user experience

tell me more

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This morning, I conducted some research with one of our customer councils.  I asked them some questions about how they go about things today, and then let one of the designers on my team show them some of his very early design thinking about how we want to improve matters in the future.  It was a great session: the participants gave me great information about the current state of affairs, and they also had great feedback about what we presented them and how they could see it fitting into their life.

At the end of the session, someone commented about how I got people talking.  I told them that my secret to getting people to talk boils down to three words: “tell me more”.  Sometimes I’ll provide additional directions, like “tell me more about what happens after the email arrives”, but the basic concept is still the same.  It’s a short prompt to get someone to add in more details or to give clarification. Then I can use this additional information to ask additional questions, get feedback from others, or be able to ensure that what I think that I’ve heard is complete and correct.

People want to be understood, and they want to provide the right level of detail to you.  “Tell me more” tells them that you’re not sure that you’ve understood or that you’re not sure yet if you have the right information from them.  There’s a lot of meaning packed into those three words.  Using them helps you do a better job of gathering data when you’re conducting research.

SlideRocket, user experience, VMware

we’re hiring user experience professionals!

My user experience team has seen phenomenal growth in the year that I’ve been here at VMware, and the trend is continuing.  We’re hiring pretty much across the board.  A quick search on user experience on our jobs website returns 170 openings as of this writing.  Not all of those are on my team1, and there’s plenty of them which are for UI developers, business analysts, and product management.

My team is especially interested in hiring for the following roles:

  • administrative assistant – We need a part-time assistant to help us recruit and schedule usability participants.
  • user experience manager – Manage a team of awesome interaction designers who work across many different VMware applications.
  • interaction designer – Join our team of awesome interaction designers who are working on complex applications.

But wait, there’s more!  My team isn’t the only user experience team at VMware.  There are other UX openings, including the following:

If you’re interested in any of these roles, or if you’ve got any questions about what it’s like to work for VMware, email me.

  1. Our growth isn’t going to be quite that phenomenal! ↩
Mac

it’s the little things

I just noticed a little change to iTunes that makes me so very happy.

The last time I wrote up an iTunes wishlist was in February.  My last item on that wishlist was “carriage returns in comments”.  At the time (which was iTunes 10.1.2), you couldn’t type in a carriage return.  You could cut’n’paste one in, but that was pretty annoying.

This weekend, as I was ripping more CDs into iTunes, I discovered that I can enter a line break!  Option-enter now gives me a line break.  Earlier, this didn’t do anything.  I’m so excited!

Mac

Susan Kare’s sketchbook

Susan Kare, best known amongst geeks for designing the first proportional-width typefaces (including Chicago and Geneva) and icons (including my personal favorite, Clarus the dogcow) for the Mac, has recently allowed the Public Library of Science access to her early sketchbooks.

Go check out that article: it’s long, but it’s a great look at some of the imagery of the first Mac that made it so ground-breaking.  Make sure you look through some of the icon ideas that never got used, such as icons for “boot”, “auto indent”, and “bug”.

Nadyne

the sage and the guru

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A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with the development lead for VMware Fusion.  We’ve worked together before, so we know quite a lot of the same people.  During our conversation, we talked about what it takes to be a highly successful engineer, and he talked about the difference between the sage and the guru.

In his opinion, the sage is the engineer with the deep technical knowledge about a specific domain.  That engineer knows absolutely everything about it, and has probably touched all of it at one point or another.  The guru, on the other hand, is the engineer with a broad swath of technical knowledge about many domains.  That engineer doesn’t know absolutely everything about a specific domain, but knows quite a lot about a lot of different domains, and is often able to draw connections between those domains.  To illustrate his point, he talked about two developers that we both know quite well.  One is a sage, one is a guru.  Both are very well-respected, and deservedly so.  I’d love to work with either of them again.

Both the sage and the guru are valuable.  The sage can work magic in their domain.  The guru can solve difficult cross-domain problems that have stymied other engineers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this conversation lately.  How does it apply to me as a user experience researcher?  Do I want to be a sage or a guru?  How do others view me?  Is it possible to do both?  Is that even something that I would want?  I need to think more.

Nadyne, user experience

winding down for the year

Thanksgiving has kind of snuck up on me this year.  It’s been an immensely busy year.  I’ve conducted a lot of research.  I also proposed, organized, and led vUE 2011, VMware’s first gathering of its cross-company user experience community.  vUE was held in the first week of November.  I took a few days off afterwards, and suddenly I’ve hit the research doldrums.

Mid-November through mid-January are research doldrums.  Collecting data is hard in that eight-week period.  You can’t get research participants for several days around Thanksgiving, and then people start dropping off the face of the planet in mid-December for the end of the year, and aren’t reliably back in the office until at least a week into January.  You can do some research during this time, but it’s difficult and time-consuming to collect the data.

