The first lecture I sat in on at Big Design '09 was "What Makes The Click" with Dr. Susan Weinchenk. She was a psychology expert that walked the audience through understanding several quirks of the human brain and how to take advantage of that in design web applications. A few points she made:
1. Fear of Loss - The most primitive parts of our brain are more concerned about losing something we have than gaining something we don't have. This can be exploited by offering a product with all the features and letting the buyer remove them rather than giving them a base model and letting them add features. In the latter example, they'd be reluctant to lose the money for the upgrade.
2. The Bystander Effect - When placed in an uncertain situation ("which item should I buy?!") people tend to become followers. This is leveraged with user testimonials and buyer reviews.
At the end of the talk, I felt (as a customer) like I was let in on a secret I wasn't supposed to know about. Like walking in on a butcher while he's making sausages. Knowing your being manipulated and pulled in is such a turn-off, even when it's the subject of a lecture.
I chuckled thinking about what it would look like if we used these principles in the UI for the F-35. "An unknown entity has been detected. Click here if you want to learn more..."
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Big Design Intro
This summer I'm taking a course in Service Oriented Computing. As a cold opener to the course, my class attended "Big Design '09" at SMU. This was an all-day conference that had multiple tracks talking about UX as it relates to software. What UX was they never said, but 10 hours of context clues makes me think it stood for "User Experience"
I'll save my over-all impressions for the end. What follows will be my summaries and impressions of each seminar I attended.
The Keynote Plenary was given by Norm Cox on "The UX Landscape" (again, never said what UX was :P) Norm gave a very interesting autobiography on his work with early computers using bitmap displays with the operating system. His work involved creating what could be thought of as the first desktop with icons. One of his most profound comments was that IBM recognized early on that the user interface is the most valuable touch-point between a user (customer) and the product.
At one point he talked about contracting with PizzaHut to overhaul their back-office system that instructed employees on how to build a pizza. This was extended to ensuring that when an order is taken, it's taken correctly. Although he didn't touch on it, this new UI was so simple that PizzaHut used it when they developed a web-service for ordering a pizza on-line. I know because I did that very thing not 3 days before the show. I remember thinking at the time, "This is a great setup they have here!"
Take-away points from his speech:
1. Beware the limitations of titles.
2. Be a 'jack of many (ui) titles, master of some"
3. Elevate and think strategically
4. Take advantage of opportunities.
I'll save my over-all impressions for the end. What follows will be my summaries and impressions of each seminar I attended.
The Keynote Plenary was given by Norm Cox on "The UX Landscape" (again, never said what UX was :P) Norm gave a very interesting autobiography on his work with early computers using bitmap displays with the operating system. His work involved creating what could be thought of as the first desktop with icons. One of his most profound comments was that IBM recognized early on that the user interface is the most valuable touch-point between a user (customer) and the product.
At one point he talked about contracting with PizzaHut to overhaul their back-office system that instructed employees on how to build a pizza. This was extended to ensuring that when an order is taken, it's taken correctly. Although he didn't touch on it, this new UI was so simple that PizzaHut used it when they developed a web-service for ordering a pizza on-line. I know because I did that very thing not 3 days before the show. I remember thinking at the time, "This is a great setup they have here!"
Take-away points from his speech:
1. Beware the limitations of titles.
2. Be a 'jack of many (ui) titles, master of some"
3. Elevate and think strategically
4. Take advantage of opportunities.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Striving for a Charlie Brown Christmas
One of the top five descriptions I'd use to describe my paternal grandfather is that he loved Charles Shultz's Peanuts comic strip. As such, I remember watching a "Charlie Brown Christmas" at an early age. As a child, there's always that initial excitement of watching a cartoon, (especially at the grandparents ;)) but I distintively remember being disappointed. The plot didn't make sense, the animation was horrible, and the humor was over my head. And that was probably the last time I watched it in its entirety until this week. It is quite possibly the best seasonal movie I've ever seen. If my mere recommendation of it now has your interest peaked, I found it all on YouTube.
For the last three or four years Christmas has been a really hard time of year for me. I feel wound up and anxious and trying to think of twenty things twenty people can get me is frustrating and feels somehow wrong. The cartoon addresses this in its opening line -
Charlie Brown tries to busy himself with holiday activities in the form of directing a Christmas play. I wish they would have developed the story on this Christmas play since it included an inn keeper, a Christmas Queen, and easy jazz music... Charlie Brown takes his job very seriously and becomes a bit of a task masker - the rest of the kids just want to dance to the jazz. Charlie Brown then tries to make it better with the infamous "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" to which he is richly chastized. At his wits end, he cries out for someone, ANYONE, to explain the meaning of Christmas to which Linus gives his epic monologue:
I hope if you find yourself striving for things or activities this time of year, you slow down and remember the reason for the season. ;)
For the last three or four years Christmas has been a really hard time of year for me. I feel wound up and anxious and trying to think of twenty things twenty people can get me is frustrating and feels somehow wrong. The cartoon addresses this in its opening line -
"I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and receiving Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed."
