Category Archives: Nadyne

user experience

the elevator pitch for user research

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Michael’s company’s holiday party.  I got caught flat-footed by Michael’s boss, when he asked me the basic question, “what do you do?”  “I’m a researcher at VMware,” I answered blithely.  “What do you research?” he asked.  And this is where I made my mistake: instead of the elevator pitch for user research, I instead answered the question as if it were about what products I’ve worked on.  But that wasn’t the answer that he was looking for, which Michael realized more quickly than I did.  “User experience,” he helpfully pointed out, which at least pointed his boss in the right direction.

User experience is a term that still doesn’t have widespread understanding, even when you’re standing in a roomful of Silicon Valley software engineers.  This is more true for research than design, since most software engineers have at least encountered an interaction designer at some point in their career.  Researchers are more rare.  There’s only three of us at VMware, so I’m never surprised when someone doesn’t know what a user researcher does.  Over time, I’ve developed my elevator pitch for what I do as a user researcher, but I somehow didn’t give that answer this time.

My current elevator pitch is this:

I study how people use things, and figure out how to make it better.

Sometimes I replace “things” with “applications” or even “our products”, but I like “stuff” better because it’s less precise.  There are words that I deliberately don’t use in that pitch, such as “user” or “usability”.  I also make sure that I connect the study with the outcome of making improvements.  It also opens the door for additional conversations, if the questioner is interested.  But if not, it’s a reasonable encapsulation of what I do and why I do it.

And next time, I’ll remember to use it, even when I’m surrounded by my fellow geeks.

Nadyne, travel

my bag of holding

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A few months ago, Rands in Repose had a great post about a bag of holding: the necessities of his laptop bag.  This post resonates for me strongly, since I feel like I’m always in search of a great bag.

Like Rands, I settled on two bags.  I have my everyday get-to-work bag, which is currently an Eco Portile Grande by Zaum.  I love that it’s cherry red, since I’m bored with plain black bags.  It’s a messenger bag, and it’s pretty minimal.  It has room for my laptop, iPad, iPhone, a small bag of cables, my wallet, and not much else.  This is perfect for just getting back and forth to the office: it’s light, it’s comfortable to carry, and it holds the necessities.

However, it doesn’t work as a travel bag because it doesn’t zip closed, so I’m not comfortable just stuffing it under a seat or in the overhead.  Things will fall out, and I’ll either lose something or have to dig around for that pen that fell out.  It takes a few too many motions to get my laptop out of the bag for security screening.  Also, if I pick up anything, it probably won’t fit very well into my messenger bag.  Overall, it’s just not a good bag when I’m travelling.

My travel bag is a backpack.  It’s currently the VMworld 2011 backpack, which is quite well-made for conference swag.  I settled on a backpack for travelling because it makes getting around an airport a lot easier.  It’s also got the right number of pockets, and in the right locations, which is necessary for finding that one thing (wallet, phone, pen, whatever) very quickly.  It’s big enough to hold a lot, even a day or two of clothing, but still be carry-on size and still fit under my seat.  I also like that it’s VMware-branded, since it gives me an extra little boost of credibility when I’m conducting research.  If I’m talking to someone who was at VMworld (or who wanted to go but couldn’t), my backpack starts off the conversation, which functions as an icebreaker.

But this isn’t a daily bag.  It’s so big that it’s overkill for my daily needs (which is mostly just iPad+iPhone+wallet), and I don’t need all of that space.  Plus, I have to admit that I like that my daily bag is more stylish than the VMworld backpack.  The VMworld backpack wins lots of points on practicality, but it’s not winning any style awards.

So: two bags, each for their own purpose.  I can switch between them at a moment’s notice, which makes life that much better.

Nadyne, user experience

the password conundrum

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I recently switched my home Internet service from Covad DSL to Comcast Teleworker1.  Almost everything has gone swimmingly so far: signing up online was painless, the tech came out within the assigned window and he was very nice and professional, and my new service is So Much Faster.

After the tech had everything hooked up, I went online to create my account so that I could view my bill and have yet another email address.  They wanted me to create a password of 8-16 characters in length, and that includes 1 upper-case letter, 1 lower-case letter, and one number or special-character.  This is fine by me, since all of my passwords meet these requirements2.  So I fired up 1Password, set it to generate a password that meets these requirements, and put it into the form.  After doing so, I saw this:Comcast said that my password was a good password

I filled out the rest of the page, and I got the following error message:

The password you entered doesn’t meet the minimum criteria for a safe password. Use between 8 and 16 characters with at least 1 lower-case letter, 1 upper-case letter, and 1 number or special character (no spaces, case sensitive).

So I checked my generated password.  In fact, I’ll share it with you, since I couldn’t use it: r9H4ybnAyf+Acw.  It’s the right length (14 characters), it’s of mixed case, it’s got a number, and it’s got a special character too.  As a geek, I know that the + in there could cause a problem, so I generated another password.  This one had a } in it, which also caused a problem.  I went through three more automatically-generated passwords until I finally got one that was acceptable.

There are two user experience issues here:

  1. They have a limited subset of special characters, but they don’t tell you what that subset is.
  2. When you enter your password, the form is validating whether the password is a good one.  However, their validation isn’t correct, since the page says that a password is good, but then the system kicks back an error on submission.  Don’t tell me that my password is good when you won’t accept it!

Strangely, the former point is actually addressed when creating additional accounts.  The page for creating a secondary account is different than the one used for the primary account, and the password field there includes this descriptive text:

8-16 characters. At least one upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, and at least one number or special character (! @ # $ % ^ & *) are required. No spaces. Case-sensitive.

This would have saved me a few erroneous form submissions if they had told me this when I was creating my account!  The basic information is still the same, but they specify which special characters are acceptable.

Many companies forget about the first user experience.  I make fun of unboxing videos, but getting your new item out of the packaging is part of the user experience.  Your first few minutes are where your first impression gets created, and that first impression is an important one.  It sets your expectations.  By not paying attention to the details of your first user experience, you can inadvertently set expectations that you don’t want set.  On one hand, I’m happy that Comcast is enforcing passwords that are more secure than usual.  On the other hand, I’m not happy that they don’t give me all of the information that I need.  It means that I don’t entirely trust them now.

  1. Yes, I’m well aware of the issues that some folks have experienced with Comcast. ↩
  2. Well, to be completely accurate, this isn’t true.  I have several passwords that are longer than 16 characters. ↩
Nadyne

2011 retrospective

Or, Nadyne’s greatest hits of 2011: the posts that were most read and that got the most search traffic.

Unsurprisingly, my post about the availability of the vSphere Client for iPad got a lot of traffic this year.  I expect that last week’s post about the new vSphere Client for Mac will hit next year’s list for most-read.  People like news about new Mac and iPad applications. Given that I was getting traffic for relevant search results before the releases of these apps, I’m sure that this will continue.

Some of my Mac geekery posts got more traffic than I expected.  Giving up on Safari and hating the Apple Store turned out to be popular.  I wouldn’t’ve guessed that.

All of my posts about career opportunities at VMware got a lot of traffic, too.  This is very good to see, because my team will continue to grow in 2012.  If one of your resolutions for 2012 is going to be to find a new job, you should ping me to learn about how awesome it is to work here.

User experience posts have gotten great traffic and search hits, such as research is not regurgitation and my post about creating VMware’s first internal UX conference.  My about page is also getting a lot of hits, which probably means that I’m overdue for updating it.  I admit that I’m also quite pleased that my post about search engine optimization is getting a lot of traffic, and I’d be very happy if that continues into 2012.

Also unsurprisingly, a bunch of my old posts about Office:Mac are still doing well in terms of search traffic.  Someone from my old team should pick up the blogging slack over there, since I think that this means that there’s an unmet need in terms of information coming out of that team.  Schwieb, Rick, I’m looking at you!

