Author: paranoidmike

A Product Manager sharing experiences on & of the job.

How I do UX, partial thoughts: the no bullshit edition

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Don’t expect a masters treatise, much in the way of theory, or anything resembling proof that UX Is Right.

Rose_PricklesI’m not interested in changing minds right here, or finding out if you’re a design bigot.  (I already know.) 

I’m also not going to pretend I’m something I’m not.  I’m not going to use a lot of flowery language, cryptic metaphor or industry jargon.  It is what it is.  A rose is a rose.

The important thing for me right here and now is to spell out what I do when I’m applying user experience principles to the stuff I create.  If you look closely, you’ll notice the topics are ordered according to where I spent most of my energy and attention. 

Interaction Design: identify what tasks a user needs to accomplish, understand why they need to accomplish it one way and not the others, and figure out how to provide an obvious/efficient/effective path through the software to successfully complete the task. 

Usability Engineering: identify the trouble spots, understand why that causes problems for people, and figure out how to make it better.

User Research: listen, ask questions, observe, ask more questions, offer unfinished ideas for early feedback, and thank them for their time and input. 

Information Architecture: spell words properly, choose words that users are familiar with, don’t use more words than you need to. 

Visual Design: choose colours that aren’t too garish, use colours and fonts consistently throughout the application(s), make sure things are aligned, don’t make users hunt for the affordances and cues.

Epiphany of Volunteering

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Been struggling with the desire to volunteer – to take my skills out to organizations and people who don’t normally have access to the kind of big corporate expertise – and to give myself opportunities to give back to my community.

Only problem is: the kinds of groups in which I want to volunteer (eg. Hack Oregon) are filled with amazing coders who might not feel friendly and welcoming to a “business/product/design” guy who wants to help out but isn’t a coder or database geek.

I’ve been out to a couple of events, and watched the participants gather together in their natural tendencies. I start out feeling self-conscious and a deficit for any group I force myself into, and end up just chatting with whoever it feels like might also be feeling disconnected.

I’ve lost my nerve with such organizations and ended up not finding an outlet for my desire to help, contribute my energy and experience, and effect change.

Epiphany
Today for no explicable reason, it occurred to me that rather than approaching volunteering as a place to contribute, and instead set my goal to “learning”.

I thought of this when Catherine Nikolovsky talked about the number of Big Data and data visualization nerds her organization, and I lit up thinking, “I want to learn about Big Data and Dataviz!”

What if I showed up and attempted to simply ask questions, see how Big Data apps are built, and what kinds of decisions are made in developing an effective data visualization?

Do I have the nerve to show up and insert myself without any ego – without an intention to help, but rather just to listen?

And now, a random picture from today’s Facebook distractions:

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Lonergan’s Iron Triangle of Content

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I’ll drop the punchline up front: when designing content management systems, you cannot optimize for all constituents, and those disfavoured will find every interaction laborious and frustrating. Choose your priorities – you cannot favour all three parties at once (at least not at tolerable costs).

I have this conversation at least a couple of times a year at work, and every time I do I end up pulling out this simple diagram and give people the pitch. I am convinced of the truth of this for me in all my years of managing, contributing to and designing content management systems and experiences, but I have no illusions: I’m sure the smarter ones reading this will find faults, flaws and a general lack of intellectual rigour in my thesis.  There are probably better ways of framing the problem space, but as I’m not aware of them, and because everyone I’ve shared this with seems to come away enlightened, it’s here to please and to challenge you.

Mike’s Key Takeaway

Continue reading “Lonergan’s Iron Triangle of Content” →

Adventures in Git for this new Mac user

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…Well, not really a “new” Mac user – I’ve been using a Mac mini for our home theatre needs for six years, so I have a pretty good handle on consumer-level operations of a Mac.
And I’m not entirely new to Git – I was using various GUI Git clients on my previous Windows system, so that I understand the basics of cloning a repo, pulling, pushing and merging.
Let’s be clear up front: I am the Product Owner and Interaction Designer for my team’s applications, not a full-time developer.  Thus, I’m looking for something that makes it quick and convenient to make small changes to the codebase (swapping strings, editing CSS, that kind of thing).  I don’t do this frequently enough to learn the ins-and-outs of Git, nor do I have the patience to fight with command line tools (yet – talk to me in a year once I’ve become more comfortable with the concepts).

