Category: User Experience

Sometimes I Hate Technology: All I want to do is print a picture!!!

Jimmy and Grandad have a problemOver the weekend Sue (my wife) undertook the monumental feat of walking 26.2 miles around the streets of London. As you might imagine she took lots of photographs of this adventure and she wanted them printing out so that it was easier to show people.

Printing – simple concept.

Last night was the first chance I had to go and get the prints. I anticipated that this would be a couple of short interruptions to my evening. It’s a 5 minute drive to the local supermarket (Asda) and I know that I would have to go drop of the files and pick them up later.

As you can probably guess by the title of this post things didn’t work out that way:

  • Put required photos on USB memory stick. Everyone supports USB, right?
  • Drive to Asda
  • Walk to photo booth.
  • Look for USB slot, but no slot to be found .
  • Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered .
  • There is no USB slot. Even though there has to be USB within the machine, there is no USB slot. I’ll need to come back with the files on a different format.
  • Walk to car.
  • Drive home.
  • Put pictures onto Compact Flash card. That should be fine. Consider putting them on CD as well to be sure but know that the machine has a CF slot so should be fine.
  • Drive back to Asda.
  • Walk to photo booth.
  • Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
  • Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
  • Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…11…stops… but there are 62 pictures on this card .
  • Start again.
  • Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
  • Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
  • Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…8…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
  • Remove card.
  • Go to second machine.
  • Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
  • Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
  • Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…12…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
  • Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered . “We see lots of problems with those type of card, sorry”. Decide that I am not going to be beaten by some poxy machine.
  • Walk to car.
  • Drive home.
  • Put pictures onto CD.
  • Drive back to Asda.
  • Walk to photo booth.
  • Follow instructions on screen and insert CD.
  • Screen tells me that it is reading the CD.
  • Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…62…result.
  • Follow the rest of the instructions for size and quality, etc. Just about to finish and then get a prompt from the system for authorisation of the order showing a screen requiring a PIN.
  • Ask lady behind counter for help (different lady by now). Get the wonderfully helpful response “Oh, I’m just standing in while she’s on her break, I don’t know.” . She asks the supervisor, shouldn’t have bothered. She asks another colleague, shouldn’t have bothered. Eventually phones through to the canteen and interrupts the other ladies break. Turns out that the PIN is the default “1234” . I have no idea what the purpose of the PIN was, she didn’t check anything, she just put the number in.
  • Pay for pictures
  • Walk to car.
  • Drive home.
  • Stop, relax, unwind for 40 mins.
  • Drive back to Asda.
  • Walk to photo booth.
  • Original lady has now returned.
  • I hand over my slip.
  • She spends 10 mins finding the pictures. There still on the machine
  • Walk to car.
  • Drive home.

I’m a technologist and I struggled – how does anyone else get anything printed. Why is this so complicated?

Sometimes I hate the way that technology has been implemented.

Communicating the motivations for change

Jimmy and Grandad take a trip to LondonToday KC Lemson has an interesting story about the changes they are making to meeting rooms at Microsoft Campus.

In these new conference rooms we got fancy new projectors (no more screwing around with the darned output to some random TV![1]), new tables, and they changed the wall covering. Where many individual conf rooms used to have 3 walls of whiteboards on it (soooooo handy), now they have one whiteboard, one blank wall (for projection) and one brown fabric-covered wall.

When the rooms were finished and I attended various meetings in the new rooms, the conversation would invariably start out with some wonderment about what was the point of the brown fabric wall. The best scenario anyone came up with was that it was to be used for pinning up notes, hardly a common use case. So we thought about occam’s razor and realized that ah-ha, the problem is just that the facilities people are dumb and they didn’t realize we liked having so many white boards! Satisfied with the knowledge that we were on the top of the evolutionary heap, we went about our way.

Then, an enterprising coworker decided to actually investigate instead of assume, and eventually made his way to the right person in facilities who informed him that actually the reason for removing the multiple whiteboards was for acoustics – we are an increasingly global workforce and many meeting attendees aren’t located in Redmond, so LiveMeeting conferences are becoming increasingly common.

I have spent much of my working life on the flip side of this situation – being the person making the change. I am sure that myself and my team have been regarded as “dumb” on more than one occasion .

The problem with making changes to things that have multiple purposes like meeting rooms and PC’s is that the solution is always a compromise. It is normal to have two requirements that conflict; whether that’s the need for good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space or the need to control the configuration of a PC and the need to make it as flexible as possible.

The greatest challenge is communicating the motivation behind the compromise that’s been made to the people who have to work with it. Because it’s difficult to communicate it’s much easier to not bother trying. I’ve been on the receiving end of that situation too.

