Developing Usable Experiences

My Job is to Get Better

May 2nd, 2011 8:18 pm —  10 views
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Recently a Rands in Repose twitter post reminded me of something important; my job (so to speak) in life, is to get better. He phrased it a little differently, but it was still a message to me that rang harmonious with the things that have been going on in my life.

But the thing is, it’s really difficult sometimes to determine your job. There are so many, we have so many.

One of the first dividing cuts that separate job types is often between personal and professional. It’s a dull blade that dissects this level, and the edges are usually rough and imprecise. But there are things that don’t surface in one or the other. It’s just the nature of sharing and how much you have time and inclination to reveal. So there is personal and professional.

Managers often see the most jagged edge as they must journey further into the personal, the deeply personal at times, with their professional subordinates and direct reports. Regardless of what you know or what you reveal, it is still important to stay focused on getting better.

Getting better means not forgetting the past, learning from it. Not being prejudiced by it, knowing there are so many variables to any event. Sometimes, trying the same thing a second time can yield different results. If the failures are different, perhaps there is the chance to get better, learn from mistakes. Is that happening?

Then there are the times where you find yourself in a repeating loop. You keep trying to find that break, that terminating condition. But there isn’t one. Knowing I need to get better, that it’s both a personal and professional thing, how do I improve those situations where I have little to no direct influence? Do they exist? Am I just missing something, perhaps not saying the right thing at the right time?

It’s complicated. More complicated that I’d imagined yet almost in an intentional way that seems simple and instinctual. An evolved complexity that embraces the simple solutions invisible to others.

Here it is, over a month since my last post. Things keep happening, I don’t always know how much to share. So I skim the limited surface of sharing via Facebook and Twitter. Yet it becomes more complicated finding the balance between sharing and revealing.

Perhaps it is the forked tongue revealing glimpses and riddles, which allows the creative and cunning mind time to develop and maneuver. In the end the complicated things are simple and their happening seems obvious and unavoidable.

This is how we live our lives.

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Embellishing our resources

March 14th, 2011 6:34 am —  9 views
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As a species, we have long taken interest in the embellishment of our world. Be it to impress or appease; manipulating things through color or decoration has long been a way to personalize our environment. Perhaps this is because having a personal environment makes us happy.

If that is true, it could also be said that having impersonal things in our environment can make us unhappy. Lack of control over one’s environment is pretty much the same thing. Within the constraints of effective choices, having some choice allows exercising of the free will and oftentimes the intellect. Preferring one type of tool to another that accomplishes the same task is such a case.

When it comes down to it, who cares if I coat the outside of a tissue box with rocks I picked up at the beach? As long as the rocks aren’t stolen blood diamonds or lumps of radioactive waste, what does it matter? If in doing so, I feel more satisfied and later happier for having it in my environment, then it can’t be viewed as anything other than beneficial.

Understanding the constraints governing choice is part of making good choices. A good choice is one in which nobody is hurt, there is little risk, and someone benefits through positive feelings or basic utility. Both of which are available in a tissue box covered in stones from a summer vacation.

Image: This is a work-in-progress on my shop work bench. It’s taken me half a year to get it to this point, but it doesn’t bother me just sitting there in its unfinished state. Seeing it like it is makes me happy. And yes W., I will finish it someday.

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

February 11th, 2011 8:18 am —  51 views
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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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Tracking what we forget

January 12th, 2011 7:20 am —  18 views
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Some time ago my fellow programmers and I agreed upon a way to rate the difficulty of a project or task. We called it the elephant rating. The more elephants, the harder it is. Loosely translated, elephant rating refers to the time it will take to accomplish something.

The thing is, we rarely actually use our elephant rating system. Every project or task that is defined and tracked1 but we don’t really use the rating system. The fact that we don’t use the difficulty rating radio buttons is only a symptom of the problem.

The problem is we don’t document what we’ll need to know later. We don’t talk enough about what we’ll need to know to know what we should document. However, as I was writing this it occurred to me that there is record of comment histories, timestamps, and check-ins. Maybe it would be easier to look backwards, asking questions after the fact, after that history can be reviewed.

We are going to forget why we did something or used something we shouldn’t. Or we’re going to create something we shouldn’t. The “shouldn’t” allows for a form of unchecked growth that erodes our ability to understand all that we’re creating.

There are all kinds of other consequences to not understanding what you’ve supposedly created. Like troubleshooting. Something isn’t doing what is expected and you need to figure it out why. But you don’t know the plumbing, wiring, architecture, venting, object structure, or programmatic infrastructure well enough to imagine the functional flow necessary to find the root cause.

That’s when I really wish we’d written something down about what should be happening.

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  1. We use Trac. If you’re a nerd you’ll appreciate this play on words … bazinga! [↩]

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Christmas, Cat, and Crucial Conversations

December 6th, 2010 11:18 pm —  13 views
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It’s been over a month since I took the time to share my thoughts with the largely anonymous potential that are those online. Rest easy, I’m still out here, walking many of the same paths as those I’ve walked. But somehow, something is different.

As I stay awake for another hour or two to assist in a release that we’re hoping will address a performance issue we’ve been experiencing. My confidence isn’t high and I have a growing list of other attacks and strategies to solve this. I digress, but only a little.

Reflecting on my actions over the past month, I’m noticing something familiar. Too often I’m thinking to myself, “I’ve been here before.” The only problem; it was not a place I liked.

That place I’m talking about is that place where all the roads have deep ruts and you’re in a wagon pulled by a stubborn horse. It’s the place where you go because you don’t remember where you’re supposed to be going and it’s easier for the horse to use the tracks. Making them deeper.

Image: After decorating our tree, Ozzie strikes his unique folded cat pose while taking in the memories, lights, and brilliance of our traditionally fake Christmas tree.

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