Category Archives: Uncategorized

Change is in the air… CS4 soon to be released…

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Seems like everything is changing right now. The economy, the presidency, how business is performed, new trends in technology. This morning I watched the Web broadcast of the Launch of Adobe CS4. I must say, it looks like a very exciting software package. I’m excited to see the new functionality of Dreamweaver. It sounds like they focused more on CSS, which I always thought was one of Dreamweaver’s weaknesses. I’m also very excited about the new Flash 10. They promised it was much easier to animate in, and requires much less programming than the older version. They also incorporated inverse kinematics to do the animation. I’m familiar with inverse kinematics from using 3DS Max for animation. No word on making the new Flash compatible with the iPhone however. I won’t let this deter my excitement from using it. I put in a request this morning to preorder the upgrade at work.

Another thing that there is much buzz about is the new Google phone. I haven’t had a chance to see anything about it. I’m surprised, because most of the buzz has been word of mouth. It seems like I saw a lot more marketing for the iPhone when it was coming out than the Google phone. Of course this could just be because I havne’t been watching much television lately. I seem to be in a vacuum where I haven’t had time to update my blog, watch tv, or update my website, but I couldn’t exactly tell you where the time has gone.

Tomorrow evening I plan on attending the new Refresh Miami at Yahoo Latin America. Last month I gave a speech on Human Factors, this month they have:

– Alexandra Leite is going to describe what it’s like to work in global virtual teams; – Jeffrey Sass of Myxer will talk about dealing with the complexities of mobile content;

– Jose from the Knight Foundation will present the Knight News Challenge Garage and give information on how you might win part of $5 million!

Should be some exciting stuff. It will be good to get out of the house for a bit.

Mockup Madness

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I haven’t really had much time to write in my blog lately because I’ve been so busy creating mockups for the Sprints at work. I’ve been using Twitter much more actively than before, but I don’t really discuss Usability Topics on there. So far I think the integration of the Scrum process has been going very well. It’s encouraged communication, collaboration and exposes design issues much earlier in the process than waterfall.

There is one thing that has been in the back of my mind lately. It seems like the process tends to allow for the constant bandaging and improving of software that already exists. Some of the design issues that exist seem like they are ready for a complete redesign. Every time I see a project rushed out the door it makes me think of Alan Coopers quote: “There’s no group of consumers waiting for you to ship your bad product to market.” Not that I think we ship bad products, I think I work on a fantastic product that is extremely powerful and flexible. I would just like to see the UI updated. Being first to market seems to take a priority to the UX.

Scrum initiated – downtime eliminated

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Immediately after I went on my last customer visits, we started scrum at work. In fact they were actually waiting for me to get to work on that Friday after my visits to get started. I am the only Human Factors Engineer at my office, that has over 100 engineers in it. I support everyone. Right before I left town, I sat in on 2 scrum teams, but there was no real UI work involved. Now we are doing a UI enhancement scrum, and I’ve never been busier. Fortunately for me, I enjoy being busy. I utilized my not-so-busy period at work, which I spent researching Human Factors and design methodologies. I also got active in the UX community, but now I have been thrown feet first into the fire.

I would say the biggest thing that I’ve noticed about scrum is that it brings issues that may have otherwise been missed to the surface. I design UI and functional items before they get to development. This has been an interesting process because we get requirements from Product Marketing, and at first glance, they may seem simple. Then I start mocking things up, and prototyping what the customer would experience and LOTS of questions come up. I think in the long run this will be a positive thing, because I help hash things out between Product Marketing, customers, before development. I bring my mock-ups in front of users before they are built to get feedback on the design.

The only thing that has become a concern to me about being consumed in the scrum process now is: will I have time to do the process research and customer research while I’m also creating designs for development. My goal has been to make sure that I do not alienate any of my internal customers; being responsive is very important to me. But there are higher-level Human Factors initiatives that I would like to work on, but I’m not sure if I will have time. I would like to take the customer data that I’ve collected, and create mental models to deliver design ideas to development.

Today I was audited by an ISO auditor. The auditor mentioned that he thought I should have some more visibility in my organization. I have personas that I created a while ago that have never been presented to development and test because I never got approvals back from marketing. This item took a backseat to all the new work I’ve been focusing on. I think I need to focus on communicating persona and mental model deliverables that will give the developers and testers more insight into our customers.

Customer Visit Success

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Boy have I been busy! My customer visits in the North East went swimmingly, but it was extremely hectic. I travelled to 4 states in 4 days and interviewed 6 customers. We started with Morgan Stanley, and then Bloomberg in New York. Then drove to New Jersey, and met with US News (Dow Jones) and Susquhanna Investment Group in PA. Then drove to Jersey City for Lord Abbott and up to Purdue Pharma in Connecticut.

