I have a colleague who inputs the location details for conference calls with this information in this order:
TELECON
Chairperson Name:
Company:
Conference Phone Number:
International Access Phone Numbers:
Conference Access Code:
If you look at this in one way it makes perfect sense.
You want to know where the meeting is and who’s meeting it is – that seems quite sensible. Next you want to know what number to dial and then having dialled it you want to know how to access it.
That makes sense – doesn’t it?
The problem is this. Give me the access code and I know the rest of the information. From a usability point of view the order ought to be completely different.
This may seem like a completely trivial issue but it actually has significant usability implications. When I look at these diary entries on my BlackBerry I have to open them to get the access code because it’s not on the preview screen of the entry in my day view. The helpful details at the beginning push this vital information off the screen. When the meeting reminder pops up I have to scroll down to find what I am looking for.
In Lotus Notes (our corporate email system) it does get shown, but it’s something of a jumble.
I’m not picking on this particular colleague I have a number of examples of people who do a similar thing and I know that this person is trying to be helpful. One person sends the information out in a nicely formatted little image – which is completely useless on the BlackBerry because we don’t download images.
Next time you are trying to be helpful try to think about how helpful you are really being.
This is just one of a very long list of things that I would like the world to know. Perhaps one day I will write a book with them all in and they will make me famous, but until then I will make myself content by knowing that I have told you.
I’m not very often in the position where I am making formal presentations. It’s more likely that I am leading a discussion or a workshop. But, when I am presenting I hate sitting down.
I’ve been in many situations where people are sat down at the end of a table talking through a set of bullet-points. This has to be the dullest way of presenting, what’s to engage with. One of the reasons that people sit down to present is because they feel tethered to the control of their presentation, their laptop.
A while ago I was provided with a Logitech Cordless Presenter, this completely removes the tether. It’s great to work without a tether, walking around, pointing, being visible. Hopefully presenting in this way is a lot more interesting than presenting from a seat with a laptop in front of me. I want my presentations to be engaging and Cordless Presenter really helps me to do it.
The Presenter has a really simple set of buttons which are just what you need:
The Presenter also has a couple of features that I rarely use.
There is also an on-switch and an off-switch.
The Presenter is a great piece of kit, it always surprises me that so few people make use of them.
Sometimes someone says something in such a succinct way that it resonates.
Today it’s Seth Goblin:
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.
It’s not true.
You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.
You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.
IT service delivery has become a commodity sell; so much so that the only focus is cost reduction.
The huge opportunity is this – no end-user really wants to buy their IT as a commodity, it’s only their organisation that wants to buy it that way. End-users want loads more value than the value they are getting today. They need to innovate, and we need to help them to do it. we either help them, or they do it without us.
Just took a little diversion down the Wordle route. It’s a tag cloud creation tool for test, or for del.icio.us tags. Here are my del.icio.us tags, spit the themes:
If you take the text from my current blog front page it looks like this:
That’s right – nearly completely different.
A quote from ReadWriteWeb:
Today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing ‘classic geeks’ in their I.T. Department, but that’s about to change. Don’t misunderstand – the world will always need a good engineer, but the I.T. leaders of tomorrow – the ones guiding the business in the use of their computer resources, the ones working with the CEOs to execute the vision and direction via information technology – they will no longer be what we think of as the classic ‘computer geek.’ You know the type – the stereotypical introvert, who’s more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. The one who likes to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. The ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. These folks will be a dying breed…at least around the office. Instead, tomorrow’s computer ‘geek’ will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong.
Instead, tomorrow’s computer “geek” will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. So what does the “new geek” need to know to run tomorrow’s I.T. Department? An entirely new skill set, as it turns out.
It then goes on to talk about the shift to “Enterprise 2.0”, “Cloud Services”, “The Mobile Workforce” and “A Self Provisioning User Base”. I’m not sure that the titles are as important as recognising the general shift away from in-house provisioned and in-house constrained services to services that are leveraged globally and have few constraints.
I speak to many I.T. people, because I’m an I.T. person and very few of them see that there is a change lurking just over the other side of that hill over there. A change that isn’t going to swoop down in a huge rampage, but is going to work under the radar and change their lives without them even knowing it. The ones who choose to go with it and to become valuable to their customers within the business will thrive, those who hide behind existing policies and standards will have their value steadily eroded until their value is difficult to see.
