sales within our organization. As an engineer deep in the engine room of a large software company, I’m usually focused on developing stuff and hadn’t officially met him. He was hired from outside the organization a few years ago and has proven himself since. His analytical approach leveraging numbers and transparency to focus and inspire his people has shown itself to be an effective motivator that has increased sales.

We’ve met a few times now and I always come away inspired and motivated. I find myself thinking deeply about the things we discuss, the practical lessons and principles he’s learned and applied through the years. Like principles of Open Book Management he practices to educate and motivate his salespeople.

The problem is that developing software is not at all similar to selling it when it comes to motivating those doing the work. As Dan Pink suggests, reward and punishment are not great motivators for creative thinking type people wielding specialized cognitive skills.

As lead software engineer, it is my job to lead other engineers by helping them understand what’s going on, how things fit together, scheduling, the direction management wants us to be headed, and what they can do to help. After thinking about the ideas behind open book management, the importance of transparency, accuracy, and attention to change, I realized there were things I could be doing to better inform and motivate those I lead.

Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different data analysis approaches to show what we’ve accomplished, who is working on what, the priority of each association, and an algorithmic approach to calculating percentage completeness. I’ve used this data to encourage focus, discussion, and development. While not perfect, it has done exactly that. Working on it, thinking about the projects and people involved, has really helped me think about and coordinate efforts to get more done in less time.

Since then, I’m exploring the information I can retrieve via RSS feeds against our ticketing system. I loop through the data, adding up code changes and ticket updates per ticket, per release and per team member. Factoring days between releases, changesets, and updates, I can calculate some interesting numbers that are empirical and predictive. I can produce all kinds of statistics, numbers, and trends, but what numbers matter the most?

What are the “critical numbers” that help us do our work more effectively? What numbers can help us understand how we’re doing as team to deliver our product enhancements and fixes on time? What numbers are most interesting to upper management? This idea of critical numbers was brought up at my last mentor meeting. It got me wondering.

It got me wondering; can I use numbers to show that we’re performing better? Or not performing as well? What does ‘better’ mean? How can performance be measured when you’re developing software? What are the benefits of measuring observable actions of engineers? What numbers are most important?

Questions for my next mentor meetings perhaps…

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  1. The editor in WordPress is telling me ‘mentee’ is not a word. So I researched it briefly at Wikipedia; “The student of a mentor is called a protégé.” [↩]

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Focusing on User Experience Will Increase Sales

August 16th, 2011 6:42 am —  13 views
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It seems obvious doesn’t it? Happy customers stay around, spending money. Unhappy customers leave and don’t come back. I don’t go back to places where the service sucks.

But what does it mean to focus on user experience? Isn’t that what businesses have been doing all along? Yes of course. But things are different today. Especially when it comes to software and services involving the Internet.

Consider some of the first automobiles. Your heating system consisted of a lever that opened a hole into the engine compartment. The heat from the engine would warm the cab. Air conditioning was similar, except drawn from the outside. Cars today have dual temperature zones, heated seats, and back-up cameras. Why is that?

The features and amenities on cars are the result of a continuous effort to improve the experience people have with the vehicle. To improve the experience, car manufacturers had to make decisions about features and amenities they thought would improve the experience for their customers.

Enjoying and driving a vehicle is only part of the experience these days. The relationship with the dealer and the automobile company is a significant factor in the experience of owning a car. Looking at it that way, marketing, sales, support, and customer service all play a role in the experience of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

Car companies, and many software companies, often have a department dedicated to researching user experience. Researching user experience focuses on understanding how people interact with other people or products when trying to achieve a goal. Using different data gathering techniques and quantitative analysis, insights can be discovered.

Insight from user experience research is leveraged by sales and development within an organization to improve both the product and the experience of owning it. Good experiences lead to more sales. It’s always been true.

What is also true is that human-computer interactions are increasingly complex these days. We expect more from technology than ever before. The instantaneous-ness of everything is critical to our experience, allowing interactions like never before. The connectedness of people and information through technology involves many interactions. These experiences need to be understand to identify areas for improvement. Improvements increase sales.

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Information Islands of Culture and Context

June 29th, 2011 7:15 am —  29 views
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The decision to create a separate wiki for my team at work many years ago was frowned upon and discouraged by a number of people. Particularly those that had used the first wiki within development. Their perspective was that their wiki was a resource for all of development, a place for teams to put all their information.

My perspective was to have a wiki that was an island of content, relevant to the responsibilities and projects of those tending it. A more personal place. A place where a search returns your own pages. It would be like having to search through everything in your house as well as my house to find that missing thing. It’s easier to find things when you’re looking through your own stuff.