Charlie Brown tries to busy himself with holiday activities in the form of directing a Christmas play. I wish they would have developed the story on this Christmas play since it included an inn keeper, a Christmas Queen, and easy jazz music... Charlie Brown takes his job very seriously and becomes a bit of a task masker - the rest of the kids just want to dance to the jazz. Charlie Brown then tries to make it better with the infamous "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" to which he is richly chastized. At his wits end, he cries out for someone, ANYONE, to explain the meaning of Christmas to which Linus gives his epic monologue:
I hope if you find yourself striving for things or activities this time of year, you slow down and remember the reason for the season. ;)
Monday, October 27, 2008
The New Love of My Life!
I'd like you all to meet Jonathan Reagan Faulk! He's due a full month earlier than thought! March 11. The technician says he looks very healthy - perfect brain, perfect spine, perfect stomach, perfect liver, and perfect kidneys. He's got a perfect.... err.... something else too! ;)
In the shots below Jonny is laying on his back with his head on the right side.
In this picture he raised his hand to his mouth...
In the shots below Jonny is laying on his back with his head on the right side.
In this picture he raised his hand to his mouth...
This final shot is looking up between his legs...
I'm going to have a son!!!
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Got Change For a Million?
If you've been to downtown Fort Worth on the weekends, chances are you've encountered a Christian organization handing out leaflets with a million-dollar bill on the front. If I recall correctly, they tie the question of where you go when you die with 'the million dollar question.' In the half-dozen times I've been to Sun Dance Square, I think I've seen them 3 or 4 times.
Turns out someone in Pennsylvania tried to make change with one of their leaflets at a grocery store. Here's the link.
Any idiot knows you have to go to the Federal Reserve to make change with your Clevelands.
Turns out someone in Pennsylvania tried to make change with one of their leaflets at a grocery store. Here's the link.
Any idiot knows you have to go to the Federal Reserve to make change with your Clevelands.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
The Intersection of School and Work
This week I've become very aware of how much my college classes had an impact in my professional life. Not my lecture classes mind you. Everything I needed from lectures I learned in the first year-and-a-half. No, it's the five project labs I had in the final years that made the deepest professional impact.
For those not in the know, Project Lab began with the instructor organizing us into groups and assigning semester-long projects, (though in later years we got to choose our teams and projects.) Each project involved designing and building some electrical device such as an electronic blood-pressure reading gadget. The projects also had an attached professor that served as the customer/advisor. We would develop a semester-long schedule and budget and then execute it with the professor signing off on our weekly progress. The majority of our time, though, was spent making power-point presentations (how accurate is that to professional life?!) and present them to the course instructor and our peers, one after another for three hour stints which can only be described as the death-march of academia.
The toughest part by far, was the firing line that came at the end. Each presenter would end with the obligatory, "are there any questions" and then the real learning would begin. The instructor would typically ask the presenter to go back to the first slide and we'd work through the presentation nit-picking every fault in the presentation. Although in retrospect this taught me the most, at the time it was sheer torture.
"Blue text on a black background means only the first row of your audience can read that, Mr. Wetz."
"There's too much information on this slide"
"There's not enough information on this slide"
"You call that a voltage divider? What have you been doing for the last three years of your life that would make you think that?"
“So you’re going to use an unsigned integer to store an angle between -pi/6 and +pi/6?”
One time a person had a picture of red and green wires he had twisted together to reduce the impedance of some network device. During the 'question time' the professor released both barrels on him for using "two of the same colored wire". "By doing so, every time you pull this out to work on it you've got to ohm out both ends to make sure you've got the right ones. You should have used two different colors!" Like good sheep the presenter and the entire class of about thirty sat there quietly taking this. Finally the presenter, at his whit’s end, did the unspeakable and said, "but sir, these are two different colors - they're red and green!" to which the instructor replied, "Oh... I guess I should inform you I'm color-blind."
In the final two project labs, the instructor raised the ante by announcing part of our grade would be determined by our active participation during the question time. Rather than the presenter being thrown to a great white shark at the end of their presentation, he would now be thrown to a great white shark and a school of piranhas.
Again, I did the most learning here, but it turned you into a person that you didn’t want to look at in the mirror!