If you don’t communicate, though, people will surely find a way of working around your compromise. Remember User Innovation is a very powerful force. If you are going to make it work for you, you need to decide how you are going to harness it rather than try and work against it. I’m sure there must be a way of having good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space, perhaps they should have harnessed User Innovation to come up with an answer to that problem.

 

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Helvetica is 50

Mossy dry stone wallsThe wonderful Helvetica font it 50 according to the BBC.

For a font to survive that long and still be in such wide use shows that it is a good font. They also say that “imitation is the sincerest of flattery”, and this font has been imitated more than most.

As people seem to want to abuse our eyes every day with the worst of fonts I thought I to would pay tribute to one of the best of fonts.

Perhaps it’s time that we started building “bad design” indicators into modern publishing and office productivity tools so people could learn the errors of their ways.

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Visualisation Techniques

Jimmy and Grandad watch the cars crossing the River KentI’ve been thinking today about how to visualise some things. I tend to think in pictures so visualisation tends to come fairly easily, but I’ve been struggling with this one. I recently came across A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods and this has given me some great ideas.

It’s good to think about something in a new way.

 

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User Innovation and Security

Look out Jimmy!!!User Innovation by end users of IT systems is inevitable. For years this innovation has primarily happened on the end user device. There have been a number of reasons for this; flexibility, isolation, responsiveness, connectedness, tools, capacity, control, etc. Each of these have created a compelling User Innovation platform.

Most organisation don’t actually like their users innovating in this way because they think users should be “doing their job”. One of the levers that organisation pull when they are trying to get people to focus on “doing their job” is security; “you can’t do that because it’s against the security policy”. The “security policy” being the lever to get them to step back into line, but this doesn’t work because the need to innovate is strong.

Let me try and explain the reasons why I don’t think that management via a rules based security policy works.

Security is normally the responsibility of a central function who express this responsibility through a security policy. Users are responsible for following the security policy, not for good security. The policy that is defined needs to be applicable to everyone making it generic in nature and tends to be rules based “though shalt not send executable files across email”.

The combination of centralized responsibility and generic rules based policies put the end user in a situation where they don’t understand the real security issues and hence innovate around the policy in inappropriate ways.

Rules based policies then get embedded into the service that is manufactured for the end user. Because the User Innovator assumes that the rules have been embedded into the service they also assume that if they are allowed to do something that it’s not a security problem.

But the truth is, it’s not possible to embed the rules in all situations within the service. Lets take Internet based services as an example. How do you set boundaries on the whole Internet with a set of rules and how on earth do you embed those rules into the service that you deliver.

At the same time you limit what they can do within the organisation so that Innovators are more likely to innovate outside it.

The publishing of potentially sensitive corporate data on Google Calendar which has been uncovered this week is probably a good example of these issues. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for the problems, but one of the main ones has to be people’s lack of understanding of the security issues involved, their reliance upon the security boundaries set for them and the level of control placed upon them within the organisation.

User Innovators need to be embraced as people who are adding value, they then need to be given some responsibility to consider the risks of the innovations that they are undertaking. Sometimes this means physically protecting them. Sometimes this should mean educating them on the risks that they are about to face and providing them with mechanisms for mitigating those risks. User Innovators need to be taught how to undertake a risk assessment of their innovation. They are going to innovate, so we should help them to do it knowing the risks.

The User Innovators are not the enemy though, they are trying to innovate so that they can gain something and that something is normally a benefit. Their skills should, therefore, be harnessed to help answer the security problem that are changing every day. There are a number of ways of getting their significant expertise focused on a particular problem, but I think that’s a topic for another day.

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User Innovation and End User IT

Jimmy and Grandad take a trip to LondonI’ve been giving some thought, and just a little reading, to the concept of User Innovation and its impact on IT. Because we are talking about User Innovation my primary area of interest is with the End User devices and the services that they are provided with.

To start with it’s worth putting some form of definition around the phrase User Innovation. I’m primarily talking here about the phenomena researched by Eric von Hippel and documented in The Source of Innovation and Democratizing Innovation.

Perhaps the best way of defining it is to describe a personal experience. I use Flickr as a photo sharing site, when I first started using the site I noticed that there wasn’t a group for photographs of Lancashire, where I live. So I created one. Having created one I invited others I know to join it. Not long after I’d created the group Stu notices that the group has a strange URL and thinks that it would be great if it had a simple URL. What’s more Stu did a bit of research, worked out how to do it and gave me the instructions. So now Flickr has a Lancashire group with a nice simple URL (http://www.flickr.com/groups/lancashire/) where people share pictures almost every day.

