All posts by nadyne

Mac, user experience

the user experience of red

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Jeff Carlson wrote a post about the battery gauge of his spiffy new MacBook Air.  The newest generation of MacBooks have amazing battery life.  There’s a strange downside to this battery life, though.  Here’s a quote from Jeff:

Working on the new 2013 MacBook Air, I noticed that the battery gauge in the menu bar had slid into red. Typically that means a scramble to find the power adapter, but then I clicked the button […]  17% battery still left—with an estimated 3 hours 23 minutes of battery charge.

A red battery indicator on my Mac used to mean that I needed to get plugged in quickly.  Not drop-everything quickly, but sometime in the next half-hour or so.  The red battery indicator usually meant that I could finish out a meeting if I was careful, but that was about it.  Now, though, I’ve got a retina MacBook Pro.  A red battery indicator usually means that I still have three hours of battery life yet.

Users are trained that a red icon indicates that there is a problem that needs to be addressed soon, and that not addressing it soon means that there will be consequences.  Apple hasn’t considered this in expectation in the current battery indicator.  Red no longer means that I need to fix this soon.  Now that my expectation for what red means is broken, I have found that I stop paying attention to the battery indicator.  I’ve increasingly found myself getting the dialog telling me that my Mac needs to be plugged in very soon or it will have to power itself off.

Apple has made amazing strides in battery technology.  I can easily get more than 8 hours of battery life on my rMBP without paying any attention to conserving the battery.  As a result of this improvement, 20% of battery life remaining is no longer a cause for concern.  Apple needs to reconsider the point at which it warns me that my battery is low.  The warning needs to be early enough that I can complete whatever I’m currently working on, but not so early that I disregard it as something that needs action from me.

user experience, VMware

job posting: senior UX researcher

My team at VMware has an opening for a senior user experience researcher at our headquarters in Palo Alto, California. We are responsible for user research across VMware’s product portfolio. A senior researcher on the team is responsible for working with teams to understand their needs, creating a research plan to address those needs, conducting the research, analyzing the results of the research, communicating the results of the research, and continuing to evangelize the results of the research. Additionally, the senior researcher will proactively identify research needs and conduct research that will help us address long-term needs of the organization and put us ahead of the curve in understanding our users, how they use our applications, and how we can better meet their needs, desires, and aspirations.

If you are interested in this role, please email me with a cover letter, resume, and (preferred but not required) link to your portfolio.

My team also has openings for senior interaction designers.  You can email me if you’re interested in that role or have any questions about it as well.

women

are you really a geek?

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This post about exorcising the spectre of the fake geek girl really hit close to home.  The post is a discussion about a panel at a recent science fiction convention.  With only a scant handful of changes, this phenomenon is one that women with tech careers recognize as well.  As a senior technical woman, I often find myself getting challenged about whether I’m really a geek.  Do I know the right languages?  Have I been a Mac user long enough?  Do I use the approved applications?  Do I read the right blogs and sites?  Do I have an approved opinion about [whatever the controversy du jour is]?

There’s always another test.  If I pass the first one, then there’s another one lurking.   Eventually, I will fail a test.  I don’t know everything about computer science, I don’t know every programming language, I don’t read every blog, my opinion doesn’t match up with your opinion on every single topic.  Failing one of those tests means that I have proven that I’m a fake geek.

I honestly can’t fathom the person who quizzes me about my geekiness.  You would think that my education (three degrees: MS and BS in computer science, BS in math) would speak for itself.  Or maybe my job at VMware, where I’ve reached one of the seniormost levels available to technical contributors1, would be sufficient.  Or maybe my time on the committee for OOPSLA, or as an advisory board member of MacIT, would be enough.  Maybe speaking at Google DevFest would prove it.  But it’s not enough.  It’s never enough.  For those who want to believe that there is no such thing as a geek woman, nothing is ever sufficient.

I’m glad to see others taking on the imagined problem of the fake geek girl.  I think if you call yourself a geek, you’re most likely a geek.  You might be a geek in a different way than I am, and each type of geekdom is just as valid as the next.  There’s no ranking of geeks2.  If you tell me you’re a geek, I’m going to take your word for it, and I’m not going to quiz you to find out where you just aren’t geek enough for me.

  1. <5% of R&D is at my level or higher. ↩
  2. Well.  Except for this, which of course I agree with as a mathematician. ↩
VMware

Things I learned today: VMware turtle edition

turtle pond
a cluster of VMware turtles enjoying the California summer sun

VMware is famous, at least amongst its employees and visitors to our main campus, for its turtle pond.  What I didn’t know is that we currently have nine turtles in our little pond.  None of the turtles were (ahem) developed here at VMware.  They’re all acquisitions, starting in 2007 with Rosie.  Rosie was an unofficial addition to the pond, but VMware adopted her wholeheartedly.  She soon had more turtles join her.  We’ve even updated the pond to be more turtle-friendly, adding more rocks for them for sunbathing purposes, and more plants for swimming around and hiding in.

