Category: User Experience

I need a new bag

Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI need a new bag, the one I’ve got at the moment is falling apart. I made a massive mistake and went for a cheap option. This one is the third bag, the first two went back with broken zips in the first few days of owning them, this one has lasted a little longer but not much.

Now I’m a bit weary of investing my money in another dud, so I thought I would ask that great big world out there.

What am I looking for?

  • It needs to look good in the office.
  • Nothing too dull, but nothing too bright.
  • It needs to take a 15” laptop.
  • I move around quite a lot so need to be able to slot the laptop in and out quite quickly.
  • I always surprise myself with how much paper I carry around but I’m not looking for a mobile office.
  • I carry stuff too – iPod, pens, power packs, cables, USB sticks, etc.
  • I occasionally walk quite a way with the bag so it needs to be comfortable.
  • The bag itself shouldn’t be too heavy – if I’m going to carry weight I want it to be in the stuff that I need not in the bag (I picked up a Swiss-army bag at the weekend and it was so heavy I put it straight back down again).
  • It needs to be robust – I don’t want to buy another one in another few months.
  • It needs to be waterproof – I live in England.
  • I don’t really want lots of pockets – I’m not organised enough to put things in the same place every time so lots of pockets just become annoying.
  • I quite like to be unusual so would look favourably on something a bit quirky.
  • I’m not Roman Abromovich so it needs to be a sensible price.

I tend to prefer messenger style bags, although I would prefer a vertical style one over a horizontal style one. I’ve never seen a really stylish backpack bag, but could be persuaded.

A couple of sample things that look good to me.

Anyone tried any of these bags?
Does anyone out there have any other recommendations for me?

Help me, please, I’m in danger of becoming a bag fetishist..

My Tools: Word – CTRL+Shift+N

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallCTRL+Shift+N does something incredibly simple – it sets the style of the selected text to “Normal”. As simple as that.

It’s a key combination that I like to use every day, but seems to be one that other people don’t use much at all. How do I know other people don’t use it – templates.

Nearly every template I see has the “Normal” style configured as something different to the main style of the document. One of the first things I do is to make them the same.

I suspect that this suggests another thing – people don’t use keyboard shortcuts, which certainly means that they are working very inefficiently.

Technorati tags:

Why Poor Performance is such a Productivity Killer

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI am struggling with a system today that is going slow. It’s nothing unusual this particular system is always slow, or at least I perceive it to be slow. In other words, it works slower that I would like it to – but worse than that, it works slower than my attention can sustain.

I’m now multi-tasking – I’m writing this in the seconds in-between this particular system responding. I’ve lost attention on my primary task, which is to interact with the slow system and I’ve moved onto a secondary task; writing this blog.

Everyone should know that multi-tasking is not the most efficient way of doing anything, but I’ve fallen into the trap and my attention has now completely gone. It happens like this:

  • Interact with system – click.
  • Wait a few seconds.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait a few seconds – get bored, check Twitter.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on Twitter.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds – already expect a delay, check FeedDemon for updates, see an interesting one, read it.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on FeedDemon.
  • I notice system has come back – take a few seconds to remember what the next step was.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds again, start to write post, also try to keep an eye on the system coming back but I’m not very good at it. Now only writing blog post because I can do that without any waits or interruptions. Not doing blog writing particularly well either.
  • Look back at the system after several minutes, notice that it has come back. It’s probably been waiting for minutes but my attention is completely gone.
  • Realise that I’m not doing what I should be doing so agree with myself that I am going to go and finish the primary thing that I should be doing. Struggle to focus on it because my mind has got into a groove on the blog post.
  • Give up and go back to the post. Think that if I get it finished I will be able to refocus on the job at hand.

This type of attention conflict is completely destructive to my productivity. I don’t get any of the tasks done and feel guilty for loosing focus on the things I should be doing. In many ways it would be better that the system was unavailable than running slow. I’d rather focus on one thing and be completing that than trying to do multiple things poorly but it’s just not engaging enough to keep my attention.

Working, as I do, in IT service design and management most customers primarily contract in terms of availability. The system must be available all of the time. If the impact of performance can be even more damaging than lack of availability – perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing?

Perhaps I just have a very short attention?

