Musings on design & other stuff jen's place

One thing that I've learned from musicians is that they perform a song over and over again. They don't just write it, sing it once, and then move on to the next song. But we do. As user experience practitioners, we tend to give a talk or write a paper, and then never give it again. Not very efficient, is it? It's like saying that just because I sang a song in California, no-one will want to hear it in Massachusetts. That's just not true.

I have given numerous talks on persona development at Sun, which prepared me for the talk I gave at CHI in April. Since returning from Italy, I've given that talk again, twice. Once, two weeks ago, at the Boston CHI monthly chapter meeting, and then again on Wednesday, at the Boston UPA Mini Conference on Usability and User Experience. I re-packaged it just slightly for the Boston CHI, and added 30 minutes of content for the mini UPA conference, but that same 10 - 15 minutes of material has gotten a good workout, as fas as talks go. I've also received two invitations to talk about persona development at local companies, so I may get even more mileage out of those slides.

Reduce, re-use, recycle ... words to live by.

Several weeks back, I published a blog post on my talk at the ACM CHI conference, in Florence, Italy. For Andrea, who asked, and for any other interested parties, here are the slides for the talk I gave.

Let's face it, Florence is beautiful. But it's a noisy city, much like Boston. We were extremely lucky with our hotel room. There were only two balconies in the hotel (at least on the front), and we got one of them. The room had high ceilings covered in dark wood panels, and tall doors onto the balcony that must have been two hundred years old. The people were nice. Everyone was willing to speak English to us, and they were happy to help us try their cuisine. I've returned with an entirely new appreciation of pasta.

The weather was sunny on Sunday and Monday, and while it sprinkled a little bit on other days, we were never in a downpour -- actually, I think there was one hard rain, but we missed it while we were eating dinner. Tom and Rachel traveled with me, which sounded like a good idea when we booked the tickets, but they were both suffering from the flu while we were there, and wished I had left them at home. That said, we saw a lot of Florence when they were hopped up on Advil and Benadryl.

We took a lot of pictures. I think we printed 164 in all, but there were many that didn't make it to the photo printer.

I loved that movie ... and the music ... Pucinni ... just glorious. And now, in April, it looks like I will be visiting the Arno myself. The paper that I submitted on behalf of my co-author and myself was accepted to the ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2008. That's the cool part.

The less cool part is that hardly anyone I know is going, so I don't think it'll be like last year's CHI conference, which was a lot of fun because there were half a dozen other folks from my graduate program there. So far, I think I'll know 3 people at the conference next year, and only 1 or 2 of them are likely to let me hang out with them (they are pretty illustrious after all). I'm hoping my co-author will go (and give the talk, if she likes)... we had a good time in Aptos. And of course, I'll make a vacation out of it for the family, so I'll spend time with them seeing Italy before or after the conference ... we've never been to Italy before, so it'll be an adventure :)

To my knowledge, there are only a few people from my graduate program who have published their work at either the ACM CHI conference or the UPA conference. Some of my friends from the program have asked me to give them advice, so here's what I have:

• Trying is the first part of doing. This is the mantra that I use with my daughter, and we find it very empowering. As the Maryland lottery tag line used to say, "You've got to play to win." You won't get published unless you write and submit.
• Get your article peer-reviewed before you submit. Ask people whom you know to review your article. They will point out where you are vague, where you need to provide specifics, and what other issues you need to address. I generally ask 3 or 4 people (colleagues, teachers, friends at other companies) to peer review the article, and to subsequently review changes that I've made based on their suggestions.
• Appreciate your reviewers. Ask the people who peer-reviewed your paper what is their favorite flavor of chocolate (white, dark, or milk?) or wine (red or white? which grape? Merlot? Pinot Nior? Zinfindel?). And then deliver -- I usually buy $5 or $10 of chocolate from the Lindt store or Godiva store, and when I buy a bottle of wine, I spend between $10 and $20 (and deliver it in a gift bag). The last time I dropped off a bottle of wine to say "thank you for reviewing an article" that had subsequently been rejected, the meeting led to a panel proposal that may take us to Florence, Italy, in April :)
• Well-written articles are more easily accepted. When I was working on my first paper for publication, my co-author had lots of publication experience. She admitted in frustration that a certain percentage of articles would be published not because they had remarkable findings, but because they were well written. I thought "Then this is going to be a very well-written paper!" -- organization, and clarity of thought count.
• Work with someone who has already published. This technique allows you to benefit from their experience, and to get some unofficial mentoring.
• Collaborate. I've always said that writing is best played as a team sport. It can sometimes be frustrating to work with co-authors, but I have always felt that the work benefited from their insights and input.
• Title your paper appropriately. A misleading title can take your reviewers down the wrong path, which we know leads to confusion, anxiety, and anger: three emotions that you don't want your reviewers to be feeling :) Likewise,
• Ensure that your abstract and conclusion sections are the best-written parts of the paper, because, as former graduate students, we know that often those sections are the only part of a paper that are read. And those sections determine whether a reader will look at the material in between them.
• Rejection does not equal failure. Clearly, it's not fun, but the more writing that you do, the more likely you are to get rejected. Take the comments that you receive seriously, consider that you may have written something that is more in line with another publication's audience or style, and try again. The world is full of stories of how innovators' disruptive ideas were rejected.
• Publication does not equal perfection. Don't wait for your article to be perfect. Write it. Have it reviewed. Revise it. And then submit it. Get out there, and do it -- trying is the first part of doing!

