Second Thoughts

Subject to Change

Lindsay — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:24:48 +0000

While in Southern California this past week, I made my way over to Hennesy + Ingalls in Santa Monica at the behest of my friend Nate. The store is packed with books on creativity, architecture, graphic design and photography; basically it was amazing!

There, we picked up Adaptive Path’s “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.” This was the first time I had a chance to hold the book in my hands and check out the bibliography in the back. Lo and behold, there was my name (along with the primary author, Professor Bob Glushko from Berkeley’s School of Information) for a paper I helped author called “Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage of Service Design”. To be honest, it was pretty amazing to see the citation, and my name in print. It’s also great to know that someone else read what I had to say on a topic, and found it thought-provoking enough to share it with others in their own publications.

Here are a couple of pictures Nate took to capture my “moment”!

I’m Leaving My Job Because I’m Going…

Lindsay — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:27:34 +0000

Today is my last full-time day at work. I’m leaving my job because I’m going…

…with my friend Lauren:

Here’s our itinerary…

If you feel like meeting us along the way let me know! And, if my flights look a little cooky to you, it’s because I got the entire ticket with airline miles from Continental’s One Pass Program; the miles were much easier to earn than I expected. The only leg I didn’t get on miles, that is not included in this itinerary snapshot, is the 3 week trip to South Africa for FIFA World Cup.

I’m going back to Philadelphia for the winter, to hibernate on my parent’s couch and to work on other projects that I’ve always wanted to devote more time and attention to, until I leave for this big and amazing trip of 2010. In the meantime, you can peruse my collection of travel pictures from previous treks.

As always, stay tuned…

Welcome to the WildWest: When Women Take on Tech Because They Want To

Lindsay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:03:05 +0000

A day does not go by when I don’t hear about an event from the numerous “we support women in technology” groups: Girls in Tech, Women 2.0, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner and Shes Geeky. All of these groups have merit, and all have a target audience, from software developers to marketing analysts. I’ve certainly benefited from these organizations, participating in Women 2.0’s Business Plan Competition back in 2008, attending a plethora of Girls in Tech events about journalism, business development, and so forth, and going to the Shes Geeky conference at the beginning of this year down in the Peninsula. I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing women which include intense athletes, creative and insightful product managers, and even friends that help me out with reservations to Chez Panisse!

A portion of the dialogue that is pervasive in these types of groups is dedicated to asking the question to ad nauseum “Why are there not enough women in technology?” The women that are in tech are quick to point out that most conferences are dominated by men, mostly white, and that few of these conferences feature any women speakers at all. Day in, and day out, the conversation and complaints flood my twitter stream and my RSS feed to so much annoyance that I’m almost tempted to start spending my free time speaking at conferences (which I’ve done), or organizing a survey to better understand why women in tech do not attend conferences or try to speak at them on their own volition. Just to make the noise go away. It’s not that I don’t believe there are valid concerns, it’s that I find the conversation is tired, and somewhat generational.

In the pop culture of the online world, it seems that women in technology fall into three roles which I can relate to Save by the Bell characters. The Kelly Kapowskis use their sex appeal to attract the tech geek guy to pay attention to them without knowing a lick of what they’re talking about. The Lisa Turtles are the peppy chicks that “overcompensate by pushing their ‘geekery’ on everyone” (quote), displaying a mastery of social media but not of the separation of the application and presentation layers (you dig?). And, the Jesse Spanos are quite qualified women of tech, who also sound like feminists ranting everyday that women are somehow being purposefully left out of the tech equation.

I don’t buy into it. And neither does my friend Amy Ziari.

Last August Amy approached me at a Girls in Tech event (we thank you for that GIT!), tired as well of the same old conversation, with an idea to create a video series featuring women in technology who talk about what they are interested in. Not to prove to anyone that we’re competent, or that we’re “geeky just like you!”, but to let our audience draw their own conclusions. We didn’t want to be Kelly, Lisa or Jesse, we wanted to be ourselves, comfortable with our role in the industry, with our peers (male, female, black, white, hispanic or asian), and what we find interesting.

In mid September we teamed up with Camille Ricketts of Venture Beat to put together the pilot episode of the WildWest show. We hoped to put together more episodes, but time passed, and now I’m leaving soon to take off on an excellent adventure (I’ve alluded to this trip, but have yet to post details). So enjoy this first episode, where we interview Joey Mucha from Sprout and talk about some of our biggest tech snafus! Also, visit the website – www.wildwestshow.tv - to learn more.

Credits to Amy for doing all the video editing!