Here’s to the crazy ones

Anyone feel a little crazy today – I must admit I am.

I’m sure that most of us can think of someone who this video really applies to. Make the most of them they are real treasures.

Yes, I know, no posting for weeks and then three in a day. Perhaps my muse has come back.

Conference call details: when the logical order isn't the logical order

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI 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.

My Tools: Logitech Cordless Presenter

Jimmy does technologyI’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:

  • Forward and backward buttons which take me forward and backward through a presentation.
  • F5/esc button which allows me to start and end a presentation.
  • Black screen button that allows me to get people’s attention back.
  • Volume up and volume down. I’m not often presenting video or audio, but when I do it’s great to be able to adjust the volume.

The Presenter also has a couple of features that I rarely use.

  • Laser pointer – I tend to use my finger to point rather than to use a laser pointer. If people are near enough to see the laser dot, they ought to be near enough to work out where my finger is pointing. The other challenge with the laser pointer is that it causes me problems with airport check-in, a laser pointer cannot be carried within hand luggage. It seems a bit strange to check-in a single object that fits in your hand.
  • Timer – There is a timer on the device that you can set in increments of 5 mins. When the time is reached the device vibrates. I’ve tried using it, but the device only vibrates once, and I’ve actually missed it a couple of times. It doesn’t really vibrate enough for me to notice it.

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.

Technorati tags: , ,

Seth Goblin: "You need to increase your value"

Jimmy and GrandadSometimes 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.

Wordle – a little diversion

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.

The death of the "classical geeks"

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.

My Tools: BlackBerry 8800

Jimmy does BlackBerryYes, 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:

  • The email capabilities are great; now that I have become reasonably efficient with the keyboard. There’s a story behind that, but it can wait for another time. I tend to only use it for short emails, but try to make the short emails meaningful all the same. I find that some others just respond because they think that there is a need to respond, this makes them respond with little meaning.
  • Our internal SameTime system is integrated with the Enterprise Messenger and that is a great experience for such a small form factor. The status code are quite limited though, and that can be a problem (active, away, do not disturb). This capability has been of the most use during meetings when I need to clarify something with someone outside the meeting.
  • I use twitterberry to keep up to speed with twitter. I suspect that 50% of my posts on twitter are from my BlackBerry. I keep getting caught out by this though, because others are reading my posts they ask me questions that I’m not expecting as soon as I walk in the room.
  • The voice dialling capability is my preferred method of dialling, especially when I am in the car. My experience is that it’s very accurate for my contact list which is just short of 100 people, I’m not sure whether that would degrade with more contacts. I love it even more now I have found the lady with the English accent and I no longer have to say “mobil” rather than “mobile”.
  • I don’t use voice dialling in the office, that will definitely get you some funny looks.
  • My preference for mapping is the Google Earth capability. I find that it downloads the images faster than the built in maps.
  • I sometimes use the inbuilt browser, and sometimes use Opera Mini. The difference is in the site that I am wanting to access. Opera Mini gives a really good approximation of the way the page would look on a larger screen. The inbuilt browser gives you a more compact representation.
  • NewsGator Go! acts as a supplement to FeedDemon, but the grazing experience isn’t as good, but much of that is a form factor issue rather than an application issue. The power here is that it’s using the same synchronisation engine.
  • I don’t use to-do at all, not for technical reasons, because I prefer to mange my tasks via bits of dead-tree media.
  • I don’t use many of the media capabilities, because I find that my iPod gives me such a good experience that I’m not sure that I want to operate two different media devices.
  • I regularly use the key on the top with the power symbol on it. I believe that this button is an optional extra on some peoples devices, or at least you would think it was by the number of times they actually turn it off.

I’ll write some more another time about some of the foibles that annoy.

Taking Technology Away

Jimmy and Grandad take in the sights at BradfordFor 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.

  • Tablets – another type of device for IT to manage, but what’s the real tangible value?
  • RSS – another set of tools to manage and loads of data all over the place, but what’s the real tangible value?
  • Web 2.0 – stuff that IT can’t even control, but what’s the real tangible value?
  • iPhone – far to sexy for corporate IT, but what’s the real tangible value?

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.

A Walk Around RydalIt 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.

Video: The Voicemail (About Good Presentations)

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?

Technorati tags: