I imagine that most of the people that come across my blog are more likely to be part of the San Francisco tech scene than they are part of the, well, non-tech scene. If you’re following the current debate over whether you should love San Francisco or leave San Francisco, than you may have come across Mat Honan’s blog post “Are You Going to San Francisco”. In his article, he makes a point to tell everyone to Make Real Friends:
“This only applies to people working in the Internet and technology sectors, but you may be amazed to discover that most people in the city work in fields that have nothing to do with the Internet. It’s fantastic to have friends in the industry. You’ll have shared interests and they’ll always get your meme-of-the-day jokes. But if most of your friends work in the same field you do, that’s a little boring, right? Try to branch out. This is a city of people from all over the world, doing all sorts of interesting things. Get to know them. ”
So here’s your chance: City of Dream’s 5th Annual – SF1900 – A Night at the Barbary Coast. I can expound the virtues of City of Dreams, but I have already done that previously. It’s a great organization, and I admire everyone of the members and friends I’ve met through my roommate and the organization. But for those of you not familiar with City of Dreams, this event is the best way to get an introduction! Not only can you fraternize with people outside of the (tech) industry, you’re going to find better male-to-female ratios than your average tech event (quit complaining!), and you can gamble the night away for a good cause. If you don’t believe me just yet, take a look at last year’s photo site. Now go buy your ticket!
My Roommate and I Looking Snappy
Details
WHEN: Thursday, November 12th, 2009 7pm – 12:30am.
WHERE: The Bently Reserve (The old Federal building, 301 Battery St.)
WHAT: Annual Fundraising Gala for City of Dreams
THEME: Think San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, circa 1900.
Preview the event’s AH-mazing silent auction here!
Katie came to visit me in August 2009. She helped herself to my city of 4 years so I helped myself to her images. Through her lens, the city refreshes in my eyes.
Like any person in your life, a city cannot be all things to you through thick and thin. As much as I love this city, after 4 years, I’m looking to shake things up. I set sail very soon, stay tuned.
Produced by: Lindsay Tabas
Photos by: Katie Delaney
Song: Signs by Bloc Party (buy on iTunes)
My cousin Alexandra ran into an entertainment industry snafu earlier this year when an uncredited appearance on Lost gave the tv show’s internet fans free reigns to guess her name. Unofficial credits began appearing on the photographer’s flickr photos, then TV Guide and, finally, on Lostpedia entries in English, and Spanish. When she realized that a search of Alexandra Tobas wielded more content than a search of her correctly spelled name, Alexandra Tabas (with an ‘a’), she called me for help. We did a bit of troubleshooting on her IMDB page, and on each Lostpedia entry. I then did a ‘whois’ on her domain name. She owned her domain name and didn’t have anything up yet! This is a tidbit for everyone out there – if you do not like your search results, you only have yourself to blame if you do not have a site up under www.yourname.com.
While I do not have time to build her an entire portfolio right now, I went ahead and put up a simple page using the jQuery Cycle Plugin. This plugin is an excellent way to mimic Flash objects without having to actually use Flash. I never learned to use Flash seriously because it is a black box to search engines, although I’ve heard this has changed in recent years. If this is old news, the new headlines are reporting that Flash uses unregulated cookies and is invading our privacy, which means I’m still staying away from it with a ten foot pole. Many web designers hate Flash on similar principles, if not just for the sole reason that there is this misnomer that your website, brand or image is somehow cool because you use a Flash intro on your site. Flash is fun to play with, but not necessarily the tool you want to use for heavy lifting.
That being said, jQuery Cycle Plugin is about the easiest thing you can use to add some pizzazz to your site. In about three easy steps:
Create a <div class=”pics”> and list your <img> within that div tag. Make sure to specify each images height and width, and include an alt value, not just to be xhtml compliant, but because you want to add extra, search-able text, to your site.
Set the height and width of your .pics class in your css. Make sure they are big enough to hold each image.
The plugin’s demo site is super easy to follow for any beginner, and if you want to get fancier, you can change your transition type in your script. I will definitely be using this plugin for my own portfolio in the future!