Change shouldn’t bring fear, we are used to it, we do it every day, we just need to recognise it and embrace it. As I.T. people we can, at least, see that the change is there. Business people, in general, have no idea about the change that is coming their way. Security organisations, as an example, will have massive changes to make, the old rules will no longer be valid. I know of organisations where there has been a huge backlash against the security organisation when they have insisted on locking down Internet provided Instant Messaging. There view was that it was an unnecessary security risk, the business’s view was that it was essential to operations, user innovation had overtaken them. It’s just one example of many of the things that are going to occur.
It’s just one small example of the mind-set change that will need to take place. Organisations that don’t change will themselves find it difficult to survive, those that go with the changes will thrive.
Today is Monday, it’s the start of a new week, perhaps now is as good a time as any to start embracing some change.
Yes, I’m a BlackBerry user. Unlike some, though, my BlackBerry is currently my only mobile communication device – phone, email, IM, Twitter – everything.
I’ve been trying to de-clutter my life, so I’m trying out the integrated communication experience yet again. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to get to an integrated experience but failed because of some issue or other. I’m hopeful that this time will be different.
One of the challenges that any integrated communication device has to overcome is that ever changing array of ways that people want to communicate. Having voice and email integrated onto a single device isn’t really that much good anymore, I expect voice, email, IM, browser, twitter, SMS.
Perhaps surprisingly I don’t yet expect photo or video. I love taking pictures, but I don’t yet use it as part of my day-to-day activity, this means that the 8800 (without a camera) works for me. I know this will change and that video input is really important to many people already. As an example, we went shopping this evening, we got separated from my son, Jonathan, while he went to try some cloths on. Rather than choose there and then, he took photographs of himself in the mirror to look at later, and what did he use for this, the camera on his phone of course. I would never have thought that way, but it was natural to him to use the camera for this purpose.
I have to say, that as an integrated communication device, the BlackBerry 8800 is the best thing I have used by a long way. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some niggles, but that’s not why I write these posts, and I’ll take more time to explain them later. Because the BlackBerry has become such a capable communicator it’s difficult to really explain all of the ways that I use it, so here are some examples:
I’ll write some more another time about some of the foibles that annoy.
For a while I had a working Blackberry, then my Blackberry got broken and it took some weeks to replace it. I was shocked at the impact.
I spend a lot of time working on two monitors. When I only work on my laptop I am shocked at the impact.
Why shock?
When I was given or invested in these technologies I would have put a relatively low value on them, in the case of the Blackberry I would have put a negative value. Now that I have them I am surprised at the impact when you take them away.
I’m not a crazed crackberry addict who can’t survive for 30 seconds without looking at it, I have my Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) and Disconnect Anxiety reasonably under control. I’m talking here about all of the things that I had integrated into my day-today working that I hadn’t even noticed until they were taken away.
When I am working on two monitors I naturally start and use applications on the different monitors without too much rational thought. When I am working on a single monitor the switching time between applications becomes so noticeable that it gnaws away at me.
I suspect that if you took my iPod away (also a relatively recent addition) I would also be annoyed at the impact.
Much of my career has been spent convincing enterprise customers of the value of some piece of technology. This discussion goes all the way back to arguments about 20MB hard disks. Over all this time it has been a recurring them that IT has had little understanding of the value of the technology that the end user is wanting, IT is normally focused on cost containment.
End users sit outside wanting value, and IT is just worried about the cost of the new value.
There are a lot of technologies, probably as many as at any time in the history of IT, that give end users value, but have a cost impact upon the IT organisation. the problem with many of these technologies is that the value is not clear cut although it is potentially massive. Within this context it is often difficult to get organisations to move forward.
So, why don’t we ask the question the other way? Why don’t we see what the value is by giving it to someone, and then take it away. If you can take it away with little impact then the value wasn’t that high anyway. Take it away and get a big push back then you have found something of true value.
For some time I’ve wanted to create an internal free market in an organisation for IT capability and technology. This would work by giving people a set of credits and a choice of technology. They would then trade in the technology in a free market manner, buying and selling at the credit value they chose without reference to the physical cost. If the supply and demand (credits) were properly constrained so people had to make choices you would start to see the true value of the technology to the end user.
