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.

Mac, Nadyne

LTFS wins NAB Pick Hit award

IBM Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which my husband Michael Richmond architected, won a Pick Hit award at the National Association of Broadcasters conference last week.

In short, LTFS puts a file system on top of magnetic tape.  This overcomes many of the disadvantages of tape, such as the long access time due to the linear nature of tape.  It also keeps the advantages of tape, such as the inexpensive cost per terabyte and its longevity.  It’s a big deal for media and entertainment companies who create and consume many terabytes of data per day, and who want to store it less expensively and more reliably than they can on hard drive.

I know that this isn’t quite one of my usual topics of user experience, VMware, or Macs, but I think it’s worthwhile.  Of course, LTFS does support Macs (obviously important for media and entertainment companies!), so maybe it’s not too far outside my usual topics.

books

book review – “Cinderella Ate My Daughter”

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As a female software engineer, I’ve been finding myself thinking more about what to do about the paucity of women in my field. I recently read “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics”, a research report from the American Association of University Women, which lays out many of the challenges women face in those fields1. One of its points is the role that stereotypes play in how girls perceive their own success in these fields, and how gender stereotypes play a role in girls’ confidence. The report is fascinating and accessible; I highly recommend reading it.

I stumbled across Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein soon after I read the report. It’s clear that gender stereotyping issues appear early in life (after all, it was Barbie who famously proclaimed “math is hard!”). While I don’t have children, it’s impossible to not notice both the pink phenomenon and the princess phenomenon. Do these well-marketed phenomenons play into gender stereotypes?

Orenstein takes a look at what is marketed to girls, and the ages at which these items and ideas are marketed. Her view is through the lens of raising her own daughter, and the book illustrates the debates that she has with herself about pink princesses and how they shape girls in general and her daughter in particular. She meets with the Disney exec behind the highly-successful Disney Princess line, attends a beauty pageant for little girls, and ventures deep into the belly of the beast by visiting an American Doll store. She looks at the hyper-feminity presented to girls, first in the pink and princess phase, which then transforms into “sassiness” (which is a codeword for “sexy”) of Bratz dolls. The next step is a return to Disney and its well-marketed tween stars like Britney Spears (remember: she was a Mouseketeer long before she shaved her head) and Miley Cyrus.

The book doesn’t directly answer my question about the princess phase and how it might impact gender stereotypes that decrease girls’ confidence and performance in science and engineering fields, but I didn’t expect it to. It’s a look at how marketing plays into (and perhaps causes) hyper-sexualisation from a young age. Orenstein’s method of considering each phenomenon, how it might impact her daughter, and questioning her own assumptions is well-suited to this book. It gave me a lot to think about, not to mention a long list of books and other research about girls’ performance to read in the future.

  1. I wrote about this recently in my post girl power, woman power, and being one of the boys. ↩
user experience

load it with details

Last week, I complained about rejecting feedback out-of-hand because it’s not delivered in a way that you like reading.  A developer said that they ignored feedback that called their application “useless”, and that really bothered me.

Here are two pieces of feedback that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum:

  • Your app is awesome!
  • Your app is useless!

As a developer, I have an emotional reaction to both of them.  The first one gives a nice warm fuzzy.  The second one causes a scowl.  Neither of them tell me anything useful about my application.  It’s human nature to want to ignore the latter because it’s negative, but I have to ignore the former as well.  Ignore them not because the feedback has a message that I don’t want to hear, but because it doesn’t have a message at all.

The best kind of feedback helps you make decisions about how to proceed.  I would “never, ever, ever” tell someone that they shouldn’t say something when giving me feedback.  Instead, I tell them what they should do: they should be verbose.  I don’t care about loaded words.  What I care about is feedback that is loaded with details.

If you want me to consider making a change to my application, phrase it like an elevator pitch.  You’ve got to tell me why your request is something that I should consider.  Tell me why you want it and how you want to use it.  Tell me what you’re doing to work around not having it today.  Tell me how not having your request impacts your opinion of my application.

For example, I went looking through the VMware Community for the new vSphere Client for iPad.  In there, I found this feature request:

Since hosts can be seen, it would be a nice feature to enable vmotion/storage vmotions from the iPad client.

Let’s assume that adding such a feature is a non-trivial amount of development time.  If you want a significant development to be undertaken, you’ve got to justify it.  I can come up with a few different use cases where being able to kick off of a vMotion activity from your iPad would be nice, but I don’t know if any of these use cases are the ones that you have in mind.  Tell me why you want to do this, and tell me how it would make your life better if you were able to do this with our spiffy new iPad client.  Tell me how important it is to you: would it be “nice to have”, or is it “useless” without it?

Adding in details doesn’t guarantee that your request will be met, but it gives me a lot more information to use as I make decisions about my application going forward.

development, user experience

loaded words matter, so listen up

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John Welch pointed out an article from Justin Williams, an independent Mac/iOS developer, about how ‘Useless’ Is a Loaded Word.  Williams opens up with this:

Here is a tip for all the non-developers out there. When you email your favorite developer with a feature request or bug report never, ever, ever use the word useless to describe their product. Useless is kryptonite to developers and puts us on the defensive instantly.