I’m using these research doldrums to do a few things.  I’m making sure that my wiki is updated with all of the documents I’ve created lately, and making sure that all of the other wiki pages that I should update have everything that they’ve got.  I’m writing up a post-mortem document from vUE that discusses what happened, what we learned, and where we can make improvements for next year’s event.  And I’m beginning to plot out next year’s research, so that I can hit the ground running in January.

Nadyne, user experience

research is not regurgitation

I’m sick of the supposed Henry Ford quote.  You know:

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.

Of course, this quote is apocryphal1.  The best ones often are.  This apocryphal quote made it all the way to Steve Jobs, who often used it to explain why Apple rarely uses research.

This quote and its repetition shows very little understanding of user research.  No researcher worth their notebook just goes out and says “so, what would you like us to give to you?” and then regurgitates that answer and feels proud of the research that they’ve just done.  I wouldn’t accept that research from the youngest user experience intern, let alone someone who calls themselves a researcher.

When you conduct research, you don’t know what the outcome will be.  Sometimes, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.  You conduct the research looking for that key insight, the unmet and unstated need.  You should, at least occasionally, go out and conduct research with no goal in mind other than, “let’s learn something new”.

After you’ve conducted your research, you analyze it to death.  You don’t just look for the easy quotes where a research participant tells you what they think they want.  You look deeper.  You go over your data with a fine-toothed comb.  You pull apart the data and put it back together in new and exciting ways.  And then you learn something new, and you go back and try to figure out the right thing to do with this new information.

Great research gives you insight that you didn’t have before and that you hadn’t yet imagined.  Great research can help form the basis of a whole new strategy.  Yes, there’s bad research out there that really does just regurgitate what someone said, but don’t let the existence of bad research stop you from conducting truly great research.

  1. Not that this is going to stop people from quoting it.  Is there a word for quotes that aren’t actually quotes?  Other than “bullshit”, I suppose. ↩
iPad, iPhone, Mac, Nadyne

the evolution of iTunes

I bought an iPod when they were introduced, and I started using iTunes when it was introduced.  I’ve gone through a few different iPods, and then got an iPhone when it was first introduced.  Today, I’ve got an iPod Shuffle, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2.  I also have two separate iTunes libraries: one on the home server, and one at work.

When I first started using iTunes, most of my music library was MP3.  Upon the introduction of Apple Lossless (ALAC) and its support in iTunes, I decided to move to that in an attempt to future-proof my library.  The decision to move to ALAC had some unexpected fall out.  When ALAC was introduced, iTunes treated those files exactly the same as other supported music files.  This is mostly fine, except that ALAC files are much much larger than MP3 or AAC files, which means that you can’t store a lot of music on an iPod or iPhone.

Concurrently, that first iPhone had a problem: to get my calendar or address book onto it, I had to sync with iTunes.  Support for Exchange ActiveSync wasn’t added until much later.  My work calendar has everything on it, and so my iPhone had to sync with my work laptop if its calendar and address book were to be of any use at all.

I ended up creating a new iTunes library on my work laptop, just for syncing my iPhone.  I ripped a bunch of CDs to my work laptop, using AAC so that I’d have reasonable file sizes for use on my phone.  A side effect of this decision is that my work laptop is also the home for my iPhoto library, since the vast majority of my pictures are taken with my iPhone.

In the intervening time, though, things have changed.  My two primary reasons for needing that separate iTunes library have disappeared.  iTunes will now downsample ALAC files for use on the iPhone and iPod, so I don’t have to worry about having massive files on there.  The iPhone now supports Exchange ActiveSync, so I don’t need to sync it with my work laptop to have my calendar available to me on my phone.

The problem is that iTunes has grown in that intervening time, too.  It’s no longer just where my music lives.  It’s where I buy some music1, and now it’s where I buy apps for my iPhone and my iPad.  iTunes is the gatekeeper for how I get data onto my iPhone and iPad.  And there’s also the Mac App Store, which is tied to the same Apple ID that my iTunes account is, and so conceptually I think of them as living on the same computer.  (And yes, I do have two Apple IDs: the one that I’ve been using for purchasing songs/apps, and my developer Apple ID.)

iTunes Match could solve part of this problem for me, although I hit up against its 25k track limit.  Macworld has published a workaround for this, which is to have a separate iTunes library that syncs with iTunes Match.  This is really no different than my two-libraries-on-two-machines approach now, so it’s not very useful to me.  I hope that Apple improves this in the future, because I really do love the idea of iTunes Match.

The problem that my household has is the proliferation of devices, which has led to a proliferation of iTunes libraries.  I’ve got two Macs (one at home, one at the office).  My husband has two Macs too (also one at home and one at the office).  Our home server is a Mac, and it is the main repository for our media collection.  We’ve got another Mac in our home study.  I’ve got an iPhone 4, iPod Shuffle, and iPad 2.  My husband has an iPhone 4, iPad, and an iPod.  He’s got his own iTunes account, mostly for iPhone apps that he’s purchased.

