Picture My World

I recently accepted a job at The MathWorks and we’ll soon be moving to Boston, MA.  (”Soon” being a relative term if you consider the magnitude of this move…)

I’ll be doing more of this usability stuff and I can’t wait for my March 24 start.  I’m joining a 30-strong usability team and a huge usability community in the Boston area. The story about how I got this job deserves a post of its own.  Stay tuned.

The rest of the family is also excited by the move.  Not only is Boston an old city steeped in history, but it also has a much larger Jewish community that we’re looking forward to joining.

I was just reading Joshua Ledwell’s blog where he wrote:

User experience is an organizational value. Either the organization understands and values UX, or it doesn’t … and it can be very, very difficult to “bubble up” a corporate value. Now, you may still choose to do usability at a company that doesn’t hold the customer experience as a core value.  The important thing is to recognize that going in, and temper your expectations accordingly.

Truer words could not have been written.  The challenge for those caught in companies or organizations like this is to choose your course of action carefully.  Either path may lead to gray hair, so be prepared.

For those of you who decide to fight to make UX a core value, you must take that fight up the corporate ladder.  It’s not enough to woo the engineers and designers, though it helps.  Management has to be on board and supporting you.  All the usual advice applies — start small, communicate clearly, and set excellent examples.

Bill Buxton gave an insightful and inspiring opening keynote at UPA2007 today.

He talked about design and specifically about the role sketching plays in the process (the subject of his new book, Sketching User Experiences).  He also nicely tied the topic into usability.  He prefaced his talk by saying he was introducing some ideas not mentioned in the book, so the reference to usability might be one of them.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow of his entire talk, but I want to capture some of the more interesting points (and one joke).

• Sketching is not design, but he’s never seen a design process without sketching.
• Buxton’s personal mantra (as highlighted on his site) is “Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.“  That really resonates with me. I think it’s easy to dismiss my development goup’s  commercially oriented products as “things”, but they have a huge impact on the people that use them. We sometimes get a glimpse of this from enthusiastic customers, but we need to internalize this idea.
• Many design sketches focus on the states but not the transitions.  Designers need to communicate the detail about these transitions.  As we all know, it’s the journey, not the destination and that applies to our interactive interfaces as much as anything else.  This leads to the joke:
• Q: What do Canada and transitions have in common? A: They are both dominated by the States.
• A key attribute of sketches is that they are ambiguous. Buxton says, “you need holes in order to let the imagination run around.”  This way, you get more out of a sketch than you put in it.
• Another key attribute is that sketches of an idea come in multiples.
• The software design industry needs to do more up front ideation.  We need more sketches. He spoke of one studio manager that demanded his designers came to the table with a minimum of 5 well thought out, valid design sketches or they were shown the door. Ideas are cheap. We are all creative. Practice.
• Usability today focuses too much on the phase following ideation and exploration. It focuses on “getting the design right”, not on “getting the right design”.
• Buxton advocates earlier usability involvement, evaluating multiple sketches of alternative designs.  We should expose users to these different designs so they can compare and contrast. He presented some research showing that this technique results in better, more critical feedback from participants.

I’m very excited to take these ideas back to work. From now on, any design work I’m involved with will follow Buxton’s advice and I want to develop techniques to quickly and easily usability test sketches. I think we have most of the tools already - as Buxton mentioned, this is similar to paper prototype testing but at an earlier phase.

I’m in Austin, Texas at the UPA conference.

Last year, there were a few people blogging about the conference, but this year I can find only one, Pat Kennedy. I hope this is not a sign of things to come, but there looks to be many good sessions regardless of the lack of online buzz.

Off to the opening reception…

I lost my cell phone a while ago. It was a recent-model Nokia and I replaced it with another recent-model Nokia slightly different than the lost one.

I was quite surprised to find many small differences in the interface. Many of the menus were subtly different for no apparent reason. In some cases, the phone was worse, in other cases, better.

In my old phone, if I wanted to change the current ring profile (for example, to switch to silent or vibrate-only), I could hit the power button and I’d get a menu that included all the profiles.  In my new phone, the power button doesn’t do anything like that.  There’s a “Go to” menu mapped to the left soft-key that allows me to pick either the “normal” or “silent” profile (among a million other options) but doesn’t reveal the other ring profiles.  If I want to switch to “meeting” or “vibrate”, I need to navigate many levels into the main menu.

On the other hand, the new phone has dedicated volume buttons on the side, which the other phone lacked.  I always wondered how Nokia missed those — aren’t they mandatory for a mobile phone?

