The boys and I were at a Bat Mitzvah, which is a religious ceremony for a 13 year old girl.  She reads in front of everyone, pray pray, sing sing, go have a giant party afterwards with music too loud.  At the ceremony, there was an interesting phenonmenon.  All of the friends of the star sat together.  This isn’t surprising, as they would want to sit with their friends.  They sat as far to the back and to the side as possible.  Sort of like rats will feel more comfortable on the edge of a room rather than in the middle.

Then deep within the mass of 70 teenagers, a little tilted towards the back, were a small group of 5-10 boys.  These boys kept trying to be funny and disrupting the service, being too loud, generally screwing around.  The rabbi (chief ceremony guy), got mad a few timees at them and tried to stare them down.  He was mostly without luck.

I put my UX hat on.  There were 4 rows of seats in front of the gaggle of kids.  I would have walked back and asked the middle group of kids to move up to the front.  Or possibly, in the beginning, I would have noticed the group is large enough to support an inner chamber of disruptiveness, and moved them all up.  This would make it much harder to be disruptive.  You need the distance and security of the group to feel safe enough to act out.

Alternatively, one single adult male could have been transplanted into the middle of the group.  That male, especially one of our bold clan, would have been able to turn closely and say, “Shut up!” in a whisper.  The kids would lose their saftey bubble and feel uncomfortable acting out.

Either tactic attacks the heart of the UX.  A kid finds it harder to act out without a sense of safety and some community. By removing that safety and community, the bubble bursts.

UX, to a large measure, is the study of human behavior and how different circumstances will affect that behavior.  If you want to sell product, or product any desired outcome, you need to watch people and see how different stimulus is received.  Social experiments like this one are perfect to sharpen your skills.

First of all, Virgin America’s website kicks ass.  It blew my mind.  I put in the origination and the destination and it gave me the lowest prices that day and several days ahead and behind.  That clued me in to the right day I should fly to save literally thousands of dollars.  The UI was spectacular, the graphic design was professional and slick, the information architecture was logical and intuitive and the features were exactly what I needed, plus a few that I loved without ever having thought of them.

Great work to whomever designed that site.

The airplane was a nice experience as well.  It had black lights, sort of like a club, like a disco.  The seats were new and about the size of the Jetblue seats. (Never enough).  There were several innovations.

1. Each seat has a DC electric plug.  I thought this was brilliant and so simple.  We used the laptop to watch a DVD and the battery didnt die by Act III.  Every airline should do this.  However, it was in a really awkward position.  I would never have known about if I didn’t notice a billboard that talked about it.  It should be mentioned by the intro movie.
2. The intro movie.  It was animated with 3D rendering by someonee with real style.  It was gorgeous.  Absolutely phenomenal.  The quality was world class.  PLUS, it was entertaining, informative and engaging.  I thought it was perfect.
3. The entertainment system.  TV (dish), Games (Crappy games, but still they were games), instant messenger to other seats, movies on demand ($7 was too expensive, I would have paid $2).  The controller was elegant and usable.  The kids figured out the games right away.  They had doom.  Lots of blood.  Katie would not approve.  However, this is the coolest entertainment system on any flight I have ever seen by a wide margin.  So it’s not perfect, big deal.  It’s a 100x better than anything else.
4. Map.  it used Google Maps so you could zoom in.  It worked a little slow, but it was still better than what most airlines has, which is nothing.

Overall, it was an A+ experience.  Great job, from the website to the checkin (handled us nicely) to the airplane to the entertainment system.  Excellent.  Of course, I still want more for less, but the price was right and the experience kicked ass.  (very inexpensive overall actually)

I give a strong thumbs up to Virgin America for this trip.

Very often, I think people do not understand what I mean by User Experience (UX).  They think its paint that goes on AFTER a product has been defined and possibly built.  Maybe it is deciding where the button goes.  I think UX is different.  UX is about looking at the world through special eyes.  Eyes that see how people react to all kinds of circumstances.

My blog, for a little while now, has been about The UX of ________.  I look at the world through the UX lens.  How was this thing conceived and implemented?  How do people interact with it?  Do they like it?  Is it easy? Fun? Profitable? Awesome? Annoying?

Recently, I have been promoted to head Product Management.  This makes me think more deeply about product management and how it fits into my world view.  I believe this graphic helps describe my feeling on it.

