Category Archives: Nadyne

Nadyne, women

I’ll be speaking at Women in Advanced Computing ’13

I just got notification that my proposal for Women in Advanced Computing ’13 has been accepted.  My proposal was “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”, and here’s my original abstract (which I reserve the right to revise!):

As a woman in computing, you usually start off being comfortable with having few peers of your gender. When you start out in college, perhaps you had resources available to you like a campus group for women in computing. When you get your first job in the field, perhaps you work for a company that’s large enough to have an organized group for women, or perhaps you just band together with friends for wine and story-sharing.

As you get older, you begin to notice that you have fewer peers of your gender. We know from the research that women drop out of STEM fields in their late 20s and early 30s. There are many reasons for this, and they’re outside the scope of this talk. There are also plenty of women who switch from a technical track to a non-technical track in their career, such as trying out management.

I want to talk about what you can do if you’re in that spot: you’re in your 30s or 40s, and you somehow find yourself the only senior technical woman in the room. I want to address the following questions:

  • How do you stay up-to-date technically?
  • How do you effectively communicate with younger team members?
  • How do you ensure that you maintain credibility?
  • How do you find mentors?
  • How do you continue to grow your career and decide what your next steps are?
  • What can you do to help address that problem of women dropping out of STEM fields?
  • How do you find your peers again?
Q&A, user experience

Q&A: about the use of jargon

In my DevFest talk a couple of weeks ago, I cautioned developers about using jargon.  I got a question about the use of jargon via email, which I’ll paraphrase like this:

I often use jargon when I talk to my customers.  I wanted to show them my IT skills and build trust.  Should I always avoid jargon?

This is an awesome point.  One of your goals when you are talking to users is to build rapport with them.  By building rapport, you make them more comfortable in sharing information with you, and it’s information that you need.

I think that you should use jargon with users, but you need to be careful about it.  You should avoid introducing jargon into your conversation with your user yourself.  You don’t want to lead them to using a term that they know but don’t naturally use themselves.  You want to hear the term that they naturally use.  If you hear that enough people don’t use the jargon that you use, but instead use something else, you might want to change how you refer to this item to match their own terminology.

You should listen closely to how they refer to something.  If they use jargon to refer to that thing, use that same jargon to refer to the same thing.  Be careful to ensure that you understand exactly what they mean when they use that term.  One of the examples that I gave was in the case of looking through log files: “event”, “alarm”, and “alert” are often used in log files.  Different log files use those terms in very different manners.  I’ve seen log files where “event” meant “something very bad has happened”, and I’ve seen log files where “event” meant “something has happened; could be good, could be bad, could be neutral”.  If you were talking to users about troubleshooting and they used the word “event”, you should clarify with them what “event” means to them to ensure that you are using “event” in the same way that they are.    If you assume that you’re using “event” in the same way, but they mean something different than you do, you could make erroneous inferences based on that misunderstanding.

 

user experience

how to present your results from user experience research

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It might just be confirmation bias, but I feel like I’ve been hearing the same question a lot lately: how do you present your results from your user experience research?

I don’t think of the question in this manner.  When you state the problem in this fashion, it presumes that there is one way to do it, and that you do it once and that’s it.  My goal in conducting research is to have it make an impact.  I can do the most awesome user experience research that has ever been completed on any product anywhere in the world by any researcher, and it’s meaningless if it doesn’t actually result in an improvement to the product.  I think that the correct question to ask is, “how do you share the results from your user experience research such that they get acted upon?”

Presenting your research results is never a single task that you do once and never do again.  You will share the results of your research over and over again throughout the development process, regardless of whether the process is agile or waterfall or some mix therein.

The first thing that you should do when you are conducting research is ensure that you have buy-in from whoever you’re going to need it from.  This certainly includes the designer and program manager, and usually includes others as well: additional researchers and designers who are working on related projects, software architects, engineering managers, QA managers, and anyone else who could block the adoption of whatever results come out of your research.

