Category Archives: Nadyne

Nadyne, user experience, VMware

why I work for VMware

When I moved to VMware last year, I was often asked by friends and colleagues why I chose to leave consumer apps for enterprise apps.  There’s a lot of different reasons, but VMware’s CIO summed up one of them very well in this interview with the Wall Street Journal:

You’re at home and you have Facebook, you have Twitter: great UI, you’re able to collaborate, there’s no training classes for that. You go into the enterprise and you’ve got Soviet-era interfaces and they’re horrible. What we have to do as IT professionals, is take that consumer experience which is easy, bring that into the enterprise and help businesses actually be much more productive.

Yup, that’s it.  There’s a great opportunity for me here at VMware to help people be more productive at work.  I don’t necessarily think that we’re going to get to a Twitter UI, but there’s awesome things that we can do with things like the Horizon App Manager that make the lives of both end users and admins a lot better.

Nadyne

do you think this is Twitter spam?

3 Comments

I’d like you guys to weigh in on something.  A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation on Twitter about Mac personal finance software.

I’m an old-skool Quicken user.  I’ve got more than 15 years of data in Quicken.  I manage everything in there: chequing and savings, credit cards, mortgage, 401(k)s and IRAs, employee stock grants and purchases1, even my life insurance.  When I was a Linux user, I maintained a Windows partition only for Quicken and games.  When I became a Mac user in 2001, I imported all of my Quicken for Windows data into Quicken for Mac so that I didn’t have to maintain a whole OS for one app.  Ever since that switch, I’ve never been entirely satisfied with Quicken for Mac.  I’ve tried several different apps in the intervening years, but haven’t been able to find an app that fully supported my extensive use2.  Even the latest version of Quicken, Quicken Essentials for Mac, doesn’t meet my needs.  So I’m still using Quicken 2007.

I follow Andrew Laurence on Twitter, and we had the following exchange on Wednesday:

@atlauren: Quicken Essentials, iBank, or MoneyDance? Go!
@nadyne: how hardcore are you? Quicken Essentials sucks if you try to do serious tracking, or if you’re an existing Quicken for Mac user.
@atlauren:Currently Quicken/Mac/2007. I basically use it for statement reconcile, transaction dload. Direct Connect/QFX is important.
@nadyne: QEM doesn’t support QIF downloads, but does support OFX. I use Q07, tried QEM, and went back to Q07 even though it’s so buggy.
@atlauren: Hurm. Most my institutions use OXF/DirectConnect. One does OXF/WebConnect. One only does OXF for Quicken/Win; Mac has to use QIF.
@nadyne: The last time I tried iBank and MoneyDance, they didn’t have enough support for my use. But that might’ve changed.

The next day, we got the following tweet:

@IGGmarketing: Full-featured iBank 4 imports from Quicken, has reports, budgets, iPhone sync, free trial.

This felt like spam to me, so I went and checked out their twitter stream.  Most of their tweets were identical to that one, with a few that were responses to questions.  So I responded:

@nadyne: It’s so full-featured it’s got spammers and everything! Isn’t that something to be proud of.
@atlauren: Blocked and reported. sigh.
@nadyne: at least they were kind enough to remove themselves from consideration, I suppose
@IGGmarketing: Sincere apologies but in doing my job there’s a big diff between “spam” and entering a public discussion via social media.
@nadyne: When you send a form tweet that doesn’t address the conversation, it’s spam.
@IGGmarketing: Just sharing relevant info. Granted I lose a certain amount of nuance in 140 characters. But I never disguise my ID, intent or bias.
@nadyne: that’s the point: your tweet wasn’t relevant to our conversation, and is the same tweet you use for any mention of Quicken
@nadyne: the issue isn’t a lack of nuance, but rather a lack of consideration

So, what say you?  Were they spamming, or did I overreact?  I’m really curious what y’all think.

  1. No options, though. I’ve only ever had stock grants from my employers. ↩
  2. Which, I must say, is fine.  If my usage isn’t part of their target audience, I’m okay with that. ↩
user experience

Q&A: how do you prep for a usability study?

When I mentioned that I was going into the lab to do a usability study, I got a mail asking:

How do you prepare for a usability study?  What materials do you produce?

In this case, I got a request from the Zimbra team to help them understand the behavior of their users.  I met with the team a few times to understand their needs, and then prepared a research plan.  For this study, the research plan was a single page.  It contained the research questions and how I planned to answer them, as well as a discussion of the type of users that I will recruit to help us answer these questions.  Once the team bought off on the research plan, I got down to the real work.

First, I produced a draft of the task list.  The task list is the list of stuff that I’m going to ask my participants to do in the study.  Creating a task list is at least as much art as it is science.  You have to create tasks that feel natural and appropriate for the environment that you’re studying, and you have to avoid leading language.  In the case of Zimbra, this isn’t exactly easy.  I was interested in several scenarios in the calendar, but here are some words that I can’t use in a task list: meeting, appointment, event, recurring, repeating.  How do I tell a participant to create a meeting without actually telling them a word that they’ll see on the screen as they do the task?

The task list had several iterations.  I iterated on it a couple of times by myself.  Once I felt like I had a good draft, I sent it to the Zimbra team to ensure that I wasn’t missing something that we wanted to study.  I met with my fellow researchers to ask them for feedback on it.  I did a pilot study to check for time and flow (more on that in a minute).  All of this got incorporated into the final task list.  For this study, I ended up doing three major revisions of the task list from my first draft through to the final document that I used in the study.

The task list turned into the moderator script.  The moderator script is a superset of the task list, and it covers everything that I say during the study.  It also notes the different ways that a participant could complete the given task.  Having this information immediately at hand helps me to follow what the participant is doing during the study.  It also makes it easy as I’m taking notes, since I can just jot down that the participant took Path A through the interface.

Then there’s a bunch of ephemera associated with simply running the test.  I use a checklist between participants to make sure that I get the testing environment set up correctly for each person.  I’ve got an end-of-day checklist too, which reminds me to do things like print off any needed materials for the next day’s participants, ping those participants to remind them what time they’re scheduled to come visit my lab, and send any schedule updates to the team.  For my own note-taking purposes, I create a Word document for each participant, which contains all of the notes that I take during that participant’s session.

I also have an observer survey.  I ask any member of the team who comes in to observe a participant to note their top three observations during the study.  This helps me if I miss something.  It also allows me to see the study through the eyes of someone who isn’t necessarily well-versed in a usability study.  Their comments often help me to craft the report of research results afterwards because I have some additional insight into how they see both their application and their users.

I always do a pilot study before I actually begin the study.  If I’m running the study on live code that isn’t going to change during the study, then I do this the day before the study is to begin.  If I’m using a prototype (paper, Flash, Flex, whatever), then I do it a few days before the study is set to begin.  This pilot allows me to make sure that the testing environment is working properly, the study flows properly, and everything fits into the allotted time.  I always uncover one problem during the pilot study.  It never fails.  If it’s live code, then the issue is usually just with my task list, which I can update quickly.  If it’s a prototype, then an issue in the prototype usually takes a little bit more time to fix, which is why I do the pilot earlier to accommodate for that.

Then I conduct the study, which is the easiest part of this.  During the study, I don’t do much other than collect data.  I save that all for what happens after the study, which is probably a blog post on its own (if there’s any interest, that is).

Nadyne, VMware

6 months!

2 Comments

Six months ago today, I joined VMware.  I’m still here!  So far, I’ve had an opportunity to work across a broad swath of our products, including vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Project Horizon, and Zimbra.  I’ve used surveys, interviews, standard usability studies, focus groups, and contextual inquiries.

It’s been a pretty cool ride so far.  I wonder what the next six months will bring?

user experience, Zimbra

back in the usability lab

1 Comment

This week, I’m getting back to my roots.  It’s been some time since I’ve done a standard discount usability study.  I often use other research methods and let newer researchers carry on with a standard usability study.  I’m in the lab to learn more about Zimbra.

As of this writing, I’m about halfway through my study (12 participants scheduled, 1.5 hours each).  I walked into this with some thoughts about issues that I might observe.  As ever, I found new issues that I didn’t guess in advance.  Which is, of course, the point of running the usability study, and is one of the reasons that I love being a researcher.