So, what’s up, Nokia? Is this an example of the constant iteration and tweaking you do on your handsets? Did you make these subtle changes for a good reason or just because different teams designed the two phones?

Now for a lighter topic.

I just got a new LCD monitor at work. It’s big and beautiful, but do you know what its biggest problem is? There’s not enough room around the screen for post-it notes!

What are office workers around the world going to do?

…this is a reminder to get tables with smooth surfaces.  The counter example is the Esquires Coffee in Ladysmith, BC that has these broken tile mosaic table tops (what do you call these things?).  I dragged my very tall and very full cup towards me and the edge caught on the grouting.  Luckily, the spill was minimal and I’m glad I had cooled the coffee somewhat with milk or my hand would have been scorched.

Since superior usability can only come from superior design, I was happy to find this list of interaction design books that Luke Wroblewski compiled.

Now I need to finish reading a bunch of books so I can justify updating my bookshelf.

Arrived in Tokyo yesterday around 6:30 pm local time. I was exhausted and didn’t stay up much past 7:30 and then, of course, woke up at midnight. I haven’t been able to sleep very well after that and gave it up around 3 am.

I was expecting an utterly foreign land, much stranger than anywhere I’d been in Europe. So are, things are different but not what I expected. Maybe I feel this way because I already knew about the many-buttoned toilets? I suspect things will take on a more alien feel once I leave the confines of the hotel today.

I’m staying at the Tokyo Dome Hotel that shares its location with the Tokyo Dome stadium and a large amusement park (here’s a satellite view from Google). As I was ascending in the elevator, I saw someone descending across from me on one of those faux-parachute drop rides at about the same speed!

The airport (Narita) is about 60 km from Tokyo and I took a shuttle bus in. The surrounding area is quite industrial and, frankly, quite ugly. It didn’t get much better in Tokyo proper as we took an elevated roadway snaking through the dense city and every descent to street level (to get to other stops) led to a collection of dark and dingy viaducts. For some reason I was expecting everything to be shiny and new, but the architecture I’ve seen so far is clearly post-war and not so pleasing. Again, these are first impressions only.

Here’s a night shot from my window (I couldn’t kill the reflections):

The lit curve is one of the elevated roads. It seems every single building has red lights and they form the night horizon. Most of them slowly blink, giving the appearence of a red, roiling sea.

It’s not often that software has this kind of power over me, but Outlook really makes me feel stupid sometimes.

My wife and I share an email account. We have this unwritten protocol where one of us might reply to an email and leave the original one in the InBox for the other’s information. Outlook screws up this workflow because of a small bug.

My wife likes to open emails in a separate window and then reply from there. She often leaves the email window open. What happens then or, rather, what doesn’t happen then is Outlook doesn’t update the email shown in the InBox with the new status. In other words, the email in the main Outlook window doesn’t get marked with the “Replied” graphic until the email window is closed. When I come and look at the email, it looks like no reply has been sent.

Naturally, I reply.

If my wife and I said the same thing, I feel mildly stupid. But, if we say contradictory things, I feel like a complete idiot.

Thanks, Microsoft Outlook!

*** This is not a Rogers web site.  Stop posting your contact information in the comments.  ***

Our latest phone bill had a URL to redeem a free gift for one of our Rogers services. I went to a page that offered a free ring tune. I never buy these things and thought it’d be fun.

First, I had to choose my phone type. I knew it was a Sony Ericsson, but what model was it? J300, T236, T237, W600i, or one of 5 others? Luckily for me, I remembered the phone had a status page that reported its model number (it’s nowhere on the phone’s case).

That hurdle jumped, I selected the ring tune and it said it would send it to my phone. I quickly got a message on the phone and selected “Load” only to be greeted with:

Unauthorized
We’re sorry, you are unauthorized to view this page (ip=205.205.50.3-0)

Thanks, guys. Another customer experience shot to hell.

*** This is not a Rogers web site.  Stop posting your contact information in the comments.  ***

I posted some of my UPA photos on flickr. I didn’t take very many pictures at all… That’s the problem with an SLR.

Right now, my biggest take away from this conference is “don’t fly to Denver”. As I wrote, my flight here was delayed multiple times and now my flight home is also delayed over an hour (so far). I also got security screened which included a lovely pat down. (And, no, I haven’t been away from my wife so long that I enjoyed that at all.)

Let’s forget the immediacy of my current situation.