It would be interesting to see the value of an iPhone v the value of a Tablet PC, a second monitor v an RSS reader.
I’ve always been uncomfortable just giving people technology to evaluate without any clear link to value, but it’s often difficult to define what the value might be. Rather than just giving new technology to people to evaluate the internal market would allow the evaluation to be undertaken within the context of perceived value. Perceived value is probably a lot closer to real value than people think, especially in a knowledge worker type environment. The things that have little value are the things you should give back. The things of high value are the ones that you should invest in.
Some people manage to summarise things in such a brilliant way that there message is clear and concise. Here is one anyone who does presentations should see:
PresenTired: “The Voicemail” from Scott Schwertly on Vimeo.
How many of us would prefer presentations using these principles?
FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice and has been for a very long time now. I loved FeedDemon so much that I actually paid for it when it wasn’t free.
It’s now free which just adds to the goodness.
Steve commented a few days ago, when talking about email overload that:
If anything I find I suffer much more from RSS overload than Email overload, but RSS readers are designed from the get go to help people cope
I would agree. My feed list is several hundred long, most of them active, but FeedDemon allows me to scan through them in a way that I regularly find remarkable. If I had as many email as feed posts I wouldn’t cope, but I do cope and cope quite well.
Feeds have revolutionised the way that I interact with the web – I rarely go to any web site to see what’s new. I used to go around a set of sites regularly, it was frustrating and annoying and took up loads of time. Feeds give me the changes, FeedDemon presents them in a way that allows me to scan through them quickly.
My favourite key combination within FeedDemon is ctrl+d which takes you to the next feed with unread items. On one of my keyboards the “d” key is starting to look a little warn which shows how often I use it.
My normal working habit is to scan through quickly flagging things within FeedDemon that I am going to read soon and I tag things into del.icio.us (using FeedDemon) that I want to remember for some indeterminate point in the future. I tend to do this early in my working day. If I’ve got some time to read I’ll do it there and then, if I haven’t I’ll close FeedDemon down, leaving it closed until I have time to do some reading.
If I forget to close FeedDemon I find myself going back to it to see if there is anything interesting happening in the world – this becomes a huge time drain.
One of my biggest friends in FeedDemon is the “Panic Button”.
On returning to my feeds after my holiday last week I hit the panic button and marked a load of older feeds read. As the dialogue says – this isn’t email after all. I’ve recently introduced a few, non-technical, friends to FeedDemon and feeds in general and they are really struggling with this concept. We still have a long way to go before we really understand the social impacts of some of this technology. People have learnt how to scan a newspaper over hundreds of years, and I think that it’s a similar skill, we just need to help them realise that.
I use FeedDemon on a number of devices, depending on where I am sitting. The NewsGator synchronisation engine is great for keeping the feed list and read/unread status aligned. It’s not always perfect, but it’s close enough for me to be able to switch between machines with little impact.
I suspect that some people might struggle with me calling Twitter a tool, but that’s what it is. For me it certainly fits into the category of “anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose”.
What purpose does Twitter help me accomplish?
The main purpose it help me accomplish is the massively important one of social connections and network building. The people that Twitter allows me to interact with are between 10 and 1000 miles away from where I am sitting. I’m not working on a project with these people so I have no need to be in regular contact. But there is real value in interacting.
There are real gems in the information that people share. My organisation, like many others, has a very string informal structure made up of many loosely coupled networks of people all interacting to get things achieved. Twitter is absolutely fabulous for this. I know who is connecting with who, I see who is interacting with who, I get to interact.
Twitter has become my virtual coffee machine, or my virtual office foyer. It’s the place where I catch-up with people.
The problem I have with Twitter is explaining this to other people. This video has helped some people get their head around it, but to be honest, it’s one of these things that you have to see.
I’m not sure I would use Twitter if it wasn’t for a client tool keeping me interested. My current tool is twhirl.
Not really sure how I settled upon twhirl, but I’m very pleased that I did. It has a few foibles but does what I need it to do.
A browser based interface is OK, but it requires you to go there, it requires you to go and to see. If something is expecting me to go and look then it will be disappointed, it doesn’t really matter what it is. A client based tool goes and does the looking for me and tells me when there is something worth looking at. It also means that I can write my own tweets in a micro-blog manner with the minimum of disruption.
Graham Chastney 