Category Archives: VMware

VMware

one of my favorite VMware perks

There’s a lot of awesomeness to be had in working at VMware.  One of my favorite perks is the VMware Foundation, which this year matches $3141.59 of charitable giving to approved organizations.  We also get 5 paid days of service learning, which we can use to volunteer time at approved charities.  (“Approved charities” essentially  means “any 501(c) organization”, so pretty much every charity is an approved charity.)

This year, here’s how I’ve taken advantage of this perk.  I’ve volunteered for two different organizations: Breakthrough San Francisco, and IDEO.org.  I’ve also donated to KQED-FM, the San Francisco Symphony, RAINN, and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.

I didn’t take full advantage of my service learning hours for this year, so one of my goals for next year is to fully take advantage of that.

VMware, women

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners

I’ve been aware of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners for quite awhile, and I’ve always had the best of intentions for actually attending one.  But I’d never quite managed to actually make it to one, which is embarrassing to admit, given how many opportunities there have been.  I finally attended one when VMware hosted dinner #30 last week.  I knew all of the speakers, and it was on campus so I couldn’t make any excuses about it being too far away or me not leaving early enough.

I’m so upset with myself that I waited this long.  It was an amazing networking opportunity, to chat with women of all ages, working in all aspects of computing.  I got to meet other women in user experience, I got to meet other women interested in programming languages, I got to meet other women at other major companies.  It was awesome.  I had so many great conversations, and met so many people who I’ve been in email and twitter contact with since.  It was great.

Sadly, I can’t go to dinner #31 tonight (I’ve already got plans), but I’ve got my fingers crossed for the next one.

vCloud, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

free VMware videos

We’ve just released a website that has more than 50 videos about vSphere, vCloud Director, vFabric, Site Recovery Manager, and more.  It’s a great introduction to VMware solutions to help you learn more about what we’ve got to offer.

I’ve been watching a few of them in my spare time to learn more about some of our products that I haven’t yet had a chance to touch, as well as to see how we’re talking about our products to our users.  They’ve been pretty useful to me, I hope they are to you too.

user experience, VMware

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.

VMware, women

women connecting women at VMware

This summer, VMware piloted a mentoring program for our female interns: each of our incoming women were offered the opportunity to be paired with a senior woman at the company.

I had my own (female) intern reporting to me, doing awesome research over the course of the 12-week internship.  I also participated in this program, and mentored a design intern.  For me as a mentor, it was a great way to get to meet with someone who I wouldn’t’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with otherwise, and hear about what life is like for woman who is currently working on her CS undergraduate degree.

Over the course of the 12 weeks, we talked about a lot of things, including (but definitely not limited to:

  • what it’s like to do user experience at VMware
  • her work with the women in CS program at her university
  • the different career paths available, and how career paths often take unexpected and awesome twists and turns
  • what it’s like to juggle two professional careers, and the tradeoffs that you have to make along the way
  • opportunities to help out other women understand the value of a CS degree

… and so much more.  I’ve only barely scratched the surface.

It was a really good experience for me.  Answering questions makes you think about things, and hearing the perspective of someone who is new to the field is always a good reminder about what we can do to help new people get established.

The best part about this is, I get to see both of these interns again soon.  They’re both going to be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference this year.  I’ll be part of one of the panel sessions, how to influence without authority and why it is important.  I just noticed that Nikki, my research intern, was featured in the GHC news, writing about her first Grace Hopper Celebration (and wearing a VMware t-shirt, too!).  It’s my first GHC, so I’m excited to be able to participate too.

Zimbra

Zimbra v8 has GAed

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this.  Zimbra v8 is now available!  It’s got a whole lot of new awesomeness, but most near and dear to my heart is that the front-end has gotten a complete makeover.

The Zimbra team approached me soon after I joined and asked if I could give them a hand.  They had a new user experience design team.  They actually didn’t know about my expertise with email clients and servers when they reached out to me, so I don’t think that they were quite prepared for how enthusiastically I agreed to help them out.  So we sat down and talked.

That team had a lot of input streams, like their Bugzilla and internal feedback that they got from us at VMware, not to mention their own opinions.  But, essentially, they had a lot of anecdotes.  They didn’t have a lot of data to help them prioritize the changes that they should make to the user experience.  Ultimately, we decided to do a baseline usability study: take the most current version of Zimbra, look at the most common workflows, and see how we fare.

When we’re talking about Zimbra, my research questions were … well, obvious.  Can users find their inbox, sent mail, and trash?  Can they create a new meeting, add people to that meeting, and schedule a conference room for it?  Can people set up their out-of-office message?  When I presented this as the questions that we were going to answer, some people asked why I was looking for such basic information.  The answer is that we needed that basic information before we could move on to more in-depth questions.  We have to understand how well we’re doing on the most basic tasks first.  If we’re getting something truly basic wrong, then it doesn’t matter how awesome we are on the subsequent stuff, because no-one will ever get to it.

So I did the study: I spent a week in the usability lab with users, the Zimbra design team, and other members of the Zimbra development team.  I learned a lot.  I learned way more than I anticipated that I would learn.

I have to admit, I was cocky when I went into that study — I thought that all of my experience with email clients and servers meant that I knew all of the answers to the questions that I had.  I was wrong.  I was so totally wrong.  I did correctly identify some of the places where people would stumble.  But there was one task that I threw in  to make the study flow better.  It was only there to make the end-to-end story behind the usability study more complete, and to make a transition from one set of tasks to another less obvious.  And nearly every user stumbled on it, revealing a problem that we didn’t know about (I didn’t anticipate it, there were no bugs filed on it, we’d never heard a complaint about it) and never would have found otherwise.

I presented my results to the team.  As with any usability study, there was good news, and there was bad news.  We went through it all, to make sure that we  understood where we were getting things right, and where we needed to make improvements.  I was cocky when I went into the study, and I was nervous when I went into this team presentation.  After all, user experience design and research were new to them, and so I wasn’t sure whether the message that I had to deliver was one that they were ready to hear.

And just like I shouldn’t’ve been so cocky when I went into the study, I shouldn’t’ve been so nervous when we were talking about the results of the study.  The team had been there throughout the whole thing, so they had seen people struggle firsthand.  We spent most of the time focusing not on the research, but rather on how we would go about addressing the issues that were surfaced in the research in time for Zimbra v8.

And so I see that Josh Johnson, one of the members of the Zimbra design team, has just posted about all of the changes that were made to the user experience.  I’ve been following their progress for awhile, and the changes that they’ve made between v7 and v8 are awesome.  Overall, the UI so much cleaner, and (near and dear to my heart) the calendar is a lot easier to use.  Go read Josh’s posts, it’s got screenshots of the awesome new v8 and even kindly gives a shoutout to my research.  The team has done some amazing work, and I’m proud to have helped them along their way.