Some people think product management is much more than what I have described above. In another post Luke Hohmann, was kind enough to provide a list of things that a product manager sometimes does:

1. market segmentation, sizing, and needs assessment
2. business model development
3. value analysis
4. value exchange models
5. pricing models
6. licensing models
7. rights enforcement models
8. profit engines
9. customer facing ROI / TCO analysis
10. channel design and management
11. technology in-licensing negotiation
12. deployment architecture choices
13. BOM development and materials handling
14. identification and management of releases

I look at this list and think, “Wait a minute.  Where does it say, ‘Figure out what the thing is supposed to do’.”

Maybe I am a technology hick.  I’ve never been trained in that fancy stuff.  However, I have seen my fair share of technology startups.  Some of them had great research up front.  Some of them, not so much.  None of it made a beans worth of difference to my one fundamental question about products.

“Is it insanely great?”

In my world view, UX should be responsible for making insanely great designs of products.  This includes what problems the thing is supposed to solve.  Engineering is responsible to turn those designs into real world products.  Marketing and Sales play their part in the selling of those products.  UX is supposed to have the great ideas.  Graphic Design, UI, IA, and Product Management all play their part to develop, document, describe and design (aliteration) these ideas so that they can become real.

It makes sense to me that UX is an umbrella over product management and not the other way around.  By having the UX lens at the top, a company is stating, “We want these products to be so good that people refuse to work without them.”  By putting it the other way, they are saying, “We want lots of documentation!”

Leadership matters.  Vision matters.  I believe that in my core.  UX as a primary role in a company will create massive success and profit.  I certainly will be trying to prove that in the coming year.

First, I need to hire a product manager and get them to work!

Quick history lesson:

Apple Mac was easier. Windows 3.1 was more successful.  Apple System 7 were easier/better then Windows 3.1.  Windows 95 was as good as Mac System 7-8.  Windows 98 was a little better, maybe.  Windows 2000 was multi-threaded and was MUCH better than Mac System 9.  Windows XP was a nice improvement and was MUCH better than System 9.  Then Steve Jobs came back to Apple.  MacOSX is much better than Windows XP.  And now, Vista is only slightly better than Windows XP and certainly alot worse than MacOSX.

OK, so here we are, Macs are clearly better than PCs, at least for now.  Vista is slower and buggier.  Developers are moving to Mac in droves. OSX is based on Unix and runs like a dream.  Usability is good.  You can run Windows in a virtual machine anyway for testing reasons. There is pressure in the office to switch wholesale to Macs.

So what’s the holdup?  A couple of key reasons that I think Apple should consider.

1. We have existing hardware from Dell.  We don’t want to buy new equipment.  It’s hard to decide to switch and spend tens of thousands of dollars on new hardware.
2. The server is Windows 2003.  Active Directory controls passwords.  Exchange 2003 has everyone’s email.  What is the migration path to new groupware?  How do we import all of our email?  Our passwords?  Our network drives.  Would we upgrade the desktop machines but not the server?  Does that make sense?  Entourage doesn’t work as well as Outllok 2003-2007.
3. Cognitive dissonance.  Alot of the non-developers would have a cow switching.  Where do I click to do X-Y-Z???  I can already here to tech support nightmare.  MacOS is  not so easy that non-technical users would just know how to do everything without anyone helping.

I have to admit, I think Microsoft screwed the pooch on Vista.  It’s SLOWER.  It can’t be slower.  They have to work for the next year or two on speed.  Speed, speed, speed.  Developers need to run their env fast.  Office needs to launch instantly.  Boot needs to be TV like speeds.  This is the only way to catch up to Apple.  Speed, speed, speed.  I can not say it enough.

If they don’t do this and keep adding bloat, then I will seriously consider a Mac for my next home computer.  We just bought some about 18 months ago, I will be in the market probably in another 18 months.  I am putting Microsoft on official notice.  Improve speed or I will switch.

And if I switch, it is a bad sign for Microsoft.  I deal with #2 and #3 at work.  That’s 66% of the roadblocks eliminated.  There are tens of thousands of people just like me.  This is a critical moment.

By the way, if Apple were to release MacOS X for my Dell, I would switch MUCH sooner.  Maybe even today.  Side question:  Why doesn’t apple see the logic in this?  Are device drivers that hard to deal with?

Somebody at Google is trying to confuse me.  They keep moving the Google Reader link.

Sometimes, its in the menu and sometimes it’s at the top.  I can’t deal with buttons moving.  Is that lame?  Ok, maybe.

