Category Archives: Nadyne

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.

Nadyne

now that’s service!

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I’ve already gone on about how awesome Pop Market is when I posted about the user experience of daily deals.  Now I’ve got another reason to love them: lightning-fast customer service.

On Sunday afternoon, I opened up one of my recent purchases from them, a two-disc set of Janis Joplin’s Pearls.  Inside, I found two Earth, Wind & Fire discs instead.  I went to the Pop Market website and sent them the following via their “contact us” form:

Hello,

I ordered the “Legendary Women” CD bundle, which consists of two-CD sets from Carole King, Janis Joplin, and Sarah McLachlan.  Today, I opened up the Janis Joplin set to listen to it, only to discover that there has been some kind of manufacturing error.  Instead of the two-disc set of “Pearl”, the two discs are Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Essential Plus”.

How can I resolve this issue?

Best regards,
Nadyne Richmond.

In less than ten minutes, I got a response.  On a Sunday!  And here’s what they had to say:

Hi Nadyne Richmond,

I’m sorry for any inconvience that may have caused. I am happy to provide your requested replacement. I have created your Service Order: [number]. You can follow the status of your Service Order online using the link below:
[linky redacted]
Once your product has shipped, this link will be updated to display your new tracking number.

Sincerely,

Sony Music Digital
[number redacted]
Victor

This is much faster service than I expected, and I’m certainly happy with the response. So: thanks, Pop Market! This certainly makes me feel better about all of the purchases that I’ve already made with them, and even more likely to continue doing so in the future.

Nadyne

one year of blogging here

This morning, I thought to look back to see if I’d reached a year here at nadynerichmond.com, and I have!  Monday was my one-year anniversary of this blog.  I’d been blogging for five years before that on my old blog.  Moving here got me onto my own server and domain.

In the year that I’ve been blogging here, a lot has happened.  I shipped Office:Mac 2011, which included the application that I’d spent the most time on, Outlook:Mac.  After the release of Office 2011, I decided to try my hand at something new, and accepted a new position at VMware.  In my time with VMware, I’ve learned a whole lot about virtualization, the cloud, and so much more, and I’ve got to do some awesome research along the way.

My crystal ball refuses to give me information about what might come for this blog (or anything else) in the future.  Is there something in particular you want to see here?  Comments and email are, as ever, welcome.

Nadyne

the feeling of being new

A couple of weeks ago, a new member of my team1 came to me with a question.  I couldn’t answer it, and wasn’t quite sure who could, but pointed her at someone who I thought would either know the answer or know where she could get it.  She laughed and said that she felt like a tweenbot.

I wasn’t familiar with it, so she sent me to the website, which describes them as such:

Tweenbots are human-dependent cardboard robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, they rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

This is an awesome metaphor for being new to something.  You know that you have a destination, but you don’t know how to get there, and you rely on the people who you meet to read the flag and aim you in the right direction.

  1. Have I mentioned lately that we’re hiring?  Because we still are, even though we’ve grown so much already this year.  We’ve got interaction designer positions open; ping me for more details. ↩
Mac, software

giving up on Safari

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I’ve been using Safari since its introduction in 2003.  Upon the death of Internet Explorer for Mac, I switched to Safari exclusively.  When other web browsers have come out, I’ve given them all a go, but I’ve always returned to Safari.  Until now: Safari 5.1 has forced me to switch to Chrome as my browser of choice.

Safari 5.1 now behaves more like Safari on iOS.  When Safari decides that you haven’t interacted with a page recently enough, it unloads that page to save memory.  This doesn’t match up with my usage of Safari in any way.  I often have several tabs open.  Those tabs represent a to-do list of sorts.  Some of the open are items that I simply want to read.  Others represent an action that I need to take: fill out a form, write a new blog post, write my weekly status report.

Forced reloading breaks every single one of these to-dos.  In the best-case scenario, the webpage that I’m reading hasn’t changed between when I started reading it and when Safari forces a reload of its content, so I haven’t necessarily lost anything other than my place on the page.  Even so, I lose the context of what I was reading, and I also lose the time necessary for the page to reload.  Occasionally, I lose the content of the page, if I’m offline when I’m trying to read the page but a forced reload has occurred.

In the cast of an action to take, the forced reload is even more irritating.  I lose my work: the partially-filled-out form, the incomplete blog post, the status report that I forgot to commit to the wiki.  At minimum, I lose the time that I invested in my half-finished work.  Recreating that work is always a losing proposition.

I tried to live with Safari 5.1 for a few weeks.  Slowly, I found myself trying out other browsers again.  I tried Firefox again, but its inability to respect my system proxy settings1 and its incorrect handling of keyboard shortcuts like option-arrow2 have made me move to Chrome.  I’m not sure if I really like Chrome yet, but it doesn’t break my workflows, and I don’t have the constant concern of losing my to-dos.

