All posts by nadyne

user experience

starting over on your user experience

The HTC blog has a post from its Director of User Experience about how they redefined the HTC Sense, and did so via user research.  He doesn’t elaborate a lot on what research they did, but rather their key learnings and how that informed all of the design decisions that they made.

My little researcher heart goes pitter-patter when I hear of stories like this, of companies willing to step back and completely reconsider everything based on user research.  Go HTC!

user experience

User research != user feedback

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This quote has been making the rounds again:

“User feedback is bad at telling you what to build. It’s great at telling you what you fucked up” – Phil Libin, CEO of @Evernote

I haven’t actually been able to find the quote in context, so I hope that Libin isn’t as ignorant about what user research brings to the table as he sounds in this Twitter-sized quote.

It appears to be making the mistake of assuming that gathering user feedback is the same as doing user research.  They’re different beasts.  It’s not difficult to show users something and get feedback on it.  User research is more than just showing something to people, writing down what they say or did, and then going back and telling people about that.

Feedback doesn’t just tell you “what you fucked up”.  If you think that’s all that you’re hearing in your user feedback, then you’re not listening to your feedback.  You’re only hearing part of the message in the feedback.  Don’t just take your feedback at face value.  Take the time to analyze it and understand it.  You’ll learn a lot about what you got right and what you got wrong.  If your users perceive that you got something wrong, then you’ve got to decide what to do about it.  I wrote a post about feedback and constructive criticism awhile ago that covers a lot of this.

Feedback also can tell you what to build.  By hearing what works and what doesn’t work from your users, you have the seeds of inspiration for building the next big thing.  It might or might not be related to what the feedback was actually about, but that’s the beauty of the human experience: every interaction we have impacts us, and it all comes together sometimes in ways that we can’t explain when we have that sudden insight that tells us what to build next.

But feedback isn’t everything.  Feedback is just a teensy subset of user research, and I sincerely hope that anyone who is CEO of a company knows that.  User research can tell you what to build.  The research that you do when you need to figure out what to build isn’t as neat or easy-to-conduct as the formative research that you need to do when you’re trying to figure out what to build, but it can lead to that lightbulb moment where you figure out what’s next.  If you don’t know what this entails, go find an awesome user researcher (hi) and ask.

iPhone

the iPhone and 4000 lattes

I was at Macworld when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone.  Several of us from my then-team were in attendance, and we all sat together in the main hall for the Stevenote.  And yes, I laughed when Steve called a local Starbucks and ordered 4000 lattes.

The fine folks at Fast Company have done some deep investigative journalism and went to visit that selfsame Starbucks.  Yes, really: Because Of Steve Jobs’s First Public iPhone Call, Starbucks Still Gets Orders For 4,000 Lattes.  Thanks to Fast Company, I now know that the Starbucks employee who answered the phone when Steve called still works there, and that people years later are still calling and asking for 4000 lattes.

Funny enough, now orders for 4,000 lattes are more common, thanks to the endless droves of Apple fanboys still wanting to partake in some aspect of Jobs’s legacy. “Before him, no [we never received such an order],” Hannah says. “After he made the call, everyone copied him, prank calling our store and ordering thousands of lattes–to this day!”

Apple, Mac

ten more reasons I hate iTunes 11

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I’ve already given you ten reasons that I hate iTunes 11, but now that I’ve been using it for awhile, I’ve got ten more.

  1. The Artists view doesn’t show all of the artists that are in my library.  I have an artist where I have several hundred songs, and yet they’re not in the artist view.  All of the songs are tagged appropriately, and they live in the same folder as all of the rest of my music, but somehow this artist isn’t worthy of the Artists view.  
  2. Navigational behavior is inconsistent between views.  Here are some examples:
    1. If you open up the information for a song in the Artists view, you don’t get Previous and Next buttons (and their attendant keyboard shortcuts).  If you open up that same song in the Songs view, you do.  Both of these are lists of songs, why do I get buttons in one place and not in another?
    2. If you delete a song (which I’m doing a lot of, because the move to iTunes 11 has duplicated a bunch of songs) in the Artists view, you lose focus and have to click with your mouse again to get focus somewhere.  In the Songs view, if you delete a song, focus moves to the next song.  Why is this inconsistent?
  3. I keep on accidentally hitting the menu arrow next to songs, because it seems that its click target is a lot bigger than the button is, and it’s not in a consistent location.  For example, if I’m trying to shift-click to select several songs, I often accidentally hit that stupid menu arrow for one of the songs.  It interrupts my workflow.
  4. There is bloody well nothing on that menu arrow that I use, so it’s especially obnoxious that I keep on hitting it when I don’t care about it.
  5. I really miss iTunes DJ.  I used it all the time to just randomly shuffle through my complete library.  It let me rearrange the songs that were coming up, and I could remove things that I wasn’t in the mood for.  “Up Next” is not nearly as useful, especially since I can only see a scant handful of songs that it’s going to play next.  iTunes DJ is also the only place in iTunes where I actually liked Cover Flow.  (I mostly don’t mind the loss of Cover Flow, but I do here.)
  6. File > Display Duplicates is gone.  When you’ve got a library as large as mine, this feature made it a lot easier to identify duplicates, determine which one you wanted to keep, and delete the rest.
  7. Gapless albums are gone.  This was awesome for live albums, as well as albums where the tracks flow seamlessly from one to another (the canonical example here is probably Dark Side of the Moon).  This function keeps iTunes from cross-fading songs on gapless albums.  Now listening to live albums is annoying, and Dark Side is all but unlistenable.
  8. Search doesn’t always take you anywhere useful.  I like the drop-down that appears in search, but if you’re in the Artists view (which is the only view that I find even remotely palatable), searching just takes you to the artist where the album or song that you searched for is contained.  This is utterly useless if you have a lot of songs by an artist.
  9. It doesn’t remember where you last were if you change views.  Let’s say you had a song selected in the Artists view, and then you go to the Podcasts view.  Go back to Artists, and you’re back at the top of the Artists view.
  10. There are default settings for podcasts that I apparently can’t manipulate.  They’re not in the Preferences, they’re not anywhere on the odcasts page that I’ve noticed.  But every podcast has a little settings icon, and there’s a “use default settings” checkbox there.  I would like for the default to be that it downloads all available episodes, not just the most recent one.  I can’t do that, so I have to go to each and every podcast, click its settings, and change that value.  Why have default podcast settings if I can’t access them?