We have, of course, named all of our turtles.  Rosie got her name from the restaurant from where we acquired her.  Other turtles have been named for their attributes, such as Houdini (who is a master of hiding himself away) and McQueen (who often escapes by scaling a wall).  Another turtle is Zilla, named after the Bugzilla that our development teams use to track bugs, issues, and feature requests for our products.

Our newest addition to the turtle family was given to us by one of our customers.  His name is from his home city of Portland.  I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll need to add another pond if we find ourselves with too many turtles.

women

the two-body problem for mid-career women

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During my talk at WiAC a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the two-body problem is one of the challenges that face mid-career women.  The two-body problem is about couples who both have careers.  Throughout your career, you have different opportunities that present themselves to you.  These opportunities have to be evaluated as to how they impact your career and the rest of your life.  This evaluation becomes more difficult when you are in a relationship, because “the rest of your life” is more complex.  There are more tradeoffs to consider, and sometimes furthering one party’s goals comes at the expense of the other’s goals.  Further, given that there are two people with two careers, this problem presents itself more frequently.

My husband and I are both software engineers, and the two-body problem is one that we face constantly.  For example, we have both passed on job opportunities that would require relocation or too much travel.  While the opportunity might have been great for our careers, it would have had too much of a negative impact on our personal lives.

In our culture, it had long been expected that a woman’s career would take the back seat to that of her husband.  Consider rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, winner of a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, whose New York Times obituary notes that she followed her husband’s career.  This expectation is changing, slowly, but it still impacts many women.  I’m lucky in that my husband doesn’t believe that my career is of lesser importance than his, and our families also feel this way.

For us, we handle the two-body problem by having an ongoing conversation about what we want, both personally and professionally.  We try to make sure that we’re equally balancing each of our career growth, as well as considering the impact of our professional decisions on our personal lives.  These are not easy conversations to have.  It can be hard to talk about what we want to accomplish in our careers, and it can be even harder to talk about places where we feel like we aren’t making as much headway as we want.  They’re hard conversations, but important ones.

Nadyne, women

prepping for a talk

I mentioned that I’m giving a talk this week at Women in Advanced Computing 2013 titled “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”.  I started out with the idea that there is a hole in the middle of your career, that hole is where women are the most likely to drop out of a technical career, and that there are steps that we as individual technical women can take to make it less likely that we and others drop out of technical careers.  With that idea, I wrote up an abstract and submitted it to speak at WiAC.

I’ve had the idea in the back of my head for months.  Ever since that idea arrived, I’ve been jotting down notes that are related to it.  As I’ve read books and articles, and they’ve led me to think about the topic more, I’ve fleshed out more of what might be included in the talk.  When I got the notification that my proposal had been accepted, I began working on it in earnest.  I first started looking at my notes and creating pieces of the talk, figuring out what would work and what wouldn’t work.  In working on those pieces, I spent a lot of time talking to myself in an empty room, to see if those pieces sounded good and felt natural when I talked about them.  Some things didn’t survive this cut, others were changed dramatically from their starting point.

When I felt like I had enough pieces that sounded right, I had to figure out how they fit together.  I had more pieces than I had time, but that’s okay: some of those pieces didn’t work in the context of a larger talk.  Some got cut, some got condensed.  New pieces got added when I discovered that I needed a bridge from one topic to the next.  I went from pieces that were related to this idea to a something that I hoped was a single cohesive discussion.

When I thought that I had the whole thing done, I stood in an empty conference room and gave the whole talk from start to finish.  This helped me be more comfortable with the talk as a whole, as well as identify places where it didn’t flow well.  More cutting ensued, as well as some new additions.  I tried again, felt more comfortable with it, and then rounded up a couple of colleagues to give me feedback on it.  They gave me fantastic feedback, which resulted in more revisions and more practice.

The talk is Thursday morning, 11am.  I really want to get this one right.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Apple, iPad, iPhone

how do I transfer iTunes metadata about iPhone and iPad?

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I have hit a second snag in moving my iTunes 11 library on my old Mac to iTunes 10 on my new Mac.

When I plug in my iPhone, which was previously syncing with my old Mac, to my new Mac, I get the warning that this iPhone is synced with another Mac. I’m given the option of either erasing it and syncing it, or doing nothing. I would be happy to let it erase and sync since all of the content that is on the iPhone is on the new Mac. However, the vast majority of the 64GB of content on my device is music, and I really don’t want to have to go through all of the playlists and artists and albums and configure which ones get synced.

Other than manually rebuilding this information, is there any other way to do this? All of the content that’s on the phone is on the new Mac, so I’m not trying to transfer content off of the iPhone. I just don’t want to have to go through and manually configure what syncs to the iPhone and what doesn’t. I have the same issue with my iPad 2 syncing with the new Mac: same error message, all of the content is on both the iPad and the new Mac, I don’t want to have to rebuild the list of what syncs and what doesn’t (which is about which movies and books sync).

I still have the old Mac and its old iTunes library. I would try to reimport the iTunes library, but I’ve added a bunch of content to the new iTunes library before I tried to sync with my iPhone. Moving to iTunes 11 on the new Mac is not an option. I’d rather take the time to rebuild the sync lists rather than do that.