Category: User Experience

Social Networking – Changing Society

I’ve just sat down for tea (dinner if you are in the south of England or some other countries) with the family.Loch Awe

The topic of discussion this even was a story about a friend of my daughter who had been told off in school by here teacher.

What for I heard you asking?

For putting on here Facebook status: “I hate [the teacher]”

I’m sure that this little story is being played out with different characters and different technology all over the world but the essence is the same.

It’s a changing society in which we are all going to have to learn new skills and take different precautions.

It never would have happened in my day.

Writing and reading – getting down to it

Over recent years I’ve noticed a significant shift in my attention span. I’d like it to be getting longer but unfortunately it’s getting shorter. Island Hoping

There may be a reason for this; we recently discovered that the central heating boiler in our house had been incorrectly fitted and was doing its best to poison us all.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple.

I wonder whether it’s also a problem with the number of distractions that I now have available to me.

This week I decided to do something about the distractions.

One of the main distractions is my phone, it always seems to ring at the most inopportune times. This week I made a decision (please don’t tell anyone), I put my phone onto silent and waited to see what would happen.

I’ve written and read more in the last few days that I have for weeks.

I haven’t missed a single really important phone call – and there have been some.

The Lost Generation – Monday Morning Inspiration

This video speaks for itself, stick with it it’s worth the ending:

Make screens a priority

How long do you think that you spend looking at some form of screen every day?Wisley in the Autumn

Television? Laptop? Mobile phone?

According to the New York Times it’s likely to be longer than you think:

In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity.(Print ranks fourth.)

That’s right 8.5 hours a day.

Even excluding TVs that’s a lot of time, spent on screens at work. So why do we spend so little on the actual screen itself? It’s the primary tool that we use.

I’m constantly amazed when I go around offices to see the way that people are using and abusing the screen that they use all day, every day.

I’ve already written about multiple monitors. If I could communicate one thing to people that I know would radically change their productivity it would be that. But there is more to it than that.

In most organisations that I know screen purchases are tightly controlled. You have to be really special to have anything more than the standard screen. In many ways this control is completely disproportionate to the value that a good screen gives and the relative cost.

The number of people who have cracked or severely scratched mobile phone screens never  ceases to amaze.

There are times when I feel like going around with a cleaning cloth and revealing to people the wonders that lurk beneath. Go on, I dare you, clean a screen today.

Why play is vital — no matter your age

I love the TED talks, they are great way of hearing thought provoking ideas presented in a way that is always engaging.

This morning I listened to Stuart Brown talking about why play is vital – no matter your age.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Speaking as a British person, we have a strange relationship with play.

We have invented some of the worlds most popular sports and continue to create new ones, but business is a serious business. And yet, there’s still a lot of business getting done on the golf course.

We all grown when someone asks us to do an “ice breaker”, but I’ve seen people turn into children as they do.

I quite like the concept of the wearable meeting – you’ll need to watch to find out.

There are also interesting thought here for people who work from home and only interact with people on the phone.

What I tend to do is put the TED videos onto my iPod and listen to it in the gym. The audio is often enough, but you also get to sense when there is something interesting to see and can go and have a look.

Rebuilding reputation – search and connections

I’m about the shut down my old blog address and move exclusively to this one, so I thought I would write a little about my experiences.

Walla CragI’ve not been updating the other one for a while now, the traffic has mostly moved over because of the joy of RSS and Twitter.

What hasn’t moved over are a few search terms where I was quite prominent. These were relating to my posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary, Windows Server Single Instance Storage and most significantly all of the thinking about Brain Strength.

The posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary are largely obsolete, and the information on Single Instance Storage in Windows is very old now.

There are still a bucket load of internal links to fix, but I’ll get around to that in time.

It’s certainly not a seamless exercise, but it’s quite nice to go through it and know that my data is mostly portable.

Please make me one of these: Universal read count

Crossthwaite ViewsI see information in many streams, email, IM, twitter, RSS reader, etc. Unfortunately my brain isn’t good enough to remember everything that I have already read so I regularly find myself going to the same piece of information more than once.

Within each stream I’m unlikely to go back more than once because I get visual indicators that I have already read it. The main problem is between streams. That’s not to say, though, that people won’t send me the same piece of information more than once in the same stream.

I’d quite like a service that handled the read status for me, across all of the streams.

I should get a visual indicator that a link in twitter points to the same content as the blog post in my RSS reader, and they should both show anything that I have already consumed from a browser. Oh, and while I’m at it, it needs to do that across any one of the devices that I’m likely to use, and it needs to handle shortened urls.

My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) does a reasonably good job of keeping the read count in-synch across devices, but nothing between streams.

What I am looking for is to be able to mark parts of the Internet as “read”.

I’d also like this status consolidation capability to be searchable, especially by date. I am reasonably good at remembering when I read something, but not so great at remembering where I read it.

I’m sure there are a load more functional requirements that I would surface if I had time to think about it, but for now, this will do.

Has anyone done anything like this?

Over-specification

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0One of my tools is a Logitech Cordless Presenter. I really like this device. It enables me to stand and present and to ignore the laptop and keep the engagement on me. This device has nine buttons – and is over-specified.

For some people it might be perfectly specified, but for me it is over-specified. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday I travelled to the south of England via a customers corporate jet (yes, I know that sounds very fancy, but it isn’t believe me). Even though this is effectively a private flight it still has to abide by all of the rules and regulations that a commercial flight would, the same restricted material, the same security checks, the same hand luggage restrictions. That’s where the problem comes in, the Logitech Cordless Presenter has a laser pointer, and lasers are not allowed in hand luggage.

I’m sure that a laser point is really useful to some people – but I never use one. The type of presentation that I give doesn’t require such a thing (to be honest I’m not a fan of people who do).