Nadyne, Q&A, user experience, VMware

Q&A: a day in the life

I’m coming up on six months with VMware (!!!), and it seems that life is settling down into routines.  I recently got asked what life is like as a researcher at VMware.

I’m currently actively working on three different projects:

  • Zimbra web client usability study
  • vCloud Director contextual inquiry
  • vSphere/vCloud/more longitudinal research

Today, I’ll have a bit of each of these.  As of this writing (10am), I’m anticipating that most of my day will be spent split between vCD and Zimbra, but we’ll see what happens.

I take a combination of Caltrain and VTA to get to work.  VMware pays for all of my public transit costs, it only takes a few minutes longer to get to work than it does if I drive, and it’s a great excuse to buy a cup of coffee at Red Rock on my two-block walk to the train station.  What’s not to like?

I usually don’t have meetings on Monday mornings, and today is one of those Mondays.  The morning starts off with email.  I’m one of those Inbox Zero sorts, so the first order of the day is getting as close to that as possible.  A few of the items in my inbox are things that will get handled as I go through my to-do list for the day, so I leave them there for now.

First order of the day is to get ready for a Zimbra usability study that I’m running next week.  Most importantly, I need to start to recruiting participants, so I spend the morning putting together a survey to find participants that meet my criteria (in short, they regularly use email, calendar, and address book for business purposes).  Once that’s sent out to some potential participants, it’s time for lunch.

After a VMware cafeteria lunch of aloo gobi and a samosa, it’s time for another email check and a couple of steps closer to Inbox Zero.  A couple of the mails that I received were from Bugzilla.  I submitted some fit’n’finish bugs for one of our applications late last week, and I got some questions about those today.  I spent a half-hour doing a bit more research and getting screenshots to further illustrate the issues that I observed.  I’m pleased to note that a couple of the bugs that I had submitted were pulled into an earlier release than I had previously requested.

Just as I wrapped that up, one of the interaction designers on my team popped by my office to ask a question about the survey that I’m using to screen participants for the Zimbra study.  We had a quick chat about the study, my goals for the study, and what kind of participants I’m interested in.  He was especially interested in the difference between two questions that I asked and how that differentiates between potential participants.  I opened up the survey results to date and quickly showed him some of the anonymous results to help him understand what distinction I’m drawing and why it makes a difference.  (Sorry, I can’t say more about this without disclosing too much about the study!)  I love having such an extensive user experience team who are highly invested in what’s going on, even when they’re not involved with the project that I’m currently working on.  It’s such a great environment.

Then it was part of the non-sexy part of being a user researcher: doing all of the work necessary to run the usability study.  I checked out the usability lab to make sure that I’ve got everything I need there (and grabbed a picture of the VMware turtles, who were out sunning themselves when I walked past their pond).  I also spent some time getting a couple of test accounts set up, sending mails to those test accounts, and populating the calendar.  I even pressed a few members of my team into service and got them to send mails to my test account, so that not everything is coming from me.

With that done, I spent some time prepping for the vCloud Director research that I’m kicking off.  I worked on the discussion guide for the study, and sent off a flurry of mails about getting participants scheduled.

I wrapped up my day with my weekly 1:1 meeting with my manager.  We talked about my upcoming projects, the open positions that we’re hiring for, and some ideas for future research directions.  Then I came back, made it all the way to Inbox Zero (yay!), finished up this post, and caught the bus home.

Mac, Nadyne

LTFS wins NAB Pick Hit award

IBM Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which my husband Michael Richmond architected, won a Pick Hit award at the National Association of Broadcasters conference last week.

In short, LTFS puts a file system on top of magnetic tape.  This overcomes many of the disadvantages of tape, such as the long access time due to the linear nature of tape.  It also keeps the advantages of tape, such as the inexpensive cost per terabyte and its longevity.  It’s a big deal for media and entertainment companies who create and consume many terabytes of data per day, and who want to store it less expensively and more reliably than they can on hard drive.