I’ve been using iTunes 11 a lot in the hopes that I could come to some kind of peace with it, but I still hate it every single time I touch it.

Nadyne, user experience

I’m speaking at DevFest on March 15

DevFest Silicon Valley is happening on March 15, and I’ll be speaking there.  My talk is titled “An Engineer’s Guide to Learning About Your Users”.  If you’re in Silicon Valley, you should join me.  In my 30-minute session, I’ll explain how to elicit information from your users (both directly and indirectly).  I’ll discuss the parallels between good code and good research, and explain how the development lifecycle applies to research too.

user experience

Austin Govella’s manifesto for user experience design

Austin Govella has just updated his manifesto for user experience design.  There’s a lot in it to like, but the last point really resonates with me:

Create better organizations to enable better design.

Your design activities don’t change. Change how you work with your team. Change how you work, so your goal is always a better organization instead of a better product. Change how you accomplish the design, so that you are always improving your team’s design literacy.

I think that everyone in user experience at least occasionally struggles with working with people who don’t understand design and how design makes better products.  I think that Austin is right that it’s our job to help make our organization better.  Just as we in user experience need to understand our technology and our users so that we can make a better design, we also have to share our knowledge about user experience and design and our users and how our technology fits into our users’ lives to help everyone in the organization do a better job of making products to meet people’s needs.

user experience

the limitations of click analytics

Dan McKinley, an engineer at etsy, has an awesome blog post titled Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics.  He makes a lot of great points about when to use, and when not to use, analytics.  This is the single most important sentence in the whole post:

It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics. Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake.

I’ve now got this bookmarked for the next time this comes up in conversation, which I anticipate will be within the next week, and quite possibly today.

Nadyne

comment wisdom

This is so true that it deserves to be engraved on every laptop, tablet, and smartphone that has been or ever will be produced:

@AvoidComments: Thinking of reading comments? Instead, call your oldest relative. He or she will appreciate your time much more than comments denizens will.

This obviously doesn’t apply to anyone who comments on this blog, for y’all are devastatingly intelligent and erudite.  You always advance the conversation and make deep meaningful points1.

  1. Except for when you don’t, and that’s one of the reasons that comments here are moderated. ↩
Nadyne

Lifehack: use your phone’s address book to avoid scam calls

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Scam calls are a fact of life.  The Do Not Call registry has cut down on it some, but shady companies operating overseas don’t pay attention to this list.  But with just a teensy bit of effort on your part, you can readily ignore scam phone calls.  This requires a telephone with an address book and caller ID.  And it’s dead simple.  Here’s what you do:

  1. Create a new entry in your telephone’s address book named “Scam” (or whatever else you’d prefer).
    1. Optionally, if your address book supports pictures, give it a picture.  I use the no symbol: my phone’s screen is big and bright, so it gives me a visual indicator that I can see across the room when my phone rings.
    2. Optionally, if your phone supports ring tones, give your Scam contact a silent ringtone.  Here’s one for you in different formats and lengths.
  2. Whenever you get a scam call (for some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of the Windows malware calls lately1), add that phone number to your Scam entry in your address book.
  3. Whenever you see Scam on your phone, smile widely and don’t pick up the phone.

You could go a step further and assume that anyone who isn’t in your address book is probably a scam caller, or just someone who you don’t want to talk to.  In that case, and if your phone supports it, you could set your default ringtone to silent (either its silent setting, or using a silent ringtone — I prefer the latter, since my phone vibrates when it’s in its silent mode), and then assign custom ringtones to those whose calls you want to ring.

I know that this doesn’t feel like it’s a big thing, but your Scam address book entry will get long over time. I’ve only been doing this for about four months, and I’ve already got 15 telephone numbers in there.  I wrote this post because my phone just rang, and I looked up and saw that it was a scam, and smiled to myself in satisfaction that I didn’t have to interrupt what I was doing and get annoyed by someone trying to sell me carpet cleaning or Windows malware removal or whatever other method they’re trying to employ to part me from my money.  I just checked my caller history, and Scam shows up in there many times over the past couple of weeks.  All of those are calls that I haven’t answered and that haven’t wasted my time.

  1. Remind me to tell you about going along with one of these calls once. ↩
user experience, VMware

hiring UX researchers

(Edited 2013-03-04: We’re no longer accepting applications for this role.)

My team at VMware, which works on user experience across VMware’s product portfolio, has an opening for a UX researcher who has recently (within the past year) graduated from college, or who will receive their degree this year.  Interested in learning more?  Ping me.

We’re also hiring UX designers and UI developers, and I can point you in the right direction if you’re interested in those roles, as well as answer any questions that you might have about working for VMware.