All posts by nadyne

user experience, VMware

creating a space where relationships can be built

Last week, I chaired the first (but not the last) VMware User Experience (vUE) conference.  Throughout my planning and scheming to get vUE going, my goal was simple.  Since this was our first time getting together, we had to have the opportunity to actually take advantage of it.  We had to be able to learn about each other, to share with each other.  Every decision came back to that question: how does this get people talking to and learning from each other?

The first idea that I had was to have everyone do a quick introduction of themselves.

Hi, I’m Nadyne Richmond, I’m a researcher, and I’ve been here for a year.  I work on projects all across VMware.  So far, I’ve done research on vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Horizon, Zimbra, Aurora, and some things that don’t have names yet.  Outside of work, I’m currently reading Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I live in downtown Mountain View with my husband and our two cats.

But then I imagined 60 of those, and thought that there was a high chance of me falling asleep.  Worse, though, I wasn’t sure if that actually imparted any information that I or anyone else cared about.  I thought that it might not meet my goal of helping people really get to know each other.

That idea evolved into what became the meat of the program: 5-10 minute talks from as many people as possible, in which they talked about their user experience in some way.  I explicitly left this open for interpretation, and I really liked the breadth of talks that came out of it.  The very first of these talks was from one of the newest designers on my team, in which she discussed the differences between what she learned in design school (where you get to start with a problem and decide how to go about tackling it) and what design is like in the real world (where the problem is well-established, and you’re coming into the project in the middle of its cycle so all of the decisions about how to tackle it have long been made).  The last of these talks was from one of our most senior designers talking about a future direction for VMware and how he’s going about it.

To help ensure that we had time to actually talk amongst ourselves, I made one other decision that was at least slightly controversial: mealtimes were sacrosanct.  I received lots of requests to do something with the meals.  “Let’s show a movie!” “How about a design exercise?” “We should have a working lunch.”  I turned down each request.  They were great ideas, and I tried to incorporate them elsewhere.  But I didn’t change the (lack of) structure for the meals.  The meals were only for socializing.

Together, the technical program and the socializing time were scheduled with the intent of creating a space where relationships can be built.  The technical program gave us something to talk about.  Actually, it gave us several different somethings to talk about, since there were so many different short presentations.  You could talk to the presenter and get more information about their topic or their product, you could talk to the people around you about the presentations, you could commiserate with a presenter about how hard it actually is to stick to a very short time for your talk.  The socializing time was built in to make sure that we could actually have those conversations, as informally as possible.  I didn’t just want people to have to go back to their offices and email people — that’s too formal, and would result in fewer relationships actually getting built.

Another thing that we did to help build relationships was to give people something to create.  Every attendee received a 4″ Munny doll, which is a white vinyl doll that you can draw on or otherwise decorate to your heart’s content.  We set out a bunch of multi-colored Sharpies, and let the attendees do the rest.  Some folks did some truly awesome things with their Munnys.  At the end, we took a group shot of the well-decorated Munnys.  This was a great ice-breaker, and helped make more conversations happen.

Was vUE successful?  Based on the feedback so far, the answer appears to be a resounding “YES!”  I can’t tell you how relieved I am.  I was well aware that I was asking for a lot of people, to put aside their work for 2 days (or more, for those who travelled to be here).  Creating vUE was a gamble, and I wasn’t sure if all of the decisions that I had made would actually mean that I met my goal of getting people to build relationships across the company.  There’s definitely some things to do better in the future, of course.  Overall, though, I’m immensely happy with how everything worked out.

Nadyne

10 years of the iPod

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The original iPod is ten years old.  That first iPod is also the first Apple product that I purchased for myself.

Anyone who’s ever been in my home1 knows that I’m a music lover.  I’ve got lots of CDs, DVDs, and vinyl.  I had been considering getting an MP3 player already, but nothing was compelling enough to make me want to buy it.  Then the iPod came along.  A friend got one, I played with it, and I instantly fell in love.

