This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
One of the bad habits in my company is the drive-by critique: we throw so much criticism at UI that it’s common for people who show a prototype or new design at a meeting to get pounded on by everyone: tons of questions and criticisms, and downright cynicism. It’s not personal – it’s the flavor of the group, but for folks who have to show creative work it’s just not fun. After a few minutes of critique, the discussion usually moves on to other things, leaving the designer on the floor.
How do you change the flavor of how critiques are done? Or is this just part of working on UI in this industry? We have to show our work to groups, but there has to be a better way.
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
In the company I work for, we have personal development discussions between manager and developers twice a year. One part of the discussion is goal setting for the next half year period, and I’m a new manager doing this for the first time.
Obviously, we want the goals to be measurable, realistic, specific, and all that. I am not that interested about general properties of good goals as I am confident (ok, arrogant :) about those. Instead, I want to see real examples of goals that have worked well or well written goals that failed. Not team goals, but individual goals.
The whole personal goal thing is shrouded in mystery – no one ever shows real examples from real reviews for real people, and I hoped pm-clinic might have some people willing to anonymize goals from people on their team, prior teams or share some of their own goals.
I realize that goal setting is dependent on context and I don’t expect that looking at other people’s goals would be transferable as such. Instead, I hope to get new ideas and food for thought in this subject that is new to me, and for that reason good and bad examples (with light commentary) would be valuable. Thanks.
Every so often the urge surfaces to replace parts of GUI, like Menus, toolbars and the desktop. This popular demo of BumpTop, from the U of Toronto, goes after the desktop.
First, some history: Back on IE4 in 1996 and again on Neptune (and here) in 1999 we brainstormed, prototyped and evaluated all kinds of radical re-inventions of the desktop (and GUI systems). For a time it was our mission, and we tried, read, played with, or prototyped just about everything that had been done. The conclusion (at least mine): The desktop is a ghetto. People spend so little time there during their day that reinvention doesn’t buy you much.
Certainly not enough to deal with re-learning basic tasks. Unless your reinvention carries over to replace File.Open dialogs and their bretheren too, it’s a low mileage revolution. (Not to mention how you get web-apps to follow your new models too). Especially these days with better search and big storage, people don’t suffer much from their messy, poorly organized desktops. Any UI problems there are noise compared to, say, fighting with web-based e-mail apps or on-line banking sites.
One perenial mistake we made in the Windows group was thinking of System UI (Toolbars, desktops, file folders) as a primary place. We spent so much time trying to build the system as a good experience, when the best thing we could have done would have been to get out of the way (admitidly harder than it sounds). Even then, as now, it’s the web and apps that get 90% of people’s time in any OS.
Now, Bumptop: This is fine research work and a great demo. They got an amazing number of details and subtlties right. It is the desktop metaphor to the max: you can shuffle, flip-through, scale, and crumple, just like things on your real desktop.
It’s certainly cool, but what difference does it all make? It’d be easy to run a baseline usability study, and compare human performance with Bumptop vs. Mac or Windows (A note to anyone else doing other GUI reinventions). Does all the visualization and pile manipulation speed finding things? For newbies or for experts? Who knows, but it’d be easy to find out and would cut the hype.
Even if it does – how much time a day do you spend organizing stuff into folders? If you’re like me, as little as possible. I clean things up when it gets too messy, but generally I avoid my desktop, or any file/folder/maintance, as much as possible.
If you do watch the video and get bored, skip to 3:00 in – more advanced manipulations including stuff I hadn’t seen before. If this stuff floats your boat, check out the Data mountain project from MSR, or Maya’s DEC project. There are tons of other visualization projects from the last 2 decades, but I’m too lazy to dig them all up for this post :)
(And now, since it’s 3pm in the peak of summer in Seattle, I’m going to get as far away from desktops as possible, and go outside to play with the dog – you should too).
For the last half-hour I’ve been jamming on essays at hacknot, on leadership and management in the tech-sector. The essays are somewhere between Joel On Software and Paul Graham in topic and tone, range from ethical challenges, opinion bias, and Delusions of crowds, to critiquing claims of agile methods.
Not sure why but I like finding writers who don’t rush their stuff into daily posts, but wait until they have something solid to say every few weeks and try to say it well.
Hacknot’s latest is a list of Mistakes in technical leadership.
(Link from architect’s linkblog)
One thing I don’t miss about working at big companies are lame morale events – those weak attempts by bored managers trying to patch over their org’s real problems. Morale events can be great things, but that’s just it – they can be, but rarely are.
I hear so often about trips to the movies, runs to Pizza hut (!), or afternoons at the video arcade that I wonder if people are stuck in corporate re-runs, repeating the same dull tricks until they retire or die. Sure, people are lucky to get these perks at all – but that doesn’t mean they should expect to be continually offered morale, and handed bordom.
The basic rule, where managers get in trouble, is this: any event outside of work does not create morale – it only allows whatever morale exists to surface. Case in point: Take a miserable team out to an amazing meal, they return to misery. Take a happy team out to a horrible meal, they return to happiness. You can’t fix a team, or raise morale, by morale events. Case in point #2: If you consistently gave people interesting projects, stayed out of their way and rewarded them for hard/smart work, you’ll do more for morale than a $100k morale budget ever could.
That said, what good are morale events then? Assuming you do them right, here’s the list:
So how do you do all this you ask? It’s easy:
How to plan a good morale event:
I’m convinced I’ve got some of the above wrong. There are too many teams with too many different things going on to prescribe morale plans for all of them. But I bet on the spirit: get out of the lame event rut. Take chances and do something interesting. You just might spark a fire, in them or in you, that leads to real morale back at work.
So help me out: What are the best and worst morale events you’ve ever been to?
From Tyler Blain, the Top ten tips on preventing innovation: His list goes further than mine in cynicism, in that it’s actually written as a playbook for squashing the creative life out of orgs. Fun read :) Of particular entertainment value:
5. Treat employees like garbage. Yell at them. Whenever possible, call them at midnight to yell at them some more. They work for us. If they get uppity, make them work on the weekends. Make them dig holes and fill them back up again. Threaten them – especially when they need the job. If you can’t yell, at least be condescending in public forums. Remember we are smarter than they are. Punks.