Category Archives: VMware

VMware, women

Systers meet-up on Sept 18 at 7pm

I nearly forgot!  I’m hosting a meetup for women in tech in conjunction with Systers and the Anita Borg Institute at VMware’s headquarters on Wednesday, September 18, at 7pm.  We’ll be discussing how to get the most out of the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

If you’re a local woman in tech but aren’t attending GHC, feel free to come anyway — most of what we’ll talk about will be applicable to other conferences.  This is a great opportunity to meet other local women in tech, learn about GHC as well as other conferences, and have some great conversations.

RSVP here, or email me if you’re having trouble RSVPing on that page.

VMware, women

you can’t get it if you don’t ask

Last week, I applied a lesson that I often have trouble with: you can’t get something if you don’t ask for it.

During an all-hands meeting, our executives announced that they’re doing special t-shirts for VMware employees that mark when we joined the company.  They said that we’d get an email so that we could choose our t-shirt size.  The following day, the email arrived.  And there were 8 sizes to choose from, XS through to 3XL.  There were no options for women’s t-shirts.

I grumbled to myself, annoyed at having yet another t-shirt that I won’t wear at any time other than at the gym or when washing my car.  I grumbled some more, annoyed that we were actually being asked for our t-shirt size, and it’s not like t-shirt vendors don’t have women’s shirts.  Then I heard more grumbling, from a couple of women on my team, and another couple of women on my hallway.

Grumbling doesn’t solve the problem.  The only way to solve the problem is to ask.  (Actually, as I said to a friend, I decided to start rabble-rousing.)  I asked: I posted a request to our internal social network and asked if we could get women’s sizes.  I posted it at 10am on Wednesday morning.  I sent the link to a few of the people who I had heard grumbling too.  By noon, there were already 50 “+1” and related comments on my post.  By the time I left the office that afternoon, there were more than 100.  And the next day, there was a post from the relevant team saying that it was going to be addressed.  For those women who had already selected shirts, or who had posted to the thread, they received an email asking them if they’d like to select a different size.  For everyone else, they received a new email to let them know that women’s t-shirts were also available.

You can’t get something if you don’t ask for it.  I asked, and I got it.  Thank you, VMware, for helping out.

user experience, VMware

job posting: senior UX researcher

My team at VMware has an opening for a senior user experience researcher at our headquarters in Palo Alto, California. We are responsible for user research across VMware’s product portfolio. A senior researcher on the team is responsible for working with teams to understand their needs, creating a research plan to address those needs, conducting the research, analyzing the results of the research, communicating the results of the research, and continuing to evangelize the results of the research. Additionally, the senior researcher will proactively identify research needs and conduct research that will help us address long-term needs of the organization and put us ahead of the curve in understanding our users, how they use our applications, and how we can better meet their needs, desires, and aspirations.

If you are interested in this role, please email me with a cover letter, resume, and (preferred but not required) link to your portfolio.

My team also has openings for senior interaction designers.  You can email me if you’re interested in that role or have any questions about it as well.

VMware

Things I learned today: VMware turtle edition

turtle pond
a cluster of VMware turtles enjoying the California summer sun

VMware is famous, at least amongst its employees and visitors to our main campus, for its turtle pond.  What I didn’t know is that we currently have nine turtles in our little pond.  None of the turtles were (ahem) developed here at VMware.  They’re all acquisitions, starting in 2007 with Rosie.  Rosie was an unofficial addition to the pond, but VMware adopted her wholeheartedly.  She soon had more turtles join her.  We’ve even updated the pond to be more turtle-friendly, adding more rocks for them for sunbathing purposes, and more plants for swimming around and hiding in.

We have, of course, named all of our turtles.  Rosie got her name from the restaurant from where we acquired her.  Other turtles have been named for their attributes, such as Houdini (who is a master of hiding himself away) and McQueen (who often escapes by scaling a wall).  Another turtle is Zilla, named after the Bugzilla that our development teams use to track bugs, issues, and feature requests for our products.

Our newest addition to the turtle family was given to us by one of our customers.  His name is from his home city of Portland.  I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll need to add another pond if we find ourselves with too many turtles.

user experience, VMware

VMware User Experience 2013

In November 2011, I led VMware’s very first internal conference for its user experience community, with the creative title VMware User Experience (vUE).  VMware’s user experience community is spread across the whole company.  There’s my team, which works on the vCloud Suite and related products.  There’s a few other small user experience teams across the company, in places like Customer Advocacy and Socialcast.  And there’s a lot of interaction designers who are embedded with their teams, one or two people sprinkled here and there throughout the company.  Our goal for the first vUE was simple: get everyone together for two days and get to know each other.  We ended up with 60 people attending, representing a diverse array of products, with people coming from as far away as Sofia, Bulgaria; Herzliya, Israel; and Sydney, Australia.

After vUE 2011, we instituted some new practices to help our user experience community keep its momentum going.  I created and am leading a series of UX tech talks, in which we as a community come together and share our experience and expertise about user experience.  The UX tech talk series isn’t limited to just user experience people, and we usually get ~100 people attending each tech talk.  We also have a monthly UX all-hands meeting, which is led by one of our Directors of User Experience at VMware, and gives us an opportunity to share things that are of interest to the whole community.

I’m also chairing vUE 2013 1.   We’ve had the opportunity to meet each other, and we now have other ways to keep in touch and be able to share our expertise.  This time, our goal is to build upon all of that, and talk about ways that we can improve the user experience at VMware.  We have 22 UX people across the company who are going to give technical talks (10-20 minutes each) about a topic that they’re passionate about, and we have several invited talks, including each of our Directors of User Experience as well as members of our executive team.  We’re also having breakout sessions to give everyone a chance to dive deeper into specific topics, and the all-important social event to share cocktails and swap stories of user experience.

vUE 2013 is five weeks away, and we’re wrapping up all of the final details.  I’ve got a great committee to help me out, and I’ve also worked to ensure that we’re set up for success for vUE 2014.  We’ve already identified the vUE 2014 conference chair and technical chair, and they are responsible for everything.  I will act as a mentor to them as they go through everything, and I’ve tried to document what I think they’ll need to know, but I won’t be on the committee myself.  vUE needs to continue to grow and evolve, which means that it can’t have the same person running it.

I’ve got a lot to do in the next five weeks, but it’s going to be worth it.  vUE 2011 was a smashing success, and I’m hopeful that we exceed the high bar that we set for ourselves.

  1. It was originally supposed to be vUE 2012, but we had to move the dates to accommodate a few things. ↩
user experience, VMware

VMware Take 3

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One of VMware’s benefits is the Take 3 program.  For those who have been with VMware for at least five years, they can take 3 months off to do something completely different from their usual job.  One option is to work on a different project or try out a different discipline.  Another option is to work with the VMware Foundation and spend 3 months working for a charitable organization.

Deanna McCusker is a UX designer on my team who has been with VMware for 9 years.  She’s on her Take 3 project now, and she’s taking the latter option.  She is working for the Community for Open Source Microfinance on an application called Mifos.  She’s also keeping a blog about her experience, and you can follow along here.

I’ve already informed Deanna that she’s signed up to give a UX tech talk when she’s completed this!

user experience, VMware

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.

user experience, VMware

a retrospective of VMware user experience tech talks

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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 …