The problem was, I was a Linux user at the time, and the original iPod was Mac-only.  I already had a Windows partition for Quicken purposes, though, and so I figured out a workaround that let me move files to the iPod using Windows.  So I bought the iPod, and I loved it.  I was so excited to have 5 GB of my music in my pocket, and I loved the design of it.  It felt good in my hand, and it was easy to use.

The iPod is part of what convinced me to become a Mac user.  I was already aware that the then-new OS X was Unix under the hood.  I’d been toying with the idea of not having to recompile my kernel all the time.  With Jaguar resolving many of the issues in the original Cheetah and Puma releases, I took the plunge and bought a PowerBook.  I quickly found that I wasn’t using my old Linux box very much anymore because I always had the Terminal waiting for me whenever I felt like I needed vi or sed.  It was retired, and I haven’t looked back.

  1. Or looked at my shared iTunes library at work. ↩
Nadyne

so maybe it wasn’t such great service

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted about an experience that I had with Pop Market, wherein I raved about their customer support.  I spoke too soon.  It’s now three weeks later, and I’m still having issues.

You see, I ordered a set of three albums.  One of those three albums, the deluxe edition of Pearl by Janis Joplin, has a manufacturing error.  The packaging is correct, but the discs inside are Earth, Wind & Fire.  I contacted Pop Market when I noticed the problem.  Very quickly, I got a response, and they sent out a replacement.  I wrote that prior blog post when I got such a quick response from them.

On October 11, I received the replacement.  I opened it up, and discovered the same problem: right packaging, wrong discs.  I wrote them again, and again received a fast response.  They said that they were sending out another replacement.

On October 20, I received the replacement for the replacement.  You can guess what happened, right?  It’s the same manufacturing error.  This time, I wrote the following to them:

Hello,

I have received the replacement “Pearl” by Janis Joplin.  However, this replacement has the same issue that the previous two had: the discs inside the package are “Essential Plus” by Earth, Wind & Fire.

You’ve now sent me three copies of this album, and all three of them have what I presume is a manufacturing error.  I appreciate how fast you’ve responded to me and sent out replacement copies, but all of them are still incorrect.  How can I ensure that I get a replacement copy of this album that actually has the correct discs inside?

As you can see from my account, I’ve purchased multiple items from Pop Market now.  I really like the service, and I’m very happy that you’ve been so responsive thus far in the issue that I’m trying to raise.  I’m sure that you are limited in what you can do, but I hope that you can try to do something that goes a bit beyond simply shipping me yet another copy of the album.  I now have three incorrect copies of “Pearl” sitting next to my stereo, and I don’t want to add a fourth incorrect copy to the pile.

Best regards,
Nadyne Richmond.

Again, I got an almost instantaneous response, and it also shows that they actually read the mail that I sent them:

Hi Nadyne Richmond,

I’m sorry to know that you are not receiving the ordered product. I have forwarded this information to our warehouse department for further investigation. As soon as I get any more information in this regard, I will get back to you.

Thank you for your patience as I strive to provide you with the best service and support possible.

Sincerely,
Sony Music Digital
[number redacted]
Victor

It’s now been nearly a week, and I don’t have a response from them yet.  But I do have three borked copies of Pearl, and I really don’t want to add another to the pile.

You might remember that this isn’t the only problem that I’m currently having with Sony.  I should write up an update of the whole Amazon/Sony tech support debacle sometime soon, but suffice it to say that it’s not resolved either.  To put a cherry on top of this Sony-flavored sundae, I got an email today saying that my Sony television needs to be inspected to ensure that it’s not a fire risk.  I feel like I need to check on everything I own that was made by Sony to make sure that it doesn’t have a problem. Is my old DAT deck going to blow up?  How many other discs do I have that were made by Sony?  Am I tempting the fates by even asking such questions?

user experience, VMware

VMware User Experience 2011 (vUE 2011)

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A few months ago, I proposed to my manager that we needed to do an offsite.  After many discussions and a lot of work done to clarify goals, a conference was born.