I bring all this up because this week groups at work have been presenting their results of a month-long development. During the times I was presenting, I found that I was calm during the moments I would speak, but the anxiety wouldn’t build until I’d get closer to the “Any Questions” slide. In addition, I find that anytime a manager asks a question, I find myself wrapping it in a ‘bail-out clause” in case I’m wrong – “Well, last time I checked…” or “I was under the impression…” Thanks to project lab, I think I’ve been conditioned to believe that any question from an authority figure is just to test me and bring me down a notch. I need to either become a resident expert (not a bad thing) on whatever it is I’m talking about, or at least have the gumption to assert myself with confidence.
In addition, yesterday a person posted an object model diagram that was riddled, I MEAN RIDDLED, with errors! After confirming that I hadn’t fallen into some twilight zone or I wasn’t the center of a prank of conspiratorial proportions, everything from project lab was screaming, “Be the first to say something! You’ve got this!” And yet the other, wiser half of me was saying, “You’ve got a half-dozen managers and another half-dozen senior developers in here, surely they’ll point it out.” Yet NOONE did. We sat there in complete silence looking at the biggest travesty to software engineering and didn’t correct this error!
I don’t think I like the idea of “a time and a place” to correct programming errors. Or things that are Worse Than Failure - things that technically compile and run, but do so in such a wrong manner that it self-induces a face-five.
Software Engineers and co-workers, what do you think?
For those not in the know, Project Lab began with the instructor organizing us into groups and assigning semester-long projects, (though in later years we got to choose our teams and projects.) Each project involved designing and building some electrical device such as an electronic blood-pressure reading gadget. The projects also had an attached professor that served as the customer/advisor. We would develop a semester-long schedule and budget and then execute it with the professor signing off on our weekly progress. The majority of our time, though, was spent making power-point presentations (how accurate is that to professional life?!) and present them to the course instructor and our peers, one after another for three hour stints which can only be described as the death-march of academia.
The toughest part by far, was the firing line that came at the end. Each presenter would end with the obligatory, "are there any questions" and then the real learning would begin. The instructor would typically ask the presenter to go back to the first slide and we'd work through the presentation nit-picking every fault in the presentation. Although in retrospect this taught me the most, at the time it was sheer torture.
"Blue text on a black background means only the first row of your audience can read that, Mr. Wetz."
"There's too much information on this slide"
"There's not enough information on this slide"
"You call that a voltage divider? What have you been doing for the last three years of your life that would make you think that?"
“So you’re going to use an unsigned integer to store an angle between -pi/6 and +pi/6?”
One time a person had a picture of red and green wires he had twisted together to reduce the impedance of some network device. During the 'question time' the professor released both barrels on him for using "two of the same colored wire". "By doing so, every time you pull this out to work on it you've got to ohm out both ends to make sure you've got the right ones. You should have used two different colors!" Like good sheep the presenter and the entire class of about thirty sat there quietly taking this. Finally the presenter, at his whit’s end, did the unspeakable and said, "but sir, these are two different colors - they're red and green!" to which the instructor replied, "Oh... I guess I should inform you I'm color-blind."
In the final two project labs, the instructor raised the ante by announcing part of our grade would be determined by our active participation during the question time. Rather than the presenter being thrown to a great white shark at the end of their presentation, he would now be thrown to a great white shark and a school of piranhas.
Again, I did the most learning here, but it turned you into a person that you didn’t want to look at in the mirror!
I bring all this up because this week groups at work have been presenting their results of a month-long development. During the times I was presenting, I found that I was calm during the moments I would speak, but the anxiety wouldn’t build until I’d get closer to the “Any Questions” slide. In addition, I find that anytime a manager asks a question, I find myself wrapping it in a ‘bail-out clause” in case I’m wrong – “Well, last time I checked…” or “I was under the impression…” Thanks to project lab, I think I’ve been conditioned to believe that any question from an authority figure is just to test me and bring me down a notch. I need to either become a resident expert (not a bad thing) on whatever it is I’m talking about, or at least have the gumption to assert myself with confidence.
In addition, yesterday a person posted an object model diagram that was riddled, I MEAN RIDDLED, with errors! After confirming that I hadn’t fallen into some twilight zone or I wasn’t the center of a prank of conspiratorial proportions, everything from project lab was screaming, “Be the first to say something! You’ve got this!” And yet the other, wiser half of me was saying, “You’ve got a half-dozen managers and another half-dozen senior developers in here, surely they’ll point it out.” Yet NOONE did. We sat there in complete silence looking at the biggest travesty to software engineering and didn’t correct this error!
I don’t think I like the idea of “a time and a place” to correct programming errors. Or things that are Worse Than Failure - things that technically compile and run, but do so in such a wrong manner that it self-induces a face-five.
Software Engineers and co-workers, what do you think?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)