Thankfully, this analysis of my traffic isn’t telling me that I need to change up a lot.  Posts about VMware and user experience are getting me a lot of traffic.  My biggest learning from this is that my about page needs some love.  I was just thinking that I should update my LinkedIn profile too, so that all fits in together.

What do you want to see more (or less) of from me in 2012?

politics

poor kids have no work ethic, he says

For those of you who don’t care about my political views, you should skip this post.

I’ve never been a fan of Newt Gingrich.  When I lived in his district, I voted against him at every opportunity.  So it’s with no surprise that I see that he’s now denigrating poor kids:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday.

Really, Newt?

I was one of those poor kids.  I watched my parents show up every Monday, and they stayed all day.  They worked hard.  They also made a couple of mistakes along the way, and they got unlucky.  I watched my dad work 80 hours per week as an EMT so that he could try to make enough money for our family, and I saw what happened when he hurt his back on the job.  Although my parents worked hard and showed up every Monday, I still had free lunches in school.  I started earning money when I was 10 by shoveling snow. I started babysitting when I got a bit older.  According to my Social Security statement, my first on-the-books job came when I was 13, a hot and sweaty summer spent whacking weeds at the local water treatment plant1.  When college time came, my parents couldn’t help, and I got through my degrees with a combination of scholarships, grants, student loans, and jobs.

I grew up poor, and I still got a good work ethic from my parents.  I worked my way through college.  I still work hard today.  And I’m deeply offended that you would try to tell me that I had no-one around me who showed me the importance of showing up to work on Monday because my parents weren’t rich.  Through a lot of hard work, and also some luck, I was able to get to where I am today.  I have a great job which pays me a salary such that I’m now paying back into the system that gave me those free lunches and subsidized loans, and still leaves enough left over for me to do things like buy a house and a Mercedes.

And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.  Apparently Newt Gingrich, with his oh-so-extensive experience in being part of the working poor, doesn’t realize this.  Gingrich doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to work his way out of that kind of situation, but he spouts off about it as if it’s just a work ethic that keeps the working poor from succeeding.

  1. In fact, I’ve still got a scar on my face from that summer. ↩
Nadyne

sometimes you don’t want search engine optimization

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I ordered Mother’s Day flowers for my mother from From You Flowers, and they didn’t arrive on time.  Not only did they not arrive on time, but they didn’t inform me of the issue.  When I contacted them about the issue, they pretty much blew me off; after a month, they gave me a $3 refund.  So I blogged about it, talking about when a satisfaction guarantee isn’t.

That, I thought, was the end of it: I got exceptionally bad service from From You Flowers, they didn’t care, and now I know about an online florist that I will never use again.  But today, I received the following email:

Hi there,

My name is [redacted] and I am an online marketer working with FromYouFlowers.com.

I discovered the link to FromYouFlowers at [http://www.nadynerichmond.com/blog/page/5]. I really appreciate this link but would like to ask you to “update” this link with a more specific URL and/or anchor text. 

Here is an example of the html code details below:

<a title=”From You Flowers” href=”http://www.fromyouflowers.com” target=”_blank”>

Thanks for your time!

That’s so awesome.  They want me to update my blog post so that it has better search-engine optimization.

I wrote back:

Hi [redacted],

I’ve got to ask: are you joking, or did you not actually read the blog post in question?  You want to make sure that my blog post, in which I excoriate your client for its terrible service and for not living up to its satisfaction guarantee, uses the title attribute in my HTML for SEO purposes?

Regards,
Nadyne.

This whole thing has been immensely instructive.  Not only have I learned about an online florist that I will never use again and that I will actively steer my friends and family away from, I’ve now also learned about an online marketer who I could never use either.  My mother didn’t get her flowers on time, and the bouquet didn’t look like what was pictured, but I might have gotten my money’s worth anyway.

user experience

tell me more

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This morning, I conducted some research with one of our customer councils.  I asked them some questions about how they go about things today, and then let one of the designers on my team show them some of his very early design thinking about how we want to improve matters in the future.  It was a great session: the participants gave me great information about the current state of affairs, and they also had great feedback about what we presented them and how they could see it fitting into their life.