VMware’s user experience community is diverse and distributed, much like our extensive product portfolio and our overall development efforts.  My user experience team focuses on vSphere, vCloud, and related products, and is the largest group of user experience people.  There are other user experience people sprinkled throughout the company, sometimes just in ones and twos, other times (especially in the case of an acquisition) a larger team of 5-10.  With such a distributed team, we often don’t have a lot of interaction with each other.  In the case of acquisitions, I noticed that my team tended to have the same set of questions when we heard about a new acquisition:

  • what does this new acquisition do?
  • how do they fit into VMware?
  • who are their users?
  • do they have a user experience team?
  • how do they create their user experience?

When new acquisitions came on board, or when I heard about a user experience person working on another team, I got into the habit of reaching out to them and offering to have lunch if they’re local or a phone call if they’re not.  In doing so, I learned that they had the exact same questions about my team.

In thinking about how to solve this problem, a conference was born.  We named it vUE, which we’re pronouncing “view”1, and it is the first-ever gathering of VMware’s user experience community.  The major goal of this conference is to answer those questions that all of us have had about our applications, the users of those applications, and the processes that create those applications.

Michael Lopp has a great post at Rands in Repose about off-sites2 called Fred Hates It.  In it, he describes three types of off-sites, and why a team member named Fred might not like that off-site.  This post came long after I was already deep into the planning stages for vUE, but it’s helped me to articulate my goals and keep my focus.  One of the types of off-site that he identifies is “we need to understand who we are”, which is exactly where we at VMware are today.

To help reach the goal of understanding ourselves, I’ve set up a program structured around the types of activities we all do as a user experience community.  There are six technical sessions, each of which consists of very short presentations centered around a topic.  Our six topics are as follows:

  • users (who are our users?)
  • user research (what do we do to understand our users?)
  • design process (how do we design?)
  • design collaboration (who do we work with as we design?)
  • visual design (how do we make decisions about our visuals?)
  • data visualization (how do we present large complex sets of data?)

Every attendee was invited to present on one (or more) of these topics, and the majority of our attendees have stepped up to the challenge.  I’m one of the very few people who will be there but who isn’t giving a presentation.  I hope that everyone will forgive me for bowing out, and I really would like to be able to talk about my research, but leading vUE has taken enough time that I just can’t put together a technical presentation too.

The overall response to this idea has been overwhelming.  There are user experience people travelling here from Sofia, Herzliya, and Sydney, not to mention Seattle and Colorado Springs.  As I’ve been talking to my fellow UX people about why we’re doing such a thing, the response has universally been one of excitement and support.  These responses have only gotten stronger as people from outside of Palo Alto have been confirming their attendance.

We’re now one week away from the start of vUE.  Even just getting together so many people from so many corners of the company is a success.  The sessions and presentations that I mentioned above are intended to be the starting point for future conversations.  This is one way for us to know who else is working on mobile projects or data visualization.  As I’ve been organizing this, I’ve learned a lot about my fellow UX colleagues here and have already been able to introduce people who are working on similar problems.  That’s just my efforts: I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn next week when we’re all in the same room together and sharing what we know.

  1. I had originally advocated for vUX, but it was pointed out to me that the name could be (ahem) mispronounced. ↩
  2. The eagle-eyed reader will notice that I’m referring to vUE as a conference and not an off-site.  That’s mostly a result of scale: nearly 70 people were invited. Thus it violates a cardinal rule of off-sites, in that not everyone attending is presenting. ↩
Nadyne

just do it

After the death of Steve Jobs, many people have shared anecdotes about him.  It’s hard to pick a favorite, but “Hi. It’s Steve” from Aaron Sorkin is a great one.  It’s not that Jobs tried to convince Sorkin to write a Pixar movie.  It’s this:

The second-to-last call I got from Steve came the day a television series of mine was canceled. “I just want to make sure you’re not discouraged,” he said. Why would an almost stranger take even 60 seconds out of his day to make that call? It had to have been because he was an awfully nice man. And that he knew what it felt like to blow it on a big stage.

