Category Archives: Nadyne

user experience, VMware

a retrospective of VMware user experience tech talks

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In January, I started something new at VMware: a monthly series of UX tech talks.  This was a direct outcome of VMware User Experience 2011 (vUE 2011), which I created and led last year.  Its goal was to get our internal VMware user experience community together for the very first time.  It was a rousing success, with nearly 60 people from all corners of VMware attending.  One of the things that we learned as a result of vUE 2011 was that we wanted more opportunities for us to come together and learn from each other.

I just sent out the series of invites for the 2013 UX tech talk series, which made me think about all of the tech talks that we’ve seen in 2012. It’s been quite an awesome mix of topics. Take a look at this:

  • OmniGraffle for designers
  • Designing on the edge of chaos: An introduction to complexity science and how it can influence your approach to design
  • User experience the “Mad Men” way
  • Design for mobile
  • An introduction to Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge
  • UX summer intern projects
  • A designer’s guide to learning about our users
  • How do you know when your design is done?
  • The odd couple: user experience versus user interface?
  • Disney imagineering
  • Visio for designers

This tells me a lot about my fellow user experience colleagues across VMware. We’ve talked about some very hands-on topics, like how to use tools and how to conduct research, as well as some topics intended to make us think about what it means to be a user experience professional and how we can learn from other areas.

I also went back and looked at the conference reports that I get from our meeting conferencing tools, and the UX tech talk series had awesome turnout throughout the year.  Even better, the invitation list has only expanded as more and more people have become aware of this and wanted to have the opportunity to learn more. We started out with about 30 people at our first tech talk, and have only grown from there.

The 2012 tech talk series has been an amazing success, and its success is attributable to so many people. There’s Lisa, who stepped in to help me run this series when it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated! She’s done an awesome job of helping to line up speakers, giving feedback to speakers when they practice their talks, and keeping everything moving. There’s also my team’s assistant Joan, who works behind the scenes to manage the logistics of all of this (which is a surprisingly involved and time-consuming task). And, of course, there’s all of the tech talk speakers who have offered their experience and expertise to the VMware user experience community.

I can’t wait to see what UX tech talks we do in 2013.  And there’s vUE 2013 in the works too …

user experience

the user experience of the end

SilarekI was introduced to Glitch, a beautiful MMO, a few weeks before it was announced that it would close.  Glitch was a lovely game with a fantastic user experience.  Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, got all of the details right.  The in-world experience was truly unique, imaginative, and beautiful.  And they did a great job with its interactivity, and even got keyboard interaction right.  Their visual language was gorgeous.  They did the best job that I’ve ever seen of integrating music into the experience.  But the game was also unsustainable: built on Flash, which brought even my brand-new MacBook Pro to a standstill sometimes, it just couldn’t deal with the number of players that it needed to be sustainable.

And when they announced that they were closing, they again got all of the details right.  They offered options to those who subscribed: refund, let the company keep it, or donate to charity.  They continued to introduce new elements of gameplay, including new areas of the world.  They introduced what was possibly my favorite type of animal, the helikitty.  There were quests that led up to the end of the world.  And in the last few hours of the game, they wrapped up everything very nicely, giving the staff and the players a nice way to say goodbye.

Also importantly, they allowed the artists who contributed to the game to continue to grow on their art and let it out in the world.  Art director Brent Kobayashi sells handmade Glitch pouches and art prints on Etsy.  Two Indiegogo projects appeared quickly: one for the music of Glitch, another for the art of Glitch.  Both hit their goals in under two hours.

As PCWorld says, it was a graceful exit.  I’m sad to see it go, but glad that I got to experience it.  Goodbye, Glitch.

VMware, women

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners

I’ve been aware of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners for quite awhile, and I’ve always had the best of intentions for actually attending one.  But I’d never quite managed to actually make it to one, which is embarrassing to admit, given how many opportunities there have been.  I finally attended one when VMware hosted dinner #30 last week.  I knew all of the speakers, and it was on campus so I couldn’t make any excuses about it being too far away or me not leaving early enough.

I’m so upset with myself that I waited this long.  It was an amazing networking opportunity, to chat with women of all ages, working in all aspects of computing.  I got to meet other women in user experience, I got to meet other women interested in programming languages, I got to meet other women at other major companies.  It was awesome.  I had so many great conversations, and met so many people who I’ve been in email and twitter contact with since.  It was great.

Sadly, I can’t go to dinner #31 tonight (I’ve already got plans), but I’ve got my fingers crossed for the next one.

user experience

user experience and The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal has a great comic about being making things for the web.  It resonated with me, a lot of it applies to user experience too.

Inspiration isn’t something you can schedule, harness, or control.  It arrives when it arrives.  For designers, this means that you have to be prepared for inspiration to strike at any time; for researchers, this means that inspiration from design analysis arrives when it arrives.

The seeds of inspiration arrive from unexpected sources, and these seeds might not come to fruition for quite some time.  You have to experience things, and this experience informs what you do in the future.

Ideas from others can spark new ideas in you.  Others will tell you what you should design or research.  Their ideas are worth listening to.  You might not follow through with their suggestion, but their idea can lead to you seeing something else more clearly, and thus doing an awesome design or completing some awesome research.

Idea generation is like a river.  New stuff comes in, old stuff flows out.  You’ve got to keep up-to-date on new user experiences and new research to keep your river flowing.

There is such a thing as destructive feedback.  Not all feedback about user experience is created equal.  If you take it at face value, it can just be destructive.  In user experience, it’s your job to tease out useful feedback from destructive feedback.

Nadyne

I hate it when this happens

I just found out, via an article in The Atlantic, that there was a whole conference dedicated to notetaking, called Take Note, and it happened on November 1-2.  I would have loved to have gone — I did a whole bunch of research about notetaking when I was working at Microsoft.  Some of the results of that research went into OneNote for iPad and OneNote for iPhone (both of which were released after I left the company).

It’s interesting to note1 that all of the speakers are academic, not from industry.  I would have loved to have heard what the academics had to say about it, as well as been able to hear from others in industry about their experience in creating technology to support notetaking.

  1. Pun unintended, but I’ll let it stand. ↩
Nadyne

a tactical error

In my post about equality in blog comment spam, I made a tactical error.  I mentioned certain well-known brand names.  That post has gotten an immense amount of spam, more than 30 keyword comments in under a day.

Which is sad, because they’re not actually brands that I care about.  I think Uggs are ugly, and the idea that there are actually wedding Uggs makes me question humanity’s role on this planet.  So if you actually want to spam me and have a chance of me clicking on it, it needs to be about Fab1 or Eileen Fisher.  Or it needs to be for a most awesome sofa that is not a sectional and is not brown or grey2, since that’s something that I want and haven’t been successful in finding.

  1.  oh, how I <3 them, we will not discuss how much I’ve spent there this year ↩
  2. Hint: my current sofa is red and camelbacked and awesome, but is also more than 10 years old and been moved a few too many times.  When I first bought it, a good friend started calling it as my bordello sofa. ↩
women

equality in blog comment spam

Once upon a time, it used to be that my blog comment spam was all about (ahem) enlargement.  Today, when I cleaned out my blog comment spam, I realized that it was all about products for women: Ugg boots, Hermes handbags, and perfume.

I’m not interested in either enlargement or Uggs, but I wonder if I’m slightly happy that the comment spam isn’t just for men any longer.  Yay, equality?