DevFest Silicon Valley is happening on March 15, and I’ll be speaking there. My talk is titled “An Engineer’s Guide to Learning About Your Users”. If you’re in Silicon Valley, you should join me. In my 30-minute session, I’ll explain how to elicit information from your users (both directly and indirectly). I’ll discuss the parallels between good code and good research, and explain how the development lifecycle applies to research too.
Category Archives: user experience
Austin Govella’s manifesto for user experience design
Austin Govella has just updated his manifesto for user experience design. There’s a lot in it to like, but the last point really resonates with me:
Create better organizations to enable better design.
Your design activities don’t change. Change how you work with your team. Change how you work, so your goal is always a better organization instead of a better product. Change how you accomplish the design, so that you are always improving your team’s design literacy.
I think that everyone in user experience at least occasionally struggles with working with people who don’t understand design and how design makes better products. I think that Austin is right that it’s our job to help make our organization better. Just as we in user experience need to understand our technology and our users so that we can make a better design, we also have to share our knowledge about user experience and design and our users and how our technology fits into our users’ lives to help everyone in the organization do a better job of making products to meet people’s needs.
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.
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.
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.
a retrospective of VMware user experience tech talks
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 …
the user experience of the end
I 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.
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.
storage admins needed for usability study
My team is conducting a usability study, and we’re in need of virtual storage admins to take part in it. We expect it to take no more than 90 minutes of your time, and we will provide compensation for your time. If you’re local to Palo Alto, we invite you to come to our Palo Alto campus for the session; otherwise the session can also be conducted remotely through WebEx. We plan to run the sessions from September 27th until October 5th.
If you’re interested, please fill out this very short survey to tell us a bit about yourself and your virtual environment.
on watching user studies
This week, I’m conducting some user research. Just after I had wrapped up a session with one of the participants in this research, I saw a tweet:
Have you ever wondered what it feels to be an engineer watching research studies on your product? http://i.imgur.com/1Hheq.gif via @iamnirav