City of Dream’s SF1900: The Non-Tech Event of the Year

Lindsay — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:17:07 +0000

Andrea and Christina at SF1900 2008

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!

Signs of San Francisco

Lindsay — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:38:49 +0000

Signs of San Francisco from Lindsay Tabas on Vimeo.

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)

PS: Happy Birthday Katie!

Avoid Using Flash: The jQuery Cycle Plugin

Lindsay — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:02:38 +0000

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:

Reference the jQuery library, and the Cycle Plugin in your header.
Create a
and list your 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.
Add the following script to your file:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(‘.pics’).cycle({
fx: ‘fade’
});

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!

View AlexandraTabas.com here!

The Heuristic Evaluation Project

Lindsay — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:13:08 +0000

The project detailed here was created and designed by me, Lindsay Tabas, in Fall 2008. It is based on Jakob Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation methodology that I learned while taking Marti Hearst’s class titled “User Interface Design & Development” in Spring 2006.

Summary

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.

Heuristics

The ten usability heuristics are listed here:

Visibility of System Status
Match Between System and the Real World
User Control and Freedom
Consistency and Standards
Error Prevention
Recognition Rather than Recall
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
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.

How Much Food Can You Get in Chinatown for $12? #hchal

Lindsay — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:51:49 +0000

More than 35 million people in our country are on food stamps – up 3 million just since January.

Living in Russian Hill, I’m just a stones throw away from the grocers lining the streets of Chinatown. I’m almost 100% positive most of my peers in this neighborhood and the other adjacent neighborhoods have never ventured in to these stores. To them it seems off putting, signs are in a foreign language, and the foods are exotic, even unidentifiable sometimes. To me though, Chinatown is my little secret. I love to cook a lot, and I could go to Whole Foods, but the spirit would dissipate once I checked my credit card bill after.

At Whole Foods you can get cherries for $7.99/lb, and in Chinatown you can get cherries for $0.99/lb. Even at Safeway, conventional apples are $1.99/lb, and in Chinatown they are $0.59/lb! Scallions? $0.39/each! Cilantro? $0.49/each! Eggplant? I bought some for $0.39/lb today. For the exchange in price, you get a cultural adventure. Some may argue that the quality is not as good, and I would agree. But not all fruits and vegetables need to be organic. And to be honest, I would rather eat some fruits and vegetables for cheap, rather than none at all because they are too expensive.

I have learned the laws of shopping in Chinatown over the past 3 years, and I will share some of them with you here:

Put your food on the scale as soon as the person in front of you is finished, else someone behind you will get there first.
Do not substitute an unidentified green leaf vegetable for spinach just because it looks like spinach; it won’t taste the same
Be prepared to see carcasses and single fishies lying dead in the freezer. If you don’t like it, don’t buy seafood and meat (I don’t).
Find the less busy stores – prices are $0.10/lb higher, but the food hasn’t been picked over.
Feel out the prices for the day. 1 store may have red peppers for $1.99/lb, another may have them for $1.29/lb.

Here are the foods I purchased today. I had a few recipes in mind while I was food shopping, and knew that I had some bulk foods to use at home which are not pictured here. I’m hoping my assumption that multiple recipes using similar ingredients will make my life easier will prove true.

Tonight I’m going to finish cooking for tomorrow. I’ll post the recipes and what I eat in tomorrow’s post.

What do you think?

60% of the clients San Francisco Food Bank served last year come from working households.

Park(ing) Day in North Beach

Lindsay — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:42:31 +0000

Today was Park(ing) Day around the world. SF Weekly explains that the day “was dreamed up by Rebar, a San Francisco-based art and design collective, and invites participants to convert a parking space into a green space that becomes a spontaneous public park for a day.” I went to North Beach on my lunch break to go to the bank, and to my pleasant surprise, I found a great spot outside of Lola’s on Grant Street. After lunch, I walked the full stretch and found about 5 park(ing) spots. I read a book, I hoola hooped, and I got some free lemonade! Having to decline the “adult” lemonade in exchange for the regular lemonade because I had to return to work was the only sad moment.

Here are some of my “better” pictures (give my blackberry a break). You can see the entire set here.

Bad Usability Calendar 2009

Lindsay — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:13:42 +0000

I’ve had this calendar hanging in my office for the majority of this year. It has 48 “classic” design mistakes, and I find each one wildly entertaining. My favorite month is July because I like the idea of playing shoots and ladders with my days. Did you roll the die wrong today? Go back to last week!

Bad Usability Calendar 2009

Select the image to visit the source site.