At the end of the session, someone commented about how I got people talking.  I told them that my secret to getting people to talk boils down to three words: “tell me more”.  Sometimes I’ll provide additional directions, like “tell me more about what happens after the email arrives”, but the basic concept is still the same.  It’s a short prompt to get someone to add in more details or to give clarification. Then I can use this additional information to ask additional questions, get feedback from others, or be able to ensure that what I think that I’ve heard is complete and correct.

People want to be understood, and they want to provide the right level of detail to you.  “Tell me more” tells them that you’re not sure that you’ve understood or that you’re not sure yet if you have the right information from them.  There’s a lot of meaning packed into those three words.  Using them helps you do a better job of gathering data when you’re conducting research.

SlideRocket, user experience, VMware

we’re hiring user experience professionals!

My user experience team has seen phenomenal growth in the year that I’ve been here at VMware, and the trend is continuing.  We’re hiring pretty much across the board.  A quick search on user experience on our jobs website returns 170 openings as of this writing.  Not all of those are on my team1, and there’s plenty of them which are for UI developers, business analysts, and product management.

My team is especially interested in hiring for the following roles:

  • administrative assistant – We need a part-time assistant to help us recruit and schedule usability participants.
  • user experience manager – Manage a team of awesome interaction designers who work across many different VMware applications.
  • interaction designer – Join our team of awesome interaction designers who are working on complex applications.

But wait, there’s more!  My team isn’t the only user experience team at VMware.  There are other UX openings, including the following:

If you’re interested in any of these roles, or if you’ve got any questions about what it’s like to work for VMware, email me.

  1. Our growth isn’t going to be quite that phenomenal! ↩
Nadyne

the sage and the guru

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A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with the development lead for VMware Fusion.  We’ve worked together before, so we know quite a lot of the same people.  During our conversation, we talked about what it takes to be a highly successful engineer, and he talked about the difference between the sage and the guru.

In his opinion, the sage is the engineer with the deep technical knowledge about a specific domain.  That engineer knows absolutely everything about it, and has probably touched all of it at one point or another.  The guru, on the other hand, is the engineer with a broad swath of technical knowledge about many domains.  That engineer doesn’t know absolutely everything about a specific domain, but knows quite a lot about a lot of different domains, and is often able to draw connections between those domains.  To illustrate his point, he talked about two developers that we both know quite well.  One is a sage, one is a guru.  Both are very well-respected, and deservedly so.  I’d love to work with either of them again.

Both the sage and the guru are valuable.  The sage can work magic in their domain.  The guru can solve difficult cross-domain problems that have stymied other engineers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this conversation lately.  How does it apply to me as a user experience researcher?  Do I want to be a sage or a guru?  How do others view me?  Is it possible to do both?  Is that even something that I would want?  I need to think more.

Nadyne, user experience

winding down for the year

Thanksgiving has kind of snuck up on me this year.  It’s been an immensely busy year.  I’ve conducted a lot of research.  I also proposed, organized, and led vUE 2011, VMware’s first gathering of its cross-company user experience community.  vUE was held in the first week of November.  I took a few days off afterwards, and suddenly I’ve hit the research doldrums.

Mid-November through mid-January are research doldrums.  Collecting data is hard in that eight-week period.  You can’t get research participants for several days around Thanksgiving, and then people start dropping off the face of the planet in mid-December for the end of the year, and aren’t reliably back in the office until at least a week into January.  You can do some research during this time, but it’s difficult and time-consuming to collect the data.

I’m using these research doldrums to do a few things.  I’m making sure that my wiki is updated with all of the documents I’ve created lately, and making sure that all of the other wiki pages that I should update have everything that they’ve got.  I’m writing up a post-mortem document from vUE that discusses what happened, what we learned, and where we can make improvements for next year’s event.  And I’m beginning to plot out next year’s research, so that I can hit the ground running in January.