My tools for the interview was a Sansa recorder, a notepad and pen. Our clients all had different work styles, environments and processes. There was one thing I was very happy about, and that was how nice and patient everyone was during the interview process. Everyone was more than amicable to take the time to answer our questions, it was almost like we were providing them with psychiatric treatment where they could unleash all of their IT problems.

I’m glad that I got the experience of going to customer interviews on this trip, I learned so much about our products, how they are being used, and about our customers. I took the customer data that I collected and assembled it into a call report. I also think that my relationship with product development has grown from this experience.

Now that I have collected user data first-hand. I am interested in viewing some of the previously collected user data and generating a mental model of this material. Unfortunately I don’t know if I will have the time to work on it.

Also, tonight, I will be giving a speech at RefreshMiami on Human Factors. This is at Yahoo Latin America in Coral Gables. It will just be a 10-15 minute speech on what a Human Factors Engineer does.

Cooper’s Keynote Speech at Agile 2008

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I just finished watching the presentation slides from Alan Coopers Keynote Speech at Agile 2008, and it reading it made me want to write another blog entry because he succinctly talks about several important UX concepts. The title of his Keynote speech is The Wisdom of Experience. In this presentation he says “the most important part of the software doesn’t exist.” He describes these parts as the “interstice between programs”, or interfaces. He describes the difference between Human facing interfaces and “Application Program Interfaces” or API’s.

I mention this because I think it’s relevant to the post that I made earlier today about how people do not understand the User Experience, and how it is not just a marketing buzzword. Perhaps people are puzzled by this subject because it is based on these non-tangible interstices between programs. It is up to the User Experience Evangelist to bring to light how important these interactions are to the applications in which they are contained.

Another responsibility of the UX professional is to decipher and distill useful answers from the cognitive distortions or raw data that people contribute in the user interview process. The following are examples he gives of reasoning illusions that distort peoples perceptions: Cognitive Friction, Memory Distortion, Hawthorne Effectve, Stockholm Syndrome, Diagnosis Bias, Reasoning Illusions, Loss Aversino, Value Attribution, Commitment bias, Pygmalion Effect, Tyranny of Small Decisions, Evolutionary Psychology, Management Fads, Abilene Syndrome. I’m not going to go into the specific details of each of these concepts, you can look them up on wikipedia. However, these are all things that can cloud the truth.

By using the Agile process, using iterations, and a multi-staged process the UX designer can greatly help the success of any development project. This process takes the guess-work out of the design by getting the users involved. The data collected by the users can be presented to development in a mental model, and in personas, and these items guide design-making decisions throughout the process. By using the Agile process, success is based more on the quality into the product, instead of being first to market. To quote Cooper “There is no large group of people out there waiting in a breathless delirium to purchase your lousy product sooner rather than later.” Developing software in iterations allows for quicker detection of errors.

When an interaction designer is brought in on a project, there is someone there to interface with the users and make sure that the application being developed stays focused on the product goal. This helps the programmers because they are then able to focus on technology. This relationship should manifest some very clear patterns, developers can start writing better applications that actually please the users, and experience more job satisfaction. Users have a good experience with the applications, and brand loyalty is built. Interaction designers take on interacting with users and management, so the programmers can do what they want to do, program.

It is very important that the Interaction Designer translates the needs of the user into something that development can understand. It is also important that designers understand the business rationale of the applications that are being built. The UX designer brings clarity to the projects goals, the users needs, and they bring sense to the business requirements definitions. They translate convoluted user input into clear user stories that can be used to develop applications.

For more information I recommend viewing the entire presentation from Cooper but for those people who dont’ have time to look at a 111 page slide presentation I hope this post provided some clarity on the importance of User Experience.

Why does User Experience lack credibility in some circles?

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This morning I read an article in Billing & OSS World Magazine about User Experience. The title of the article was Copping the ‘Customer Experience’ Buzzword and this is how the article began…

“I hate when I succumb to the use of buzzwords. So I came reluctantly to the term “customer experience.” It always struck me as psycho-babble B.S. — and I don’t mean Bachelor of Science — that some precocious second-year grad from the Acme School of Business Management came up with to get a bunch of old techheads to stop thinking about their icky old networks. And thinking it impossible to ever accurately measure the quality of individual or collective experiences, I cringed every time I let the phrase slip into an article, thinking myself a shill for whichever nameless marketeer had coined it.”

So my question is what has happened to this individual and to usability that would create this type of impression to anyone. One of my goals as a UX Evangelist has been to take the mystery out of usability and to make it understandable and digestible by everyone. I mean usability affects every aspect of our life, why would it be so intimidating, or what would have caused it to lose credibility, and be described as a buzz-word of all things?! Is it because good usability makes things so seamless to use that people don’t even notice it?