I think that the next thing that I’ve got to figure out in with iTunes is how to contain all of this sprawl.  To date, I’ve just handled the new changes in iTunes on an ad hoc basis.  It’s time to stop and figure out how to move forward.  Is it possible for us to have just one iTunes library?  How do we handle all of the music and apps that one of us has purchased?  How does this impact our photo libraries?  I’m not sure, but I think that we’ve got to figure it out soon, before the situation gets any worse.

  1. I mostly still buy CDs. I only buy on iTunes when it’s an exclusive, or if I really do just want one track off of an album. ↩
Nadyne, user experience, VMware

one year at VMware!

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One year ago today, I joined VMware.  And what a year it’s been!

I’ve done quite a lot of research.  I’ve done research on several things, including  vFabric Data Director, Horizon, Zimbra, vSphere, vCloud, the VMware website, and vCloud Director.  Some of the research has been validation, some of it has been generative.

I created, organized, and managed VMware’s first gathering of its internal user experience community.  Last week, about 60 people came together in Palo Alto to discuss our user experience.

What’s next?  I’ve got three major studies that I’m working on now, all of which are generative research.  They’re all intended to set our user experience direction for future releases.

It’s been an awesome year.  Let’s see what happens next …

user experience, VMware

creating a space where relationships can be built

Last week, I chaired the first (but not the last) VMware User Experience (vUE) conference.  Throughout my planning and scheming to get vUE going, my goal was simple.  Since this was our first time getting together, we had to have the opportunity to actually take advantage of it.  We had to be able to learn about each other, to share with each other.  Every decision came back to that question: how does this get people talking to and learning from each other?

The first idea that I had was to have everyone do a quick introduction of themselves.

Hi, I’m Nadyne Richmond, I’m a researcher, and I’ve been here for a year.  I work on projects all across VMware.  So far, I’ve done research on vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Horizon, Zimbra, Aurora, and some things that don’t have names yet.  Outside of work, I’m currently reading Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I live in downtown Mountain View with my husband and our two cats.

But then I imagined 60 of those, and thought that there was a high chance of me falling asleep.  Worse, though, I wasn’t sure if that actually imparted any information that I or anyone else cared about.  I thought that it might not meet my goal of helping people really get to know each other.

That idea evolved into what became the meat of the program: 5-10 minute talks from as many people as possible, in which they talked about their user experience in some way.  I explicitly left this open for interpretation, and I really liked the breadth of talks that came out of it.  The very first of these talks was from one of the newest designers on my team, in which she discussed the differences between what she learned in design school (where you get to start with a problem and decide how to go about tackling it) and what design is like in the real world (where the problem is well-established, and you’re coming into the project in the middle of its cycle so all of the decisions about how to tackle it have long been made).  The last of these talks was from one of our most senior designers talking about a future direction for VMware and how he’s going about it.

To help ensure that we had time to actually talk amongst ourselves, I made one other decision that was at least slightly controversial: mealtimes were sacrosanct.  I received lots of requests to do something with the meals.  “Let’s show a movie!” “How about a design exercise?” “We should have a working lunch.”  I turned down each request.  They were great ideas, and I tried to incorporate them elsewhere.  But I didn’t change the (lack of) structure for the meals.  The meals were only for socializing.

Together, the technical program and the socializing time were scheduled with the intent of creating a space where relationships can be built.  The technical program gave us something to talk about.  Actually, it gave us several different somethings to talk about, since there were so many different short presentations.  You could talk to the presenter and get more information about their topic or their product, you could talk to the people around you about the presentations, you could commiserate with a presenter about how hard it actually is to stick to a very short time for your talk.  The socializing time was built in to make sure that we could actually have those conversations, as informally as possible.  I didn’t just want people to have to go back to their offices and email people — that’s too formal, and would result in fewer relationships actually getting built.

Another thing that we did to help build relationships was to give people something to create.  Every attendee received a 4″ Munny doll, which is a white vinyl doll that you can draw on or otherwise decorate to your heart’s content.  We set out a bunch of multi-colored Sharpies, and let the attendees do the rest.  Some folks did some truly awesome things with their Munnys.  At the end, we took a group shot of the well-decorated Munnys.  This was a great ice-breaker, and helped make more conversations happen.

Was vUE successful?  Based on the feedback so far, the answer appears to be a resounding “YES!”  I can’t tell you how relieved I am.  I was well aware that I was asking for a lot of people, to put aside their work for 2 days (or more, for those who travelled to be here).  Creating vUE was a gamble, and I wasn’t sure if all of the decisions that I had made would actually mean that I met my goal of getting people to build relationships across the company.  There’s definitely some things to do better in the future, of course.  Overall, though, I’m immensely happy with how everything worked out.

a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world

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