A Heuristic Evaluation is a usability inspection method performed systematically; it is traditionally part of an iterative UI development process and an alternative to user testing. For this project, an evaluation was performed with all employees within the company. We used the heuristics more loosely to guide discussion around the major functional areas of the product.
The goals of a heuristic evaluation are:
To find usability problems, both major and minor
To judge the software’s compliance with recognized usability principles
The discussion elicited many ideas and visions for how the product can accommodate its vast client needs. The largest benefit was the consensus building and idea trading taking place between colleagues from different departments within the company.
Why Perform a Heuristic Evaluation of Your Product?
A Heuristic Evaluation project is the first step in evaluating an existing product’s strengths and weaknesses, and will support brainstorming within a company on improvements for the next version. The primary outcome of the project is a compiled design evaluation that includes new feature proposals and high level design principles. The secondary outcomes of this type of project is to unite the different business units of the company, promote creativity and forward thinking, and build a shared sense of team and common goals. A tertiary benefit, which should be part of every company’s knowledge management efforts, includes hard-coding employee domain expertise so that in the event of anyone’s departure, this knowledge remains an asset to the company, and does not walk away with the employee. We may also include education as a benefit, in that more team members grasp basic usability principles that they can carry with them as they embark on features and bug fixes that don’t have time to be reviewed by a designer or analyst.
Background
In April 2008, I was the first trained “any role”* that sat between the client and the software development team. The product has sailed by for the previous 5 years because it was the only web-based SAAS product on the market in its industry. When you have that type of advantage, little effort is required to retain customers. That means that features were poorly implemented and based on only a few loud clients’ requests, the sales team was allowed to oversell the product, and the customer support team was left to handle dissatisfied users. All of this, after five years, left the majority of development resources stuck fighting fires, rather than building a world-class, scalable application. It was also clear that there was a breadth of domain expertise from all parts of the company, but little time to share that knowledge, nor build up from it.
After the first 6 months at work, I lobbied the CTO and the rest of the management team to allow me to collect our company’s knowledge by running a Heuristic Evaluation on our out-of-the-box product. Not only would I be able to hard-code this knowledge as a company asset, I would be able to learn more from my co-workers in order to build better features and modules, as well as work towards Product 2.0.
Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
Help and Documentation
Methodology
Over a two week period, I held 8 team meetings. The company was divided into 4 groups for the first week, and a different 4 groups for the second week. Each group (for each week) was made up of participants that had varied roles and expertise within the organization. For example, one group had a junior and senior programmer, a customer support associate, a trainer, and a sales associate. The idea was to build groups with employees that may not normally trade ideas about the product.
During each 1 hour meeting, a different functional area was the focus. One group looked at scheduling, while another looked at invoicing, and so on. At the beginning of each meeting, we reviewed Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics (listed below). We then went through 4-5 major user tasks within the assigned functional area; for example, Create a New Patient. Everyone would have a few minutes to perform the task and take notes, then I would choose one person, usually the one least likely to know how to perform the task, to guide us through the steps they took to complete the task.
As one teammate discussed their frustrations, another would offer tips, while another would chime in with why the feature was implemented in such a way. Teammates from customer support would let us know if this was particularly frustrating for the users that they spoke to on a daily basis, and new programmers would detail how they may have implemented such a feature. After frustrations were aired within the context of the heuristics, I would ask everyone to tell me how the feature would operate in a “perfect world” with “no strings attached” to lead into brainstorming.
Final Report
After the 2 weeks of meeting, I prepared a final report for the management team in two versions – one detailed report and one executive report. Here are some of the components of the detailed report:
Most often violated heuristics
General Pain Points (ex: button placement, help information, data pages and forms)
By Functional Area:
Table of Pain Points with Examples and Design Opportunities
Specific features with suggested design changes
Customer Support Statistics (ex: 30-40% of our support issues deal with reports)
Business Goals (ex: Reduce the effort to train current users)
Design Goals
Design Ideas (high level)
Structural Guidelines (ex: maintain a multi-user system)
Special Considerations
Risks
Opportunities
Next Steps
* “Any Role” = Product Manager, UI Designer, User Experience Researcher, Requirements Analyst, etc. Any role that participates in translating customer needs to software requirements and functional specifications.
My cousin
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