I wish Google would consider some more advanced UI for stuff like this.  Check out this basic EXT combobox.  Now imagine the above UI using it.  You could use the keyboard, you could type in what you want and get auto-suggest, you could use the basic trigger.  It would make a more nuanced and powerful experience.

Some may say that simplicity is the hallmark of Google’s success and there is alot to be said that.  However, I think that simplicity on the search page doesn’t always translate to simplicity on the links at the top of gmail.  If you look at Google Analytics, there are plenty of RIA UI components.  Overall, I like gmail better than Hotmail or Yahoo mail, but I think there are spots where a richer UI would be an improvement.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself. I need my new beta software fix. Must use new software. The upgrade went flawlessly AS USUAL for Wordpress. The UI is cleaned up and so far, I like it. I haven’t used it enough to really get a feel for it.

Right now, I am trying the editor screen. I think there is one thing missing. Control-K usually makes the LINK dialog popup. I use that all the time. I hope they didn’t kill it. They are using TinyMCE, which I hate in our own application for all the crazy html it produces.

When I click on the HTML it doesn’t actually give me HTML.  It still gives me processed code.  I wish it was the raw html.

Maybe, this would be a good time to redo the theme?  I could use widgets and some fancier layout.  Hmm.  I don’t really have the time.  Anyway, so far it is thumbs up.  I’ll give more feedback soon.

I went to a conference today at Yahoo.  Nice campus.  It was P-CAMP Unconference for Product Managers. I took alot away from it.  Some learnings:

1. There is a huge chasm between what serious Agile practitioners proscribe and what most companies who say they are doing agile actually do.  One guy said, “You just have to find the companies that are doing it right.”  I laughed.  I just can’t suspend my skepticism that it just doesn’t exist beyond the 1% of companies.  I am very happy to be proven wrong, but so far, I haven’t met anyone on a personal level who was doing Agile the way they describe in the book.  Not even 50% of the book.  Sorry, I calls em likes I sees em.  Please don’t flame me.  Maybe I am just unlucky.
2. There is a big chasm between big company product managers and startup product managers.  In one session the woman asked, “How many of you release more than twice a year?  I said, “Do you mean twice a month?”  She laughed and didn’t understand.  We push new code to customers every 2 weeks.  That doesn’t mean all projects are two weeks long.  You can work on something for several iterations, but the code is pushed every two weeks, so you need a private brand in source control for longer projects.  The group with 4-10 iterations per year emphasized documentation and product research.  The group with 10-26 iterations a year, obviously could not produce the kind of documentation required.  The first group looked at us like we were insane and not real product managers.
3. I am not, nor do I want to permanently be a product manager in a mid-large size company.   I love UX Design, and I want to manage people and product managers.  But I don’t want product research and documentation to be my life.  At work, I am looking for a Product Manager to report to me. One guy said, “You are hiring your boss.”  I completely, utterly disagree.  I think a UX person, like myself could manage a product manager.  At the very least, it’s worth trying.  I will never know if I can do that if I don’t try.

It worries me a little.  What if a company can’t have a UX person manage a PM?  Will I forever be at that UX Architect individual level?  As always, I am eager to grow and evolve and learn.  Who knows what lies beyond the corner?  Life is not just around the corner.  Life is the corner.

Fun conference.  And Free!  Have to love that.

I’m up early again.  I get ideas in the middle of the night and need to wake up and record them.

Anyway, this is a follow-up from the last post.  I think I have a new idea how to manage predictions in a software project.  This would fit in nicely with a program like TargetProcess. But could just as easily work with Trac, Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz, Jira. or any other bug tracking system.  The key is the source control integration.

In TargetProcess (and others) when you check in your code changes, you usually put the number of the bug or task in the comment field.  This is automatically linked to that bug/task.  In TargetProcess, you can click a link to see the checkins for that task and then view the diff of the files that were checked in.  In other words, you can see the actual work that was produced for that task.

The easy part of time tracking are estimates.  Developers would put a number in there.  The hard (impossible) part is getting them to track their time for each bug.  They just don’t do it, and I think it’s lame anyway.  As one poster said, “Its a fools errand”.  I agree. 

In agile methodologies, however, you don’t track REAL hours.  You track difficulty points or sometimes “ideal hours”.  My proposal to to extend this a little and estimate Code Deltas.  A code delta is defined as new lines of code that would need to be produced or lines that were erased because of refactoring.  Maybe a new line of code is worth 1 point and an erased line is worth 0.5 points. (In theory, erasing lines takes less time than producing lines, but this might be a bad assumption).