Continue reading “Adventures in Git for this new Mac user” →

PDX-local Meetups in my coherent rotation

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(Hah – I meant to type “current rotation” but sometimes autocorrect makes me sound much more nuanced than I meant)

Here’s where you’ll find me lurking and entertaining the not-so-innocent bystanders: meetup-in-a-bar

Occasional fly-bys:

Manifesto

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Get to know Mike. The Tech Ambassador, the Empathizer, the hairy Dog Fur-bearer, the comics-inspired Dude and the Hatter.

Something I’m tired of doing to myself, every time I want to write my thoughts out to the world around me, is deciding halfway through a rant or a confessional, that the people I’m aiming at probably wouldn’t give the full rat’s ass to make it through the ninth paragraph.

So starting in 2015 I’m mustering the nerve to just write what I need to get out of my multi-layered (fractured?) brain. Is there anyone out there reading what I write (other than the Google index spider and the parasitic content-scrapers [hi there bastards!])? Fucked if I know. And as far as this pressurized-anxiety release valve is concerned, don’t really matter. Nope, it don’t.

Got something to say to me? Take your best shot (and not your laziest one). I’ll give as good (but not as bad) as I get.

Where’s Mike, September edition

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Summer’s over, I can go back to being a couch slug and no one will be the wiser because they’re all back indoors too. I love the great indoors, with all of those mental vistas to take in.

Slug

I wanna get back in touch with you. See you here?:

Further out, I’ll be at

Where are you headed this month?

Apple versus everyone else: you really do get what you pay for

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get-what-you-pay-forI used to work for Microsoft (7 years) and I only used PCs for about 20 years. Macs actually intimidated me. Then I got an iPhone.

I was also the family tech support, and every time I saw someone go Mac, I never heard from them again. The Windows folks, have me clean up their PC every year and are calling every few months with another infection, another driver problem, another hardware issue.

I’m now on my fourth iPhone, and got a Mac Mini a few years ago to hook up to the TV. Turns out I was intimidated for very little reason. I didn’t understand it all at once, but it was damned easy (in fact too easy – I kept expecting I’d have to do something fancy or painful to make it work the same way my PCs do).

I’ve grown to love my Apple stuff and grown to hate how much excess maintenance, worry and frustration I get from Windows PCs. Now I tell people that if they don’t want to worry for 5+ years and just have the sucker work and stay speedy, get an Apple product. If they want to mow the lawn, make the bed and change the oil every time they want to do something like browse the web or write a document, by all means get a Windows system and start saving for its replacement in a couple of years.

I still know more internals and tricks for working with my work PC, and I’ll never be a guru about my Apple products. And what I’ve learned is, I don’t need to be a guru to be happy and productive with them. It’s very freeing when you realise that the PC promise of ultimate flexibility really means constant maintenance and incompatibilities. You really do get what you pay for.

Adventures in Data Modeling: Entity Framework, Model First

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sun breaks through cloudsWorking up a data model for a new systems architecture – been spending the last few months working in MS Word, whiteboards and sticky notes.  Feel like we’ve hit diminishing returns by looking at this in the abstract, so I figured I’d hack up an instance in MS SQL to see how much of this thinking stands up to reality.

I tracked down a few online resources to get me back into SQL (it’s been nearly a decade since I dug in deep) – two of note were:

After a day or so messing around with this, my valued conspirator Dale Cox mentioned Entity Framework to me:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ee712907

And thus was the Bright Light of Truth shone upon my works.  For a guy like me who’s working out the business needs, transforming into Stories, and usually has a lot more to say about UX than about MVVM constructs or SQL queries, this is the perfect level for me to dig into next.  Entity Framework, Model First, using Visual Studio 2013?  I still wouldn’t pay thousands of $$$ for this tool, but here’s one way that it stays relevant for me.

See me speak at PDMA on UX for Product Managers (May 15th)

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By the way, this Thursday I’ll be joining a panel of UX geeks talking at the Product Managers Association of Portland on “User Experience – What’s the Big Deal?”  I’m going in as the resident hybrid – UX geek and Product Owner, giving me the superpower to empathize with both halves of my brain when I do a crappy job for each of them. 🙂

Here’s a twist: I finally found a use for those “view this email in a browser”, because for some reason the PDMA doesn’t have a URL-able web page describing the logistics for this event:

http://us8.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f58583aa4a84e349713216644&id=464a80ea15&e=81024300cd

Hey, it’s a low-cost gathering of PO’s and PM’s getting together at the Lucky Lab for beer, food and some interesting conversation.  How bad could it be?

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