If a future update to Safari changes this behavior, I might try it again.  But Safari has really broken my trust with 5.1, and I don’t think that I’ll come rushing back.

  1. My wired access in my office is via proxy, but wifi has no proxy.  I switch between the two several times during the day: wired when I’m working in my office, wifi when I’m in a conference room. ↩
  2. When editing text, option-arrow moves you to the beginning or end of the line.  Except in Firefox, where option-leftarrow is “back one page”. ↩
Nadyne

lost in tech support hell between Sony and Amazon

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Several months ago, my husband Michael and I acquired a Sony Blu-Ray player.  One of the benefits of this player is that it works with Amazon’s streaming video.  I’ve had Amazon Prime for years, and haven’t yet had the opportunity to put their streaming video to work.

Five months ago, Michael made the ill-fated decision to try to actually set this up.  He entered his Amazon account details.  It didn’t work, and so he called Amazon tech support to try to figure out what’s going on.  They told him that since I’m the primary holder of the Amazon Prime account, it’s my account that needs to be associated with the player.  They walked him through the steps necessary to unregister his account from the player.  It didn’t take immediately, so they said to wait a bit for it to filter through the system.

The next day, his account was still registered on the player.  Thus begins tech support hell.  In the past five months, Michael has called Amazon and Sony multiple times.  Each of them says that it’s the other one’s fault.  At one point, a third-tier support tech from Sony was in contact with Michael for about a month.  That ultimately resulted in a conference call with engineers from both companies, wherein the tech from Amazon said that it would be fixed in a week.  That was three months ago.

Every once in awhile, Michael will try again.  His ticket is still open, and has new notes entered into it occasionally.  But neither Sony nor Amazon has bothered to contact us, it’s always been Michael calling to try to learn whether there’s been any movement.

This weekend, Michael called yet again to see if there was an update.  The tech on the phone was nice enough, and read through the most recent notes.  They’re still working on it, in short, and there’s no update as to when it might actually work.  After Michael hung up, he received an email from Amazon asking about his tech support experience.  He clicked on “no, this didn’t resolve my issue”, which resulted in this webpage:

we're sorry
Amazon is sorry. Or something.

I don’t think that we needed another example of the ineptitude of Amazon’s tech support.  It’s bad enough that this issue has been dragging on for five months.  But really, this link arrived from Amazon within ten minutes of the end of the call, and Michael was online and so noticed it and clicked on it immediately.  That’s one way to avoid getting negative feedback: pre-expire the links on your feedback emails.

We can’t get trade in our existing Blu-Ray player because his account is still somehow associated with the player.  No amount of unregistering it has worked, and both Sony and Amazon have supposedly reset it in their systems multiple times.  So we’re stuck with this player, unless we want to take the risk that someone will get access to Michael’s Amazon account through the player.

It’s been a pretty frustrating experience all around.  Thankfully, we’ve got our Netflix subscription working through our Xbox 360, and we’ve never had problems with it.  Too bad Sony and Amazon can’t work together as seamlessly as Netflix and Microsoft.

user experience

user research begets more research

A truism of my job is that user research begets more research.  There’s two major reasons this is true: you always have more research questions than you can answer in any given amount of time, and you always learn something when you’re conducting research that you want to learn more about.

The first problem is the most apparent when you set out to do research.  You begin by identifying what questions you want to answer.  Your list of questions grows as you identify themes and trends.  As you share your research questions with others, they have more questions to add to it.

Once you feel like you’ve got a good list of questions, you then have to prioritize them.  Some questions are more important than others.  When I’m prioritizing my list of research questions, I try to determine what action will be taken if I answer a given question.  If I think that it would simply be nice to know a given piece of information, then it’s immediately struck from my list.  I craft my list such that every research question has something actionable that comes out of it.

Once the prioritization is done, then you have to decide what methodology you will use to answer those questions.  The methodology that you will use is dependent on many factors that are external to your research questions, such as the time that you have available, your budget, access to appropriate users, and support from your management.  Even in the best of circumstances when you have an infinite budget, lots of access to the right people, and lots of time, the methodology that you choose is unlikely to answer all of the research questions that you have identified.  There are a lot of factors in play, and you’ll have to make a decision about the best way to proceed.  You will have to leave some of your research questions unanswered, oftentimes with the hope of being able to revisit them at a later point to answer them.

As you’re conducting your research, you will learn new things.  This is, after all, why you’re conducting your research in the first place.  Inevitably, your new information will create new research questions.  Sometimes this will happen early in your research, and you’ll have an opportunity to tweak your methodology in an attempt to try to answer this new question.  In this case, you have to choose whether your new research question is one that you can answer using your current methodology, and whether it’s more important to answer this question than one of the ones that you’ve already identified.  You might have to remove an existing research question to make way for the new one.