Good luck!

I'm back home today, after 10 days on the road. To review -- we went to Aptos, CA for the innovation@Sun conference, then to Phoenix, AZ to visit family, and then to Las Vegas, NV for the CEC conference. We are all glad to be home, but it was tough getting up this morning, after 10 days in the Pacific time zone.

As I mentioned, I enjoyed Aptos and the innovation@Sun conference. One of the people I got to meet was Tim Bray ... I think we ended up at the same table for three meals. During our first conversation, we both discovered that we were going to be speaking at CEC in Las Vegas. He said that his talk was Tuesday the 9th, and I said that my talk was Tuesday, the 9th. I expected that his talk would be before mine, but he said that it was at 3:30 -- right after my talk, which was scheduled for 2:15.

Fast forward six days ... I get an email from the CEC conference committee that my talk has been moved from 2:15 Tuesday, to 3:30 Monday. So I email Tim to ask if his talk was moved too. It turns out that he got the days mixed up, and had booked travel for Tuesday, even though his talk was on Monday, so someone decided to swap his talk and mine. No problem, except that everyone at CEC had pre-registered for sessions, so now anyone who had registered for my talk now had a conflict. As a result, my husband had to rearrange his schedule and I had a poor turnout for my talk -- my husband was more put out than I was, but Tim offered to buy him a beer to make up for it.

We didn't care for Las Vegas -- too much cigarette smoke, we don't gamble, and we had a 7-year-old with us.

On the "good" side, we had sunny weather, enjoyed our time in Aptos, and were happy to be so close to family that we could drop in on. And we're glad to be home.

Today, we're in to Las Vegas for the annual Sun CEC conference. I'll be giving an hour-long version of the talk that I gave at Innovation@Sun -- to a very different audience. There will be 3,500 folks at CEC, who work in all parts of Global Sales and Service: nearly all the people who actually talk to customers. So I get to talk to people who work with customers about the value of customer research ... I'm hoping that this is going to be like preaching to the choir ... I'll let you know ...

So, here's my summary: the next time that you're invited to attend a conference with a bunch of Sun Fellows and Distinguished Engineers, accept :) They throw a good party.

I had a lot of fun getting to hang out with my colleague and co-author, Nalini. We ate good food, drank good wine, and gave good poster sessions :) We saw the milky way through a star-laden sky above the beach where dinner was served one night. We had warm days, and cool breezes, and hung out with more famous people than you can shake a stick at. I gave a presentation on the work that we had done -- it was not my finest delivery of a presentation, but the audience was intimidating. My presentation was on some persona development that we had done, and was not necessarily what they wanted to hear. I quit talking with more than 13 minutes left in the 45-minute time slot, and then I took questions until we'd used up that time plus a few minutes more. That was a lot more fun than going over the slides. And they were, in all, a very receptive audience to the message that I was trying to deliver.

I had to run right after my talk so that my family and I could catch our flight out on time. But before I got away, one director ran out after me and stopped me to chat. We talked for a few minutes, and then he asked if I was in a hurry -- so I told him that I was on my way to the airport. He laughed, and said, "Oh -- you're just going to drop a bomb like that, and then run before the fallout hits the ground?" ... That's good right?

Today, we are (yes Tom and Rachel are joining me) flying to San Jose, California, so I can attend the innovation@Sun conference, and give a talk on Wednesday afternoon. It's a little nerve-racking, because I'm giving the "soft" talk -- the one on user research and persona development -- not on chip-level multi-threading. I'm not giving this talk to my organization, but to the Sun Fellows and Distinguished Engineers -- Sun's technical leadership. People like Radia Perlman, and James Gosling ... there were only 10