The second thing that you must do is ensure that you and the designer are always on the same page.  After you have conducted the research and are in the process of analyzing the data, you need to involve the designer to ensure that you have captured all of their concerns.  When I am crafting recommendations, I usually create a first pass of them as part of the analysis, and then work with the designer to get their perspective.  In my eyes, that first pass at recommendations is a strawman, intended to kickstart the conversation about what the final results should be.   You want your final results to include recommendations that are the user experience recommendations, not just the user experience research recommendations.  You don’t want a designer to feel like they’ve never heard about an issue until an official results presentation meeting, and you certainly don’t want them to feel like your recommendations don’t meet their design goals.

Likewise, if you anticipate that these recommendations are going to be contentious or will require significant unexpected work, you should discuss the research results and recommendations  with those who are most likely to be impacted by that.  These discussions are usually 1:1, and give you the opportunity to understand other constraints.  If there are major constraints, such as scheduling constraints, you can work in advance to prioritize the recommendations, and work with the designer to come up with a design that addresses as much as possible now as well as a long-term design that will be implemented in the next version.

Once all of this is done, the way that you communicate your research recommendations depends on the needs of your audience. Your communication style needs to match theirs. If they communicate exclusively through their bug-tracking mechanism, then your design needs to be communicated there too. If they communicate via wiki, then your design needs to be wiki-fied. If there’s one stakeholder who really needs to buy off on your design and everyone else will follow that person, then you need to figure out who that stakeholder is and figure out how to get them to buy off on your design. If everyone needs to come to agreement that your design is the one that they will implement, then you probably need to have one discussion with project managers and a different discussion with engineering. Each of those groups have different goals and different needs, so having a separate discussion with each of them means that you’re able to address their unique goals and needs, as well as answer any questions that they might have.

As a part of all of this, you might give a presentation to a roomful of people to discuss your research results, and you might write up a big report and send it out in email.  But that’s not the end of the process.  It’s only the beginning.  You’ll need to share your research results more than once. You’ll need to track the development process and ensure that your recommendations are being acted upon, and communicate with the team if they’re deviating from the recommendations. It might be that they’ve forgotten elements of your recommendations, or that someone new has come on board and simply isn’t aware of them, or they disagree with it and so are conveniently disregarding the research, or (as in every software project that has ever existed) they’re having to make changes to their plan (adding features, cutting features, cutting parts of features, etc), and thus parts of your research recommendations are impacted by those changes. If they’re going to make changes or compromises in the design that you researched, you should be a part of that discussion — you know the design and the research recommendations the best of anyone, and you know why you made the design recommendations that you made, and you can help them make decisions and discuss the trade-offs between development time and user experience.

Remember: no-one cares about your work more than you do. For your research recommendations to be truly effective and fully implemented, you’re the one who’s going to have to track it and make sure that it actually happens.

Nadyne, women

career webinar: “how to map your plan for success and stay on it”

Before I forget … I’m going to be speaking at a Women’s TechConnect webinar on Thursday, March 21, at 8am PT.  The topic is “how to map your plan for success and stay on it”.  The first half of the webinar will be with Stephanie Peacocke, a career coach who will discuss mistakes that people make in career planning and how to pick yourself up if you get off-track.  In the second half of the webinar, I’ll share my experiences in being a woman in a technical field, growing in my technical career, managing difficult career situations, and making decisions about where I want to go in my career.

It looks like they record the webinars as well, so I’ll share a link once I’ve got it.

user experience

Greg Hoy: “good work isn’t enough”

Greg Hoy of Happy Cog has written an awesome blog post about being a great user experience designer: “Good work isn’t enough”.  Greg is right: creating the most amazing designs (and research) isn’t sufficient for you to advance in your career.  You also have to be a good person to work with.  You have to be a good team member.  Greg lists several points of what makes a great designer, including being respectful, being patient, and put in extra effort with no strings attached.

Greg says that this applies to people who ” work in an agency or web department within an organization”, but I think that it’s a lot wider than that.  I think it definitely applies to anyone in user experience, and quite possibly anyone in software engineering at all.

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.

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.