In many cases, new research questions arise as you’re analyzing your data.  Perhaps you can’t answer one of your existing research questions because you need to know something else.  Perhaps you learn something entirely new that you don’t understand, so you know that you want to conduct additional research about it.

Perhaps a different way to look at this truism is to say that you have to accept that you’ll never answer all of the questions that you can identify.  I always have a running list of research questions.  That list always gets longer.  When I left my previous employer, I shared my running list of research questions with my colleagues in the hopes that perhaps it would be useful to them.  One of the hardest things about leaving my previous position was the day that I deleted that running list of questions.  I’d invested so much effort into my research there, and there was still so much left that I could learn.  I put off deleting that file for days.  Conversely, one of the most awesome days that I’ve had since I joined VMware was the day when I created my new running list of research questions that I’d like to answer some day.

Research begets more research.  While I sometimes find it frustrating that I’ll never answer all of the questions that I have, it’s really one of the things that I love about my job: there’s always something new to learn.  The day when I run out of research questions is probably the day that I’m taken off of life support.

Nadyne, user experience

the user experience of daily deals

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Scouring the Internet for a good deal isn’t new.  It’s easy(ish) to compare prices online and find the best one.  Some websites have been compiling daily lists of good deals.  Consumerist has posted morning deals to its website for ages, and MyPoints has its daily deals too.

Now, daily deals are all the rage.  They’ve evolved from the lists of deals that someone has dug up into offering specific deals tailored to someone’s location or interests.  There’s Groupon and its ilk, with their focus on location.  There’s also the interest-based ones such as Fab and Bookperk.  Each of these daily deals has a different user experience.

So far, I’ve purchased a couple of local daily deals.  A Groupon came up for Books Inc, a bookshop that is about four blocks from my home.  PurpleTie, the dry cleaner that services my office, also offered a Groupon that I jumped on.  Groupon made headlines with their Nordstrom Rack coupon, which I took advantage of (along with the rest of the world).  In total, I’ve bought six Groupons.  Likewise, I’ve purchased some from LivingSocial: a manicure, a gift certificate to Amazon, a deal for Amoeba Music.

All of those daily deal website emails get filtered off to a folder, and I scan the subject lines to see if there’s anything of interest.  Generally, though, they go unopened.  I find them pretty repetitive.  I don’t want to try every restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I really don’t need multiple photography classes.  I only open them if one catches my eye, both for being close enough to my home and of matching my interests.  I probably don’t even open one of these emails per week.

There are several reasons for this.  Aside from their repetitive nature, most of these daily deals are unknowns.  In exchange for a (sometimes steep) discount, I’m usually taking a risk on an unknown.  If you look over the list of ones that I have actually purchased, I’m much more likely to purchase them if it’s for someplace with which I’m already familiar.  Another aspect is that I’m not actually purchasing something, but rather a voucher to redeem at some later point.  This means that I have another hoop to jump through later.

Take the example of the LivingSocial manicure voucher that I purchased.  The user experience of redeeming the voucher was such a huge hassle.  The merchant wouldn’t accept walk-ins.  I wouldn’t mind that if booking an appointment were a more reasonable process.  They didn’t even call back for three weeks when I tried to book  the appointment, and no indication given that there would be such a delay.  When I finally went to the appointment, the experience was horrible.  Even at a discount, the manicure wasn’t worth the cost.  As a result, I’m now much less likely to purchase from LivingSocial again.

On the other hand, I’m much more engaged with the interest-specific daily deals.  There are two that I read every time they appear in my inbox: Fab and Pop Market. I’ve purchased six things through Fab in six weeks, and have been very happy with all of my purchases.  Fab bills itself as “daily design”, and I think that I’ve figured out why they’ve gotten so much of my business lately.

While Fab is a daily deal mail, their offers actually last for 3 days.  This means that I can see something on the website and let it simmer.  I’ve missed a couple of things because I didn’t jump fast enough, of course, but it’s been rare.  I don’t feel pressured to make a decision at this very instant, which is another reason that I often let other daily deals pass me by.  I generally consider my purchases (which is why I’m still wibbling over which new Mac to buy), so unless a daily deal is an absolute must-have, I tend to let them go.  With three days, I have more time to consider whether it’s something that I should actually buy, which perversely means that I buy more.  Further, since there’s new items coming up daily, I have an opportunity to reconsider the deals from the previous two days, which has also resulted in additional purchases.

Pop Market is somewhat similar in its execution.  While Fab focuses on design, Pop Market is all about music.  Given my CD-buying habit, Pop Market is perfect for me.  They do a mix of daily deals and week-long deals.  They publish the artists for their daily deals in advance, which gives me some insight as to whether I’ll be interested.  For their week-long deals, they’re centered around a theme (this week: anniversary editions, Sun Records alumni, complete albums collections).  My main complaint is that their deals are often good but not great.  When I’m on the Pop Market page, I’ve also got a browser tab open to Amazon.  Sometimes Pop Market wins, other times Amazon wins.  I can’t rely on Pop Market having the best price, which seems to defeat the purpose.