I like this story because I think that it encapsulates one reason that Jobs was successful: he saw things that he should do, and he did them.  He didn’t equivocate about whether he should do them, he just went out and did them.  Some were big, some were small.  But the gist is the same: he took action instead of just sitting around thinking “I should do that”.  In this case, the action that he took was to reach out to someone he liked (but didn’t know very well) when they’d experienced something discouraging.

This anecdote keeps on coming back to me.  It makes me do things instead of just thinking about doing them, including writing this blog post.

Nadyne

LTFS has won an Emmy!

I hope you’ll forgive me for stepping away from my usual VMware and user experience posts to share some awesome news.

Michael Richmond, my husband, has just found out that the project that he architected at IBM Research called LTFS has won an Engineering Emmy Award.  Engineering Emmys are “presented to an individual, company or organization for engineering developments so significant an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the transmission, recording or reception of television”.

Michael has always had trouble explaining to people why his work on LTFS is so important and so ground-breaking.  He wrote a blog post about it titled “Tape? Does anyone care about tape anymore?” to try to address this.  I think that winning an Engineering Emmy shows exactly how important and ground-breaking it is.

Three other Engineering Emmys have been awarded.  You can read more about them, as well as some other Emmy news, here.

Mac, software

more on giving up on Safari

It seems that I’m not the only one who is giving up on Safari in its latest incarnation.  Macworld staff writer Lex Friedman is also dropping Safari for Chrome, and for the same reason: Safari’s insistence on refreshing the content of a tab if you haven’t viewed it in awhile.  This has a performance impact on your whole Mac.

I didn’t expect Chrome to become my browser of choice, but that’s what won.  It feels snappier than either Safari or Firefox.  It doesn’t grind to a halt the way that Safari does.  Firefox has always driven me away because it refuses to honor the system network settings, which gets in my way when I’m at the office and switching between the wired network (with a proxy) and wireless (no proxy)1.

  1. I should note that Adium, my IM client of choice, also has this problem.  On Adium, it’s actually more annoying: if I want to use it, I have to reset my proxy settings for each bloody IM account.  I use ’em all, so this is quite obnoxious.  However, if I’m in a meeting, I generally don’t want Adium connected anyway, so not using it isn’t as much of an issue as not using a web browser.  That said, if anyone’s got a solution that makes Adium be a good Mac citizen, I’d love to hear it. ↩
Nadyne, user experience

more thoughts about being female in tech

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Geek Feminism has a great post on being harassed.  It’s a great post, you should go read it.

The part that fundamentally bothers me is this, where the author talks about being invited to give a keynote presentation:

I remember talking to my boss about it at work the next day, telling him I was flattered but didn’t much relish the negative attention it would get me. He was surprised, and didn’t get it. Later, he would admit that he’d read the ensuing comment threads around the web and was stunned not only by the content of them, but that such responses were expected.

This is one of the many hard things about being female in tech.  Whenever you step out into the spotlight, you run the very real risk of what Skud, the writer of this post, gently calls “negative attention”.  You have to make a choice about whether it’s really worth it.  She says later, about another opportunity to speak at a conference, that she decided that it wasn’t worth it.  Which has its own issues of feeling conflicted over letting the opportunity pass you by.

Right now, I’m in the middle of organizing VMware’s very first gathering of all of our user experience people across the whole company.  It’s been a lot of work to get it off the ground.  The people that I work with have been awesomely supportive.  My manager and my director deserve awards for their supportiveness.  Everyone else that I’ve worked with, from the others who are helping me organize it to those who I’ve asked to give presentations, have all been fantastic.  But even knowing that I work with awesome people and that no-one would make this difficult, I have to admit that I had a question in the back of my mind as to whether I was opening myself up to something that I just don’t want to deal with.  This isn’t about my team or my colleagues or anything else.  It’s just that it’s so frequent, so expected, that the thought still came to me.

And that’s not how it should be.