Category Archives: Nadyne

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.

Nadyne

Future Nadyne and Current Nadyne

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Recently, someone told me that they admired how confident I am and how I take on new challenges.  She asked for some advice on how to be more confident.  I gave her two pieces of advice: fake it til you make it, and talk to your Future Self and ask her what would be better for her.

The first is relatively easy: pretend to be a confident person.  It gets easier over time, and there will come a day when someone says that they admire you for your confidence even though you know that there are plenty of days when you have to remind yourself to keep your head up.

The second requires more introspection.  When presented with an opportunity, a challenge, or a difficult situation, I think about what will make Future Nadyne happier.  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I have the carrots or the fries?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I take the opportunity to speak at this conference?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I go to the networking meetup?  Will Future Nadyne be happier if I let this jerk steamroll over me?

Thinking about Future Nadyne makes Current Nadyne a better person.  Doing this doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t mean that I’m successful in everything that I try.  But it does mean that I take the time to truly consider whether I should or shouldn’t do something, and my consideration is based on what is best for me, not just on what is most comfortable for me.

user experience

use body language to improve your user research

I came across a great blog post from Design Staff about how body language can impact your user research.  It’s a great post about reading the body language of the participant in your user research to see if they’re uncomfortable, and what you can do with your own behavior and body language to try to make them more comfortable.

I always try to start out my research by reminding participants that we’re looking at early design thinking, and thus they can be frank with their opinions.  I also try to be encouraging without being leading, and I’m definitely grateful for the time that they take to share their thoughts with me.  I try to be good with body language, but that’s probably the hardest one to know if you’re doing the right thing.

development, software

college versus software engineering

There’s lots of things that you do as part of your job as a software engineer that you don’t learn in school.

When you’re first starting out as a software engineer, you probably don’t really know what it’s like to work on a team.  You might have had group projects in school, but their scope was limited to whatever you could accomplish in that semester, you’re working on it from the very beginning through to its completion, and everyone in your group had roughly the same amount of experience that you do.  This is very different than delivering real software.

In the industry, you usually start out working on a project that’s already in progress, and if it’s software that’s been available for more than a couple of years, it’s got a history that you know nothing about.  You have to learn where the project is today, you have to learn how to contribute to your project, and your deliverables or your deadlines1 are going to change at some point.  You’re virtually guaranteed that you’re not there for the beginning of the project, you’re coming in to complete the work that someone else has defined.

There’s often not an actual end of a software project.  You finish this version, you start working on the next version, and you have to go back and patch bugs from this version while you’re working on the next version.  At some point, you’re going to stop working on this project (either moving to a different project in your company, or moving to a different company altogether), and the project is going to continue on.  This means that you’re going to have to figure out how to help whoever is taking over your work understand where you are and what needs to be done next.

Your project team is probably bigger than the ones that you had in college, and there are more roles on it.  Your college project team probably had everyone contributing code.  Now you’ve got to figure out how test fits into your world, and program management, and documentation, and user experience, and then there’s this marketing person that suddenly appears and you don’t know what this means.  In addition to all of these specialized roles that you haven’t had to deal with before, you’re also working with a much higher degree of variance of experience.  In college, everyone probably had roughly the same level of experience.  When you’re delivering software, you’ve got everyone from fresh college grads all the way up to the person who’s been working on this software since it was first shipped N years ago.

Deadlines are fixed in your college project.  You know exactly when the semester is going to end.  You might decide to change the scope of your project when you realize that you had planned more than you could actually fit into the semester, or when the person who said that they’d do this important piece of code never actually came through, but the deadline is immutable.  When you’re working on on a software project, you’ll learn very very quickly that your deadline can get changed without any notice.

Also, your project might change mid-course.  When you’re working on a project in a college course, you don’t have to worry about your competition changing, or about the market suddenly deciding that this new technology is an absolute must-have.  That list of features that you thought were going into the next release can change at any time, and it probably will.  Not only are you going to have to accept this change, but you’re going to have to accept that a feature that you were working on yesterday that was very important might not be important tomorrow.  In fact, you might stop working on it entirely so that you can work on something else that’s now more important.  That’s okay, it’s the nature of the business.

None of this is meant to say that group projects in college courses are useless.  You  learn a lot by having to work with other people to get your project done, and that does translate well to your first software engineering job.  What you learn in your group project in college is limited, and doesn’t give you the full story of what you’ll experience when you start working for a company on a software project.

  1. Note that this isn’t an XOR.  It’s actually most likely an AND, but I’m going for OR because OR doesn’t preclude AND. ↩
women

booth babes at CES

I’m a part of the Systers mailing list, and we had a discussion about the booth babes at CES.  Systers doesn’t make its mailing list archives public, but does have a Best of Systers blog wherein someone will write a blog article and use (with permission) quotes from the discussion.  I was one of the quotes in Dear CES, Objectification is Calling:

I think it’s also important for us… who work for companies who have booths at conventions and conferences to remind our companies that we don’t want to be represented by booth babes.  If our companies sponsor their own conferences, I think that we should raise the concern about booth babes.  In this case, it’s not enough to just make sure that our showcase booths not have booth babes, we should also figure out how to keep vendors who have booths at our conferences from having booth babes.