Ok, so now the developer says, “I can do that task in 100 points of Code Delta.  They go about that chore and check in their code and close the bug.  The bug tracking system gets the checkin and automatically calculates how many REAL points of Code Delta there are (Field: Estimated Code Delta).  Then the system justs puts in that number in the “Actual Code Delta” field.  Ok, now fast forward ahead 10 more tasks.  The developer would start to see the difference between their own estimates and the actual Delta.  According to agile methodology gurus, they would get better at estimating.  I believe that the developer would be off by the same percentage every time. 

Here is the beauty part.  I believe there is a correlation between Code Delta and Time Spent.  In other words, this is a pure measure of time spent without actually asking the developer to track any of their time. Code Delta is a personal metric as well.  One developer might take 100 lines of code to complete a task in 1 hour.  Another might take 100 lines of code to complete a task in 4 hours.  In agile methods, you give each developer a set of how many Code Deltas they can do in a sprint, so these actual numbers would provide that metric easily per person.

FogBugz has a great feature which automatically calculates Time Spent versus Time Estimates for each developer. (They do have to track time for this to work).  It then helps the project manager by giving them charts on the accuracy of the developer in estimating over time.  If they switched to Code Delta, they could provide the exact same value, BUT the developer would never ever have to track their time.  They just need to check in their code with the proper bug numbers noted.

Most bug tracking systems have source code integration.  This seems like it could make developers lives much easier and show accurately the time spent on tasks and help developers estimate better.

This is the part where I close my eyes and wish a talented developer would make this dream come true.  Thoughts?

Project management is hard work.  I feel for anyone who has to do it in the software industry.  The problem is simple.  To do any kind of prediction in project management, you need to be able to guess how long something will take.  Let’s say you want to build a web page.  How long will it take?  Over the last decade of doing just that, I know that a page takes about 1-2 days to produce from a JPEG or PSD.  I know I can make a Marketo landing page template in about 1-2 hours.  I can make a home page in about 1-2 days.  SOunds like a project manager could get that information out of me easily.

But what if he asked me to debug some javascript that was non-trivial.  It might take 5 minutes.  It might take 3 days.  Programming is notoriously hard to predict.  Multiply this by hundreds of bugs and features that really take a variable amount of time to produce.  One programmer might know something out in a day, while another does it in a week.  So what does the project manager do when the boss says, “When will this feature be ready for customers?”

Most project management systems force programmers to track their estimates and then track the amount of actual time spent.  I have been looking at these systems for work. The problem is a UX one.  Who wants to track their hours?? No one, that’s who.  Designers don’t track their hours.  Marketers don’t track their hours.  Why do programmers need to?  Programming is perceived as “magic” by myself and other non-engineers.  This is why we try to force the developer to become robots who can be predictable.  We try to put logic around something we don’t understand.  I have never been in an organization where time-tracking worked.  Maybe someone else has.

So why does every single PM tool out there hinge on time tracking to do it’s thing? Are there no alternatives?

Why am I awake at 6am thinking about this?  Ok, I’m going to cut this short.

The Jets have made some great free agency moves.  My general philosophy is that a team lives and dies on the line.  O-line got improved with Alan Faneca.  I expect D’Brick and Mangold to improve dramatically with Faneca in between them.  They need his veteran presence.  This will lead to Thomas Jones (RB) to having a break-out season running behind these guys.  In fact, he gets another great blocker with Tony Richardson as Full back. Jones must feel like he is the luckiest guy in the world.  I am predicting a 1500+ year season.  I also expect QB Clemens to have a better year with better protection, although I have my doubts he can step up.

They also signed Linebacker Calvin Pace and O-Lineman Damien Woody. More great news.  Pace should do well in the 3-4 defense the Jets are trying to install.  Jonathan Vilma is gone for draft picks but he was disgruntled anyway.

Hopefully, the Jets will have a good Draft.  They still need help at many positions.  I am hopeful.

Other good news is the new Jets stadium. Oh wait, I mean the new Giants stadium.  God, I hope they don’t plaster GIANTS STADIUM over the whole thing.  That would stink.

I predict the 2008-2009  New York Jets season will be breakthrough.

Happy Birthday Daniel!  Are you 30 now?