Category Archives: VMware

Nadyne, VMware

my wikification

Until joining VMware, I haven’t been very wiki-fied.  It’s not for lack of exposure.  I know Ward Cunningham1 through my involvement with OOPSLA (now SPLASH).  I’ve attended WikiSym, also through my involvement with OOPSLA.  I even helped the WikiSym folks get their 2011 site at my previous employer.  I’ve contributed a handful of things to Wikipedia, and a good friend now works for the Wikimedia Foundation.

But knowledge and exposure aren’t sufficient for actually using them.  I suppose I could use one for my own purposes.  I’m pretty sure that my husband still maintains a personal wiki for his own note-taking needs.  But deep in its soul, wikis are social.  They’re about collaboration.  To be truly wiki-fied, a wiki needs to be a part of the culture.  Wikis haven’t been part of the corporate cultures that I’ve been involved with, until now.

Internally, VMware uses wikis a lot.  We use them externally, too, such as the Zimbra wiki.  As a result, I’ve been very carefully wiki-fying my work life.  I started out by contributing to existing wikis, such as one that helps VMware Mac users get set up.  Now I’m creating wiki pages all over the place, using either my team’s wiki or my own user page as the launching point.

I upload pretty much every file that I create to the wiki.  They all get linked from my user page, which makes finding them easier.  I create pages for each of my research projects, which contain schedules and related documents.  My team uses our wiki for our weekly status reports, and so I dutifully create one every week.  I’ve even come to … well, not quite like, but at least appreciate the utility of having a weekly status report.

Now that I’m actively using wikis more frequently, it’s probably time to go back and read all of the research about them.  Maybe I’ll be moved to write my own paper for a future WikiSym …

  1. One of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, it must be said. ↩
VMware

could I have an acquisition with that, please?

A couple of weeks ago, I said that VMware is out to hire half the Valley.  On the user experience team, we’ve hired four or five new people in just the six months that I’ve been here.  VMware currently has a zillion job openings, and now we’re about to triple the size of our main campus.

But that wasn’t quite right.  We’re actually out to either hire or acquire half the Valley.  Just look at the past few weeks.  We’ve acquired SlideRocket and Socialcast, plus Shavlik.  That’s three companies in six weeks!

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.

VMware

Gigaom: “VMware is the new Microsoft”

I just escaped the Dubiously-Evil Empire, and now Gigaom tells me that I really didn’t in their article “VMware Is The New Microsoft, Just Without an OS”.  Gigaom looks at VMware’s history, acquisitions, and recent launches to conclude:

With VMware holding the keys to the hypervisor layer and management, then the platform layer, and even the cloud applications layer with email from Zimbra, and presentations from Slide Rocket, why do I need Windows?

Hopefully this means that my VMW stock will continue to go up, unlike all of the MSFT stock that I still have …

Horizon

VMware Horizon App Manager is launched!

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One of my first projects upon joining VMware was to give some user experience love to Project Horizon.  Today, we have launched VMware Horizon App Manager 1, which is the first piece of Project Horizon.

So what is the Horizon App Manager?  It’s a portal that allows end-users one-click access to cloud apps that their providers have deployed.  On the backend, it hooks up to Active Directory (or others).  What this means for the end user is that they don’t need a billion different usernames and passwords for all those cloud apps that they use.  For admins, they can quickly and easily deploy apps to users, also leveraging their existing Active Directory setup.  For example, they can say that everyone in the “sales” AD group gets access to Salesforce, or everyone in “engineering” gets access to WebEx.

I think it’s pretty spiffy.  If you’re interested in learning more, check out our site for Horizon App Manager.  There’s also already a bunch of coverage in the tech press, including:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include our three-minute overview video, filmed right here on campus:

  1. I just realized that its acronym would be vHAM. I think this means that this is going to have to go un-acronymed. ↩
Nadyne, VMware

6 months!

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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

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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.

VMware

user experience manager wanted

The user experience team at VMware is growing like gangbusters!  To help us handle that growth, we’ve got a new position open for a user experience manager.  The job description has plenty of details.  In short, we’re looking for an awesome manager who can manage both visual designers and interaction designers effectively, and be able to bridge the gap between visual and interaction design with aplomb.  If this might be you, ping me!

If this isn’t you, VMware is hiring all over the place.  I sometimes feel like we’re trying to hire up half of Silicon Valley, and some significant portion of Boston too.  My team has senior interaction designer positions available, and overall VMware currently has several hundred jobs open.  Email me if you’re interested or if you’ve got any questions about what it’s like to work here.

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.