One of the things that I have to admit that bothered me about my quote in that article is seeing it in context.  Of the five quotes there, I’m the only one who consented to have my full name used.  Two were completely anonymous.  I understand why someone would make the decision to either only use their first name1 or be fully anonymous.  I’m just sad that those Systers felt that they needed to be anonymous.

Thankfully, booth babes weren’t the only women at CES.  Meet the women of CES 2013, nary a booth babe in sight.

  1. Which isn’t really an option for me. My first name is unique enough that it’s trivial to trace it back to me. ↩
Nadyne

trying to despam my life, Wells Fargo edition

I have a bank account with Wells Fargo.  It has long annoyed me that I am often subjected to ads for additional Wells Fargo services when I login to my account.  I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of junk and spam in my life.  I whinged about it on Twitter, and ended up with the following exchange:

  • @nadyne: Dear @WellsFargo: I sincerely hate how you try to upsell me on something every time I login to my account.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Sorry for the inconvenience, Nadyne. To opt out these ads, please visit https://www.wellsfargo.com/help/faqs/privacy_faqs … for more info. Thanks, ^MD
  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – This addresses email, mail, and phone. It says nothing about ads on login to my account.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Please call our support team at (800) 956-4442 and we’ll submit your request to stop further interactive offers. Regards, ^MD
  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – The fact that I have to call you to get you to stop spamming me when I login to your site makes me want a new bank.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne You can send a secured email with your request. After logging in, click on Contact us at the top then, Email us to the right. ^MD

So I did, and got the following response from “Porsche” (I’ve cut out a bunch of boilerplate):

If you would like to opt out of email solicitation, please reply to this email with your request or call us anytime

Thank you for missing my point.  So, back to Twitter:

  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – I sent mail, and the response indicates the request is not understood. Why do I have to work so hard to not get spammed?
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Follow and DM us, Nadyne. We’ll have our support team try to help resolve this for you. Regards, ^MD

I did as requested, and they didn’t respond in any fashion, just in case you were curious.

So back in email, I responded that it’s not email solicitation that I’m concerned about (I’ve already opted out of those), it’s the ads when I login, and I got this email reply from “Ashley” (again, cutting the boilerplate):

The messages you see at the top of your Online Banking session screens are designed to let our customers know about new products, services, and special offers. These messages are only used for Wells Fargo products and we limit the number that a customer sees in any one Online Banking session.

I responded that I didn’t want these ads, and since Wells Fargo is either unwilling or unable to stop spamming me, it’s time for me to to some research and find a non-spamming institution for my mortgage and chequing account.  Somehow this netted yet another response, this time from “Lashia”:

I have noted your preference to no longer receive full-page offers in your online banking session. Please be aware that it may take up to 60 days for your preferences to take effect. I appreciate your patience during this time and apologize for any inconvenience.

I also apologize for the misinformation provided in our previous correspondence.

It’s amazing how Wells Fargo can start spamming me in an instant, but somehow it takes 60 days to stop getting spammed.  Of course, it’s also amazing that it took me two days of complaining about their spam and a threat to move my account to potentially get rid of this.

Yes, in fact, I do have a new reminder on my calendar to email them again in 60 days if they’re still spamming me every time I login.

Nadyne

killing voicemail

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Author John Scalzi has decided that he is killing his voice mail.  I’m completely on his side in this, and I think that perhaps it’s time to make it official.

I have three voice mailboxes: my personal cell phone, my office line, and my home line.  On my personal cell, if the voicemail is left by someone I know, I almost never listen to it.    I look at the number and decide when I’m going to call them back (or communicate in some other way, usually text or email).  If it’s not left by someone I know, there’s maybe a 50/50 chance of me listening to it.  Maybe.

On my home line, voicemail is this vast wasteland of nothingness.  I can’t tell you the last time that I listened to it.  I check its caller list to see who’s called lately, but that’s it.

My office voicemail is one that I actively hate.  It’s a hassle to use.  I have to remember my PIN, and then navigate an idiotic menu system (“press 1 to listen to your voicemail”, “press 1 to listen to your messages” why?!), and then listen to the message.  If I miss the important information in the message (like a telephone number), I have to listen to the whole bloody message again.  And, possibly, again.  And then I can delete it.  Once I’ve listened to and deleted all of my messages, my voicemail starts playing me my deleted messages automatically.  I have utterly no idea why.

I think it’s time to officially put this policy into play.  This means figuring out how to record a message on my work voicemail.