There was lengthy debates on why we shouldn’t become a small island of information, but my intuition and purpose told me it was the right thing to do. We now have 100′s of pages in our team wiki, organized into guides, how-tos, references, diagrams, and even pages with color coded SQL queries for those recurring requests. It is a focused island of contextually important information, increasingly critical to the maintenance of the product and systems developed by my team. I use it everyday. But this perspective does not mean I’m opposed to centralization of information. I think there are effective ways to do it that allow for integrating islands while leaving them islands.

All wiki systems are islands of content. The quality of information offered by an island is up to its inhabitants. Unfortunately, there is one thing I have found over years of cultivation and encouragement, is how unwilling people are to create or update wiki pages. That happens to be a big challenge.

It has helped to have our own sandbox, our own private island, to shape and transform. Most wiki users are hesitant or don’t understand how to create and edit pages. It happens to be a very public thing, authoring wiki pages, writing blog posts. Constraining the context to a team, tasked with overlapping responsibilities, the island is likely to get better care1. This type of ownership is important to cultivate in a large organization. It is the soil in which roots of synergy and innovation take hold.

There are many islands of information content, some larger, some smaller. But they are all islands. If you explore them you’ll discover whether they are truly cared for or not. Dig a little deeper and you can discover if they are really used or not. Traffic analysis is a dead give-away.

In an information rich, island friendly organization, people can find what they’re looking for because of how things are organized. Organization of information relies on awareness of other islands of information, not conquering and subsuming. At least not right away. The people using the information will know when to migrate, if they know the option is open to them and can discuss its appropriateness.

For example, I don’t publish these blog posts on corporate blog resources because they don’t belong on that island. But if you’re curious about me, you can find this island from the corporate one. That’s how the web works. It’s beautiful.

Image: This was taken with my iPhone during a day long training session on working across cultures. I wrote the word “nerds” in the culture part and “Hunger” in the human nature part. The teacher was explaining work done in this field, Hofstede came up.

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  1. This is completely unsubstantiated I realize. I would have to research and analyze data from content islands used within an international corporation to validate this claim, but my intuition is clear on this [↩]

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Collaboration Software Changed My Life

May 18th, 2011 8:47 pm —  39 views
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When I first learned about the field of CSCW, I began to see the world differently. Here was an entire discipline focused on the science of using technology to communicate and collaborate. As surely as I knew the web was the way, I knew collaboration software was critical.

I was in a graduate class the fall of 2007. It was being taught by Gary Olson, a professor at the School of Information. In 1992, he published research showing the effectiveness of shared editing using a program they developed called ShrEdit. Professor Olson showed us pictures from their research project. One was a room filled with monochrome screens. Very old school looking.

Everyone knew how difficult it was to collaborate on a report or lengthy paper. Having network access helped, but then only one person could edit it at a time. Emailing a document back it forth happened a lot. Track changes could be useful if you knew how to use. In 1992, it was paper, pencils and a whiteboard or old school CRTs. The Internet was in its infancy.

It was in this course that I worked on a group project analyzing Google Docs, a web based document editor by Google. It was similar to MS Word, but in a browser. Better yet, a number of people could edit at the same time. Google Docs was a better way. I knew it immediately. Such things could make working with others so much easier.

The group project required that we find ways to improve it, and we came up with a few ideas such as showing the cursor position of other people editing the document. Since then, that feature and a number of other improvements, have been implemented by Google.

The technical challenges associated with multiple people working on the same digital artifact are significant. But the advantages afforded to people working collaboratively on the same document is considerable. Being able to see where a person’s cursor was, and whose cursor it was, and to see what they typed as they were typing it was mind boggling and totally awesome. I loved it!

This type of editing revelation was similar to the one I had when I first learned about wikis in 1999. I was using ModWiki, a Perl based web application, and wondered why more people weren’t using wikis. When I realized how simple it was to enable people to create and edit web pages together, I knew it would change the world. Just like I knew that databases behind web applications would change the world.

Fast forward a decade and I’m writing my 507th blog post talking about how people interact with technology. I’m doing it as the first featured blog post for a corporate wiki about collaboration resources!

Every day I interact with technology that connects me to co-workers, family, and friends. I’m in meetings using my computer, phone, and a video camera to interact with a dozen people in different locations. I can see when someone is talking but forgot to unmute their microphone. I can see people yawn or lose interest in what’s being said. All the while I have various instant messaging threads going with co-workers and teammates. Even people in the same web meeting, via yet another instant messaging application.

My daily life involves using working with computers and people to get work done and to help others get work done. I think about it how to make things better all the time. I love gadgets and technology that allow me to interact with information and people in different ways.

And I know there is always an easier way. It just takes time to find it.

Image: This is a picture of an adaptation made by a novice installer when code dictated a 4 inch pipe, even though the coupling was for a 3 inch pipe. It took some effort to crip the metal like that. But I couldn’t help but think there had to be an easier (and less hacked) solution. There was. That’s another story as well.

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