I cannot disagree enough with this assertion.  Feedback is love.  Your user, or at least a potential user, took the time out of their day to write to you to tell you something that you could do that might help you win their time, their loyalty, and their money.  Feedback is a gift, a priceless gift.  The wrapping paper might be an unattractive shade of brown, but the gift inside is one that you should never ignore.

People use hyperbole.  They’re prone to using it when excited or upset.  People are most likely to offer feedback when they’re excited or upset.  As a result, you’re likely to that hyperbole in action when you receive unsolicited feedback.  Yes, they’re probably using loaded words.  But those loaded words matter.

When you get any piece of feedback, you’ve got to figure out what to do about it.  Marco Arment said this:

If you call my app “useless”, I stop reading right there and either hit Delete or keep scrolling.

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your decision.  Making decisions about your applications based solely on an emotional response might not be the right way to go about it, but everyone gets to do their own thing.  Instead, I think you should step back a bit and try to determine what’s caused such a response.  It behooves you to do this for both positive hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP IS THE BEST APP EVAR!!!!!!”) and negative hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP KILLS USELESS KITTENS DEAD!!!!!!!”).  This isn’t to say that you’ll necessarily act on the feedback, but you do need to at least understand it.

Determining what gift is hidden behind that ugly brown wrapping paper is a hard-won skill.  It’s not about “developing a thicker skin”.  It’s about learning how to hear what someone is really saying, not just the words that are coming out of their mouth.  In fact, Williams himself says nearly the same thing in another post about edge cases:

Any developer worth his salt hears about [edge case] issues like this and their skin starts to crawl.

Yes!  That’s it, right there!  You hear someone describe an issue, and your skin crawls because you know that there’s something more going on than what they’re saying.  So you take the time to consider what their feedback indicates about your application, and you decide what to do about it.  Of course, Williams had said earlier in that post that his “nerd ego” had been boosted a bit, which makes it psychologically easier to try to tease apart the feedback to determine if there’s something to be done.

It’s tempting to only listen to the feedback that tells you what you want to hear, or is offered without any kind of (real or perceived) judgement.  Don’t just pay attention to what your nerd ego wants to hear.  Listen to it all.  Accept the love, accept the hate, and continue striving to make your apps better based on what you learn from both the lovers and the haters.

VMware

data recovery after the earthquake

I stumbled across a blog post today from Christopher Well’s vSamurai blog titled Real Life DR & BC, with VMware SRM.  The title isn’t nearly descriptive enough: he gives details about how he used VMware Site Recovery Manager after the 9.0 earthquake in Japan to move their data centre operations from one site to another.  Their data recovery efforts in their virtual infrastructure were successful.

Now that I’m thinking about disaster recovery, I should go check on my own earthquake-preparedness kit at home …

VMware

VMworld call for papers deadline is looming

VMworld 2011 is coming: August 29 – September 1 in Las Vegas, and October 18-20 in Copenhagen.  If you’re interested in presenting, the submission deadline is April 5.  You’ve got a little less than a week to get your submission ready!

Looking at the list of the top sessions from last year, it looks like there’s a lot of interest in real-world examples of architecture and best practices.  Don’t let that limit you, there’s plenty of other types of sessions that will be popular and beneficial too.

See you in Vegas!

user experience, VMware

this is why I tweet

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I was asked recently why I’m on Twitter.  It’s all about serendipity.

The metaphor that I use to describe Twitter is that it’s a neverending cocktail party that’s full of people I like.  Just like a large cocktail party, there’s lots of different conversations going on at once.  You can participate in them, or not, as the mood strikes.  And, just like a cocktail party, the topics of the conversations vary widely.  There’s always someone talking politics, there’s always someone sharing something banal about their life, and there’s always someone talking shop.

Likewise, as at a cocktail party, it’s okay to leave to go get some fresh air.  I don’t think that anyone expects that you’ll read every single tweet.  I certainly don’t expect it, nor do I read everything.  I ignore Twitter with aplomb and have no guilt whatsoever.  After I’ve gotten my fresh air, I can come back into the cocktail party, and it will have continued on just fine without me.

Twitter is great for serendipity.  I’ve randomly learned that a friend is nearby, so we’ve taken advantage of the proximity to grab a coffee and catch up.  I’ve helped answer questions that I’ve noticed, helping someone else out.  I’ve had someone find me at a conference to thank me for my assistance.  It’s all good.

I had another example of that kind of serendipity late last week.  One of my VMware colleagues, who I haven’t yet met, tweeted that he was out in the field helping out with a vCloud Director installation.  This is perfect timing: I’m in the midst of some longitudinal research, and wanted to add a vCloud Director customer to that effort.  I sent off an email, and received a lightning-fast response from him.  He’s happy that someone in the company saw his tweet and reached out to him, I’m happy that it looks like I’m going to fill a need (and improve my research too!).

And this, this is why I tweet.  Yes, I admit, I’ve tweeted about cats, cocktails, and the coast.  I’ve also tweeted about projects I’m working on, like Horizon.  It all comes together in one big tweetstream that represents who I am, and hopefully will continue to create serendipity.

a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world

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