By the end of the article the author acknowledges that usability is becoming more credible and that more companies are investing in it. But it still seems like this is an area that remains mysterious to many of whom do not understand it. People seem to understand the concept of convenience, why do they not understand ease of use?

As this blog grows, I hope to take away some of the mystery of usability. I know I haven’t gotten into it very deep so far, and most of my messages have discussed methodologies, and the whatnot without getting very detailed, but this is because I’ve been waiting to practice some of the processes, and provide some real feedback about my experiences and have some real content to discuss. Hopefully this will all come to fruition next week as I will be in NYC on customer visits.

Crash course in collecting user data…

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.. well, next week is the big moment I’ve been waiting for. I will be going to NYC to visit customers. My main goal will be collecting customer data to use for the User Centered Design process. This will not be a contextual inquiry session, but I’m sure I will be getting a lot of useful information to disseminate to my development team.  I hope to have lots of good stuff from my trip for my blog.

WordPress Application vs WordPress online.. & IxDA

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I read on the IxDA list about how WordPress has more functionality over other Blogging applications. I was wondering why I wasn’t getting it, and then I realized perhaps it was because I’ve been using the online version. So I accessed my web hosting company to see about installing the WordPress app onto my hosting server, and I got a message that it was not compatible with my web hosting plan. Apparently you have to have Linux hosting to use most of the applications that are available with my hosting provider. My website uses ASP includes that run with FrontPage extensions, so I went with the IIS hosting instead.

Also, I finally caught up on 700 emails from the IxDA over the past few days. I have no idea how people have time to keep up with that mailing list. I insisted that I read every post because oftentimes threads are referred to further down in the list, and if you miss the first post, then all of the subsequent messages do not make sense. I enjoy keeping up with this list because I always get a ton of links for applications and websites to check out. I also like to know what other people in the industry are doing.

As a result of the list, I tried out Cuil for the first time. Of course I searched my name (I almost typed Googled), and it returned with no search results that were relative to me. I looked for my name, my URL and my blog URL. I consider myself to have quite a bit of content online, and the search engine did not find any of it. I mean there’s Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, my website, my Blog and nothing came up at all. That does not seem like a very useful search engine. I thought the UI was so-so. the look and feel was okay, but the text seemed hard to scan to me.

Something else I learned on IxDA today was the term “gorilla arm” and how it relates to touch screens. From my experience with touchscreens I never liked them because of the glare and the fingerprints. You can read the definition of gorilla arm in the hacker’s dictionary.

I also read a very surprizing review about irise. I guess I always assumed that because the software package was so expensive that it would be awesome. The review I read said it was very hard to use. I guess I’ll stick with learning Serena Prototype Composer since it’s FREE!

I also went to the Microsoft Silverlight website, and interestingly enough the demo did not play properly. I could hear the audio but I could not see the video. Then I installed the plug-in (blech) to view HardRock Memorabelia and it never played properly. That’s it for today. I’m looking forward to eating some sushi for lunch!

Looking for a better way…

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Over the past year, I have been trained in User Centered Design techniques by some of the leading names in this country. It seems the whole Contextual Design process is very time consuming. I have a hard time making users visits because I do not access to a solid repertoire of customers from my work site. The application I do UX for requires lots of hardware and setup. I have received great UI feedback from trainers, but even some of their requests are hard for me to test in my current environment.

Because of the previously stated issues, and the fact that I’ve been reading up on the IXDA website, I am getting interested in Action Centered, or Behavior Centered design. This takes the User–the most inconsistent and unreliable element out of the equation. I am looking for good resources on ACD, and how I can integrate the ACD workflow and methodology into the scrum process that we are initiating at my location. I am even interested in doing maybe a hybrid of methods, because I believe it is important to know the users, and listen to their needs, it just seems like it may not be practical 100% of the time.

Scrum, an Agile project management methodology

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Today I attended a 2 hour session on Scrum. Apparently the concept of Scrum is derived from the sport Rugby. The concept is that you have a team of people working together to achieve a common goal in small iterations. The scrum process consists of periods of development known as ‘sprints’, and are moderated by people called ScrumMasters. Yes, it all sounds strange, but the concept is that if you design something iteratively, that you can change development direction as needed and determined by the Product Owner.

I was partially exposed to an Agile development methodology working from a remote location, and it seemed rather chaotic. Hopefully this will run smoother since most of the people involved are in one location. One of the most important elements to Scrum are daily stand-up meetings. These are 15 minute long meetings to monitor progress on a day to day basis.

Tomorrow I will be giving a presentation on Interaction Design integration into the Scrum process. This integration may prove to be a challenge for me as I am the only HF/UX Designer at this facility, and there may be several Scrum projects going on concurrently. I will need to determine when and how I will be involved in each of the projects. I’m sure that my role will evolve throughout time. I am interested to see how this all pans out.  For more detailed information on scrum, you can check it out on wikipedia here.