As I join the flight reasonably early in the morning the location of the Presenter is not high on my list of priorities. A couple of times now, most recently yesterday, I have had my bag checked on the far side of security and had to relinquish the Presenter to security. It sits in my bag for those occasions when I want to use it.

Even though it’s only nine buttons, this one button makes the Presenter over-specified.

The keyboard in front of me has lots of buttons on it. I know which ones I use because they are clean and shinny, there are an awful lot that are dull and dusty. Why on earth would I want a “Shopping” button? The keyboard is over-specified.

I’ve recently started using TweetDeck for Twitter. It’s a really nice twitter client. Today I updated to a new version and got, in return, a few more buttons. I’m highly unlikely to ever use these buttons. TweetDeck had the capabilities I required, it now has some capabilities I don’t. TweetDeck is in danger of becoming over-specified.

Over-specification is a huge problem in IT. People ask for more and more features which have less and less value. If they were high value it’s likely people would have thought of them early in the lifecycle – the further along the road you get the less likely it is that you are adding something of really significant value.

What’s even worse though, is that the new features become diversionary, particularly in the development cycle. I’m currently working on a number of large programmes where we are in danger of focussing on the peripheral requirements and not the core capabilities. People will get something new and shiny, but not something that makes a real difference to how they work.

Someone once told me a story about a spider that lived up in the eaves of a garage.

One day the spider noticed that there were lots of nice juicy bugs down on the ground, so he decided to lower himself down. He started by building a simple web to see how he got on. This web was a very successful web and the spider decided to extend a little further to see whether he could be even more successful.

Bit-by-bit he extended to form a whole complex of webs that kept him supplied with more bugs than he could have ever imagined.

One day he was walking around his vast abode when he noticed this rather scruffily and dusty looking strand leading up into the eaves above. Seeing all of the webs around him he decided that he no longer needed this connection with his past. He climbed up onto the webs and rid himself of this piece of history with a single snip.

No sooner had he snipped than the web below him started to collapse, trapping his feet. Further down he sank deeper into the web. Before he knew it he was completely engulfed, with no way out. There he lay until he starved to death.

The spider took his focus off his foundations, we must be careful that we don;t do the same.

My Tools: Lotus Notes

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEver since I started using Wakoopa something has been nagging away at me. Sitting at number 3 of my most used applications has been a tool that I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to write about – Lotus Notes.

In this week of Lotusphere I’ve finally decided that I can’t avoid it anymore.

But why to reticent?

The primary reason is that I have a very mature relationship with Notes, I’ve been using it since version 2 (now on version 8+) and the relationship has not always been a good one. It has been an incredibly powerful tool helping me to achieve things that I couldn’t have done in any other way. A number of years ago (too many to count actually) I was working with a team and we were processing a lot of paper forms, Notes enabled us to automate the process quite quickly and very efficiently. But that was some time ago.

For me Notes (and Domino) is an application development platform, that happens to also do a reasonable job as a personal information tool. The problem is, these days, I only use it as a personal information tool. All of the things I used to do on Notes have pretty much gone away, being replaced by portal type tools. Some of these portal sites are little more than web enabled Domino applications, but I’m not using Notes to access them.

So that leaves my relationship with Notes as a “personal information tool” relationship, and it’s in these capabilities that my love-hate experience is the most acute.

I love the ability to access my email, calendar and tasks across a firewall boundary, something that Notes could do long before Outlook.

I hate the lack of trust I still have in the calendar. This week I tried to delete an item, got an error message, went to the IBM support site to find an answer. The answer, and I paraphrase – get stuffed. The problem is, this is a reoccurring appointment which I can’t delete and lasts almost forever. I have never been able to trust my Notes calendar.

I love the enhancements to the Notes 8+ interface. I especially like the ability to see all of the emails in a thread from within the email.

I hate the way that flagging works and the document properties dialogue.

I could carry on, like I say this is an old relationship.

Whether Notes is winning market share or loosing against Exchange is, in my opinion, irrelevant. As an application platform it’s loosing to the web. Both Exchange and Notes are also going to loose to the web in the long run (even if they persist at the back-end) for email, calendaring and tasks.

So I’ve done it, I’ve written about one of the oldest tools in my kitbag. A tool that I think will be around for a good while yet, but only because it’s not easy to get rid of. If I was starting a business today – I wouldn’t start from here.

My Tools: At least 94 of them

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI was starting to think that the My Tools series was running out of steam so I thought I would do some analysis on how much I use the various tools. My chosen tool for this is wakoopa.

I’ve only been running it for a few days and I’ve already accessed 94 different applications. Considering that I’ve written less than 20 articles and some of them were about parts of applications, or physical tools I clearly have a long way to go before I really cover the full set of tools that I really use.

If you want to look at my usage profile it’s here.

On a lighter note, look out for something happening on the Jimmy and Grandad front, you will be shocked.

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Returning to work: Needing more context

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEvery time I return from a break I think about writing this post – and then forget.

Returning from a break can be a very frustrating experience for IT users and one of the main reasons for that is that all of those so-called scheduled tasks have been queuing up in the infrastructure waiting for you to plug-in or turn on.

There can be quite a number of them: system updates, password expiry, anti-virus updates, password expiry, application updates, browser updates, etc.

The main challenge here is that the activities aren’t really “scheduled”, they are just set by a simple daily, weekly, monthly elapsed agenda without any context. Any break in the system being online means that the activities are just queued up waiting to happen.

Personally, the ones that I find most frustrating are the password expiry ones. You always have a lot to think about when you return from a break, thinking about new passwords is one that you shouldn’t really be burdened with. What I find worse are the passwords that expired just before I went on holiday.

It can’t beyond us to do this in a less intrusive way. We only have to understand the context a bit better and schedule appropriately.