Additionally, these sites are giving me something now1, whereas Groupon et al are giving me something much later.  In many respects, Groupon is just giving me another item that I have to add to my task list: remember to use the Groupon before it expires.  On Fab and Pop Market, I’m buying an item.  On Groupon, I’m buying an opportunity to purchase a service or item.  My to-do list is long enough without having to worry about using a voucher before it expires.

In all, the user experience of the interest-based daily deal websites has been significantly better than the location-based ones.  I wonder if that will change.

  1. This isn’t actually as true as I want it to be.  Fab.com’s shipping is glacially slow.  Most items arrive a month after the purchase.  This is, by far, my biggest complaint about the service. ↩
user experience

usage data tells you what happened, not why it happened

A blog post that ends with “Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody” is going to get quite a lot of mileage.  I lost count of how many times I saw it go by on my twitter stream.  Laurie Voss posted a response to Steven Sinofsky’s MSDN blog post about the improvements to Windows Explorer that are coming in Windows 8.

Voss takes a look at the data that Sinofsky posted about the usage of various commands in Windows Explorer, and is less than impressed at how they’ve applied this data to the new design of Windows Explorer.  He has two major complaints.  First, he complains that even by Microsoft’s own data, many of the commands that are elevated in the new Windows Explorer design are ones that aren’t commonly used.  Second, he complains that Microsoft’s data says that the menu bar within the Windows Explorer is very infrequently used, so what’s the point of doing it at all?

Both of these complaints are a very common misuse of usage data.  Usage data only tells you what happened in the past.  It doesn’t tell you why it happened, nor does it tell you what will happen in the future.  Furthermore, usage data can often not be broken down very far, so we don’t know what types of users and usages it represents.  I’ve written about this before in my blog post about the usage fallacy:

Usage data is directional. It doesn’t tell you what action to take, it tells you that there might be an action to take.

This certainly applies here.  For example, Voss is upset that few users use the menu bar, instead using contextual menus.  Do we know why they don’t use the menu bar?  Are there commands that they’re more likely to use in the menu bar?  Is there a discoverability problem (that is, are there commands that users would like to use but can’t find them)?  None of these are questions that can be answered by usage data.  To answer these questions, you need to use other research methodologies.

The true irony of Voss’s lack of understanding of how to appropriately apply usage data is found in another recent blog post of his about the need for statisticians, in which he says the following:

The whole web industry is accumulating vast quantities of data and storing it, magpie-like, as if it has intrinsic value, aided by ever-falling prices for storage. But the data isn’t valuable. It doesn’t mean anything until somebody who knows what they’re doing looks at it, sifts through it, and produces a tool that lets others use it to draw valid and useful conclusions.

He’s right: data isn’t valuable until someone who knows what they’re doing looks at it and helps draw valid and useful conclusions.  It’s always amusing when bloggers officially enter the realm of self-parody.

Nadyne

being female online is being a target online

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I’ve been online since 1993.  Through it all, I’ve used my real name, and I’ve never tried to hide my gender.  I’ve taken part in various online communities, mostly geek and music.  One of my earliest lessons in being online is that being female makes you a target for threats.  I’ve received rape threats, most notably after I’ve mentioned that I financially support RAINN.  I’ve received death threats.  The threat that bothered me the most was a threat from a rather unhinged music fan against my beloved cat, since said music fan lived in the same city that I did and so I felt like there was a chance of him actually trying to do something.

Threats are the reason why I moderate comments here.  When I first started blogging, I didn’t bother.  Spam was my only concern, when I first started blogging, and modern spam filters do a reasonable job of managing it.  I started moderating comments when I got one particular commenter who saw it as his mission to threaten to rape me.  At first, moderation didn’t change his comments, but it did keep an echo chamber from forming.  Finally, he got bored, and stopped posting.  Maybe he’s still reading, I don’t know, but he’s not making the threats any longer.  I still get threats on occasion, most often if I’ve seen an uptick in traffic because I’ve gotten linked elsewhere.

Sadly, it came as no surprise to me today when I saw another female blogger say that she’s gone into hiding as a result of death threats:

I got a death threat.

I got another death threat.

And then I got one telling me that if I went to a popular blogger’s conference in November, they would find me, they would kill me, and they would kill everyone around me.

[…]

As a reasonably prominent female face on the internet, I always knew the day would come when it would get very, very ugly.

I don’t know why being female online sparks this kind of response.  I don’t know why there’s an echo chamber that creates an ever-escalating environment.

And I don’t really know what to do about it, other than continue to be myself.  Yes, I’m female.  Yes, I’m a software engineer.  Yes, I have opinions, and I share them unapologetically.