The conference itself was excellent. Everyone at the conference was approachable and, unlike a conference like CHI, I didn’t worry that I’d strike up a conversation with some stuffy academic operating on another planet. It was a given that everyone was doing the same sort of work and facing the same challenges. I even had a great chat with next year’s conference chair, Alain Robillard-Bastien, on the shuttle to the airport. To Matthew, Matt, Steph, Ashley, Trent, Scott, Suzanne, Larry, Daniel, Josephine, and others I’m forgetting: it was great meeting you all. (more…)

Matthew Oliphant created a Wikipedia entry for the Usability Professionals’ Association.

It wasn’t someone else.

Weather is the bane of air travel. My 2.5 hour flight extended itself to almost 4 hours in the air due to storms around Denver. Add a 40 minute departure delay to that and you have a pretty long trip for such a short distance.

The guy wearing the “I (heart) to Fart” shirt at the airport made it all worthwhile, though. (Who would wear something like that in public?!)

I think the Denver airport is one of the worst airports I’ve ever visited. First, there’s the train you must take to get to the terminals. It was packed and the herd got bottlenecked a number of times. The ground transportation story is also very confusing. I got my bag and then proceeded to look for a shuttle to the hotel but there was nothing in view from the baggage claim except the exit. I poked my head out there but none of the signs said “To your hotel” to me.

I called the hotel and they told me which shuttle company to find, so I searched for them. The map of the terminal was useless — there was no “you are here” label and there was something about it that confused this tired traveller. Anyway, it turned out that I walked right by the desks for these shuttle companies after getting off the train. Since my goal was to find my bag and I was stuck within a herd of people all doing the same, I didn’t even notice them.

What’s the worst airport you’ve passed through?

I’m heading to Denver for the UPA 2006 conference tomorrow. It’s my first UPA (Usability Professionals Association) conference and I hope it’s a good one. I hear these conferences are much more practioner-oriented than CHI which has historically been heavily academic (although, that is changing).

I’ll take my camera and hope that the higher-than-I’m-used-to-temperatures don’t keep me inside the entire time.

It’s nice to see usability mentioned in the mainstream press. CNN’s article Making Cell Phones Simple is Hard is pretty good and I’m glad carriers are putting effort into making the phones easier to use.

One paragraph at the end doesn’t ring true (pardon the pun):

Charles Golvin of Forrester Research said a recent survey indicated few cellular customers choose a phone based on its usability, typically because they either don’t think there’s anything better or, like Bales in Kansas City, don’t think they need those services [voice recognition].

Even if some carriers or cell phone manufacturers start to offer more usable phones, how will this change? Consumers don’t get a chance to try before they buy. Demo phones aren’t live and the best you can do is determine if the phone is too small for your hand or not. I’m not even aware of cell phone reviews unless it’s a PDA-type device like a Blackberry or Treo. If there are reviews, I doubt the average Joe, who needs usability, is reading them.

The other complicating factor is the divide between carriers and cell phone makers. Usability is really only in the carrier’s interest as they must field the support calls and accept returned phones. The article seems to imply that they are working on making their network services better, but it’s unclear how they can directly improve the phone’s design.  Perhaps their influence is growing as usability goes main stream.
In related news, some small cell phone manufacturer is trying to improve phone usability by, get this, stripping away all the fluff.  Imagine that, a phone that’s just a phone.  (Hat tip to Mark Hurst at Good Experience for that link.)

Can someone please explain why I get both a message icon and a text message on my cell phone to tell me I have voice mail?

(And this happens on two different brands of phone each using a different provider.)

I’m sure there’s some logic behind this behaviour — I just can’t figure it out.

Guy Kawasaki posts another brilliant top-10 list. #9 really resonates:

“Our beta sites loved the software.” In twenty five years of working in technology, I’ve never heard a company report that its beta sites didn’t like its software. There are three reasons for this: first, many beta sites are so honored to get pre-release software that they don’t want say anything negative. Second, most beta sites haven’t used the software very much. Third, most beta sites don’t want to seem cruel by criticizing a company’s new product. Doing so is as socially unacceptable as telling someone that his baby is ugly.

Although, to counter Guy’s experience, I was involved with a project that got tossed out of the first beta site. We had missed a requirement so badly that it was unusable (not just hard to use — impossible to use) and we couldn’t fix it in time. That was a learning experience (include a domain expert as part of the team). Luckily, the team recovered and the product stuck with the later sites.

When your day starts at 5 am with a loud beeping sound coming from inside your home, you know it’s going to be a bad day…

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