Developing Usable Experiences

What will the technologist’s workplace be like in the coming years?

February 11th, 2011 8:18 am —  51 views

As luck and preparation would have it, I was invited to join a committee tasked with researching what the workplace might be like in the coming years. Those in charge are interested in understanding what sort of expectations the incoming workforce for a global company might expect.

Is every employee going to have a laptop, or a video camera, or a headset with a microphone, or a Dick Tracy style watch1, chatting via video with coworkers?

For those of us whose daily lives involve being jacked into the networks, we rely on our technology to make that a useful experience. Not only hardware, like having multiple monitors or HD video equipment, but having software that works and isn’t so difficult to figure out that you give up on it.

So I’m in this committee tasked with cataloguing collaboration software and tools with a focus on their availability, use, education, and training. I absolutely love this stuff. Right before a meeting I’m trying to tweak the firewall configuration on some servers to avoid filling system logs with unnecessary packet handling. I join the meeting, watching the desktop of the presenter on my middle monitor. On my right monitor I have video feeds for the participants with an SSH window behind it connected to servers in another state. Behind the SSH window is a program where I have a number of active chat sessions going on with my team and folks in other departments. On my left monitor are the various documents we’re discussing in this meeting and some windows tailing logs on some servers.

During the meeting, coordinating via chat with the Waltzing Bear, we test a firewall modification. I’m listening to and taking notes during the virtual meeting while taking a moment here and there to answer questions from my coworkers via chat. Towards the end of the meeting I am made the presenter, I share my desktop,2 and give a demonstration of a Wiki I’d configured to address a need to collaborate on some information harvesting.

While all that was happening, I was thinking to myself, “this is the workplace of the future.” I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the screen, thinking about writing this post. I took a few minutes using Photoshop to remove or blur the innocent and protected information3.

I am one of the people experiencing what the workplace is going to be like for tens of thousands of technology company employees all over the world. It’s pretty exciting developing usable experiences.

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  1. Now known as Facetime on the iPhone. [↩]
  2. Embarrassingly, I shared the wrong one and everyone in the meeting got to see my chat conversation with the Waltzing Bear helping me verify the firewall configuration changes didn’t affect web stuff. [↩]
  3. Such as a user name and IP addresses in the SSH window behind the video feeds. [↩]

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