I know that this isn’t quite one of my usual topics of user experience, VMware, or Macs, but I think it’s worthwhile.  Of course, LTFS does support Macs (obviously important for media and entertainment companies!), so maybe it’s not too far outside my usual topics.

books

book review – “Cinderella Ate My Daughter”

1 Comment

As a female software engineer, I’ve been finding myself thinking more about what to do about the paucity of women in my field. I recently read “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics”, a research report from the American Association of University Women, which lays out many of the challenges women face in those fields1. One of its points is the role that stereotypes play in how girls perceive their own success in these fields, and how gender stereotypes play a role in girls’ confidence. The report is fascinating and accessible; I highly recommend reading it.

I stumbled across Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein soon after I read the report. It’s clear that gender stereotyping issues appear early in life (after all, it was Barbie who famously proclaimed “math is hard!”). While I don’t have children, it’s impossible to not notice both the pink phenomenon and the princess phenomenon. Do these well-marketed phenomenons play into gender stereotypes?

Orenstein takes a look at what is marketed to girls, and the ages at which these items and ideas are marketed. Her view is through the lens of raising her own daughter, and the book illustrates the debates that she has with herself about pink princesses and how they shape girls in general and her daughter in particular. She meets with the Disney exec behind the highly-successful Disney Princess line, attends a beauty pageant for little girls, and ventures deep into the belly of the beast by visiting an American Doll store. She looks at the hyper-feminity presented to girls, first in the pink and princess phase, which then transforms into “sassiness” (which is a codeword for “sexy”) of Bratz dolls. The next step is a return to Disney and its well-marketed tween stars like Britney Spears (remember: she was a Mouseketeer long before she shaved her head) and Miley Cyrus.

The book doesn’t directly answer my question about the princess phase and how it might impact gender stereotypes that decrease girls’ confidence and performance in science and engineering fields, but I didn’t expect it to. It’s a look at how marketing plays into (and perhaps causes) hyper-sexualisation from a young age. Orenstein’s method of considering each phenomenon, how it might impact her daughter, and questioning her own assumptions is well-suited to this book. It gave me a lot to think about, not to mention a long list of books and other research about girls’ performance to read in the future.

  1. I wrote about this recently in my post girl power, woman power, and being one of the boys. ↩
user experience

load it with details

Last week, I complained about rejecting feedback out-of-hand because it’s not delivered in a way that you like reading.  A developer said that they ignored feedback that called their application “useless”, and that really bothered me.

Here are two pieces of feedback that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum:

  • Your app is awesome!
  • Your app is useless!

As a developer, I have an emotional reaction to both of them.  The first one gives a nice warm fuzzy.  The second one causes a scowl.  Neither of them tell me anything useful about my application.  It’s human nature to want to ignore the latter because it’s negative, but I have to ignore the former as well.  Ignore them not because the feedback has a message that I don’t want to hear, but because it doesn’t have a message at all.

The best kind of feedback helps you make decisions about how to proceed.  I would “never, ever, ever” tell someone that they shouldn’t say something when giving me feedback.  Instead, I tell them what they should do: they should be verbose.  I don’t care about loaded words.  What I care about is feedback that is loaded with details.

If you want me to consider making a change to my application, phrase it like an elevator pitch.  You’ve got to tell me why your request is something that I should consider.  Tell me why you want it and how you want to use it.  Tell me what you’re doing to work around not having it today.  Tell me how not having your request impacts your opinion of my application.

For example, I went looking through the VMware Community for the new vSphere Client for iPad.  In there, I found this feature request:

Since hosts can be seen, it would be a nice feature to enable vmotion/storage vmotions from the iPad client.

Let’s assume that adding such a feature is a non-trivial amount of development time.  If you want a significant development to be undertaken, you’ve got to justify it.  I can come up with a few different use cases where being able to kick off of a vMotion activity from your iPad would be nice, but I don’t know if any of these use cases are the ones that you have in mind.  Tell me why you want to do this, and tell me how it would make your life better if you were able to do this with our spiffy new iPad client.  Tell me how important it is to you: would it be “nice to have”, or is it “useless” without it?

Adding in details doesn’t guarantee that your request will be met, but it gives me a lot more information to use as I make decisions about my application going forward.