There are two innovations in this example, the creation of the group and the change of its URL. Both of these innovations where undertaken by a User of the service, not by the Manufacturer of the service. I wasn’t 100% happy with the service as it was delivered to me by the Manufacturer, so I modified it. Fortunately Flickr has been built to encourage that kind of innovation, but more than that, the modification I made was immediately available to the whole community.

The alternative to User Innovation is Manufacturer Innovation. In Manufacturer Innovation it’s the person who is creating something to sell that undertakes the innovation. Manufacturer Innovation normally to follows the design, build, test, deploy process, with the requirements for the design phase coming from within the Manufacturer.

I have a lot of experience as a Manufacturer of End User Services (what used to be called Desktop Services). I (We) design a service and sell it to the people who are going to Use the service changes to the design are driven by the internal development process. 

For years there has been one primary driver for the development of these services – cost. This has included the cost of support as well as the cost of acquisition.

If you want to reduce the cost of acquisition then you need to make the delivery of a service highly automated and to automate something you need repeatability. If you want repeatability then you need uniformity. Delivering 1000 PC all the same is cheaper than delivering 1000 PC that are all different.

Capping the ongoing costs requires the perpetuation of that uniformity, but more than that, it requires simplicity. If you are going to maintain simplicity you need control.

Uniformity and control might cap costs, but they also stifle User Innovation. The need to innovate is strong, though, and Users of the service innovate anyway. They innovate outside the boundaries of the control whether that’s through Internet delivered services, or by utilising equipment outside the control of the standardised service (like the PC at home) or by finding loophole in the control.

So the costs still exist, they have just been moved, and probably increased by people working around the system.

On the flip-side of this debate is the need to protect User Innovators from themselves, but more about that another time.

 

Feeling a little older – ZX Spectrum makes 25

Jimmy and Grandad riding lowToday marks the 25th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum.

When I was at school I did most of my ‘O’ levels on a trusty ZX Spectrum, printing it out on a thermal printer and then sticking the bits of metallic paper to some real paper so the teachers could read it.

Knowing it is 25 years old makes me feel that little bit older .

Knowing that I have 2GB in my USB memory stick doesn’t make me too nostalgic for the days of fussy micro-tapes, but knowing how much we managed to do in 48KB does make me wonder whether we have used all of these extra circuits to their full potential.

 

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Blackberry on my Windows Mobile

Jimmy and Grandad take a trip to LondonIt seems that RIM are wanting to extend their footprint to Windows Mobile 6.

The interesting thing about this is that RIM aren’t porting the capability to a Windows Mobile type application. The software will run as a Virtual Blackberry on the device, this Virtual Blackberry will use the Blackberry interface, not the Windows Mobile interface.

I’ve used a Blackberry interface a little and a Windows Mobile 5 interface a lot. They are very different and I’m a little uncertain how people will feel switching between them.

 

Happy Hour is 9 to 5

Picnic by DerwentwaterI used last weeks holiday as an opportunity to read Happy Hour is 9 to 5, I was one of the fortunate ones who got a free copy in the Christmas give away. I was going to read it over the Christmas break, but circumstances overtook.

For anyone not familiar with this book it’s written by Alexander Kjerulf who goes by the job title of: Chief Happiness Officer.

The basic premise of this book is that happiness at work is a good thing for everyone, and that the opposite is also true. The book is a great holiday read without too much detailed analysis of research, but with loads of practical examples and comments.

The book contains a number of exercises to use to assess your own happiness at work and to direct you towards finding greater happiness. It also provides exercises for managers. My current position doesn’t include managing people, but I’m often in situations where I indirectly manage people, and certainly provide their motivation.

I’ve finished reading the book, but I haven’t got the exercise done yet. I need to do the exercise because there will have been little point in reading the book if I don’t.

Even before doing the exercises, though, I am aware that my own attitude needs some work especially if I am going to regain an attitude to work that isn’t “Meh” but is “Yay” (see this section). That means making some changes, which requires some planning and some action. It’s also closely linked to the research on My Brain from last year.

Not sure that the The Order of the Elephant idea translates to UK culture though, will have to think about that one:

“Kjaer Group, a Danish company that sells cars in developing nations, introduced The Order of the Elephant a few years back. It’s a huge plush toy that any employee can award to any other, along with an explanation of why that employee deserves The Order. The praisee gets the elephant for a couple of days, and at two-feet tall it’s hard to overlook if it’s standing on that person’s desk.

Other employees stopping by immediately notice the elephant and go, “Hey, you got the elephant. What’d you do?”, which of course means that the good stories and best practices get told and re-told many times. This is an excellent, simple and cheap way of enhancing learning and happiness at work.”

from the What makes us happy at work? section of the book.

I’ve certainly witnessed the observation on meetings though:

Psychological experiments can be very devious, and this one was certainly no exception. The focus was meetings and the format was simple: Groups of people were asked to reach agreement on a contentious topic.

Here’s the devious bit: Unbeknownst to the other participants, one member of the group was an actor hired by the researchers. The actor was told to speak first in the discussions. In half the experiments he would say something positive, while in the other half he would start by saying something critical. After that he simply participated in the discussion like the other group members.

The experiment showed that when the first thing said in the meeting was positive, the discussion turned out more constructive, and people listened more and were more likely to reach a consensus. When the first statement was critical, the mood became more hostile, people were more argumentative and consensus became less likely.

The researchers concluded that the way a meeting starts has a large impact upon the tone of the discussion and on whether or not the group will eventually reach a consensus.

from the What makes us happy at work? section of the book.

Big Brother Live is Watching Me

Up to where?I’ve always found it fascinating zooming around Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth looking at the amazing detail on famous land-marks. It was also interesting to look at the slightly blurry, but relatively old images of my own house. The privacy issues never really occurred to me, until today.

Today Microsoft Virtual Earth has had a whole load of new images and the pictures of my house are no longer blurry or that old. In the old images my garden was still a patch of grass making it at least 5 years old. The new picture shows my garden with all of the landscaping and the trampoline which was present to the kids (honest) 18 months ago.

It all feels a bit too close to home now. It’s especially disconcerting to think that someone can look at the front, the back and the sides.

The picture below shows the construction of a set of houses near us into which some friends have just moved. That makes the images a few months old, max.

I didn’t dare show the images of my house, far too embarrassing. 

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Get Ahead: Start with a Small Organisation

Jimmy and Grandad take a trip to LondonObservation of the day: People who start their working career in small organisations go further than people who start at the bottom of large organisations. People who start their career in growing small organisations go the furthest.

I’ve observed this phenomena a number of times, some of it within the Organisation where I work, some external.

There are a number of people within my own organisation who were outsourced into the organisation from a smaller organisation, or a small part of a large organisation. These people thrive in the new large organisation in a way that people from existing large organisations do not.

I’ve also noticed large organisations buy small organisations. Within a few years the senior management of the large organisation is dominated by people from the small organisation.

I’ve wondered for some time why this should be? I have come to some conclusions around experience.

The first conclusion is that it’s the breadth of experience that matters, not the depth of experience. People in small organisations need to be able to cover a number of roles, they can’t be a specialist in a small part of the operation. This breadth allows people from small organisation to understand the whole. In large organisations this holistic view immediately places them at an advantage over someone with a more narrow view.

The second conclusion is that it’s breadth of experience, not scale of experience that matters. Within a small organisation you get to understand a lot about many things but on a smaller scale. It would appear that scaling that experience up is easier than broadening the experience.

The next conclusion is that people from small organisations have far less respect for hierarchy than people brought up in larger organisations. If you have been in an Organisation where you know the Chairman and the Cleaner you realise that the difference between these people is very small. You’re also less likely to have a “not worthy” attitude when working with people more senior than you, something that they are likely to respect.

My advice to anyone thinking of starting out in a new career – start in a small organisation, it will work out much better in the long run.

My own experience is that I initially worked as a System Administrator for email systems before they were mainstream. This was in a large organisation, but a very small part of a large organisation. That experience put me in front of very senior people as well as shop-floor people trying to get the job done. This was in the days when we used to give people training courses on how to use a mouse. I was one of only 4 people who did what I did, it was a small organisation within the large organisation. During that time IT and email in particular exploded, businesses also became reliant upon IT. There are things that I haven’t done since those days which inform my understanding of customer today, some things haven’t changed that much. My broad experience within the small organisation still feeds my experience today, it was invaluable.

I have no scientific evidence to say these things, only personal experience. I suspect someone has done a study on it somewhere but I don’t have the time to go and find one right now. Even if I did go and find a study it wouldn’t be a fully fledged research of the area, it would be just me looking across the Internet trying to find someone to back up my own opinion. For now, though, personal observation will suffice.

Laptops finally overtake desktops – perhaps

Jimmy and Grandad take a trip to LondonIDC is predicting that:

“Portable PCs will represent more than 50% of all Client PCs worldwide in 2011”

It’s difficult to deduce from the report, but I assume that most of this transition will be driven by consumers rather than corporate purchasers. While enterprises are becoming more mobile, everyone I know is buying a portable device for their home. A portable device and a wireless LAN at home gives far more flexible access to the Internet which is the primary reason people seem to have a PC. The exception to this are the high-end gamers who still need a desktop for the graphics performance.

I’m sure I’ve heard these predictions before, though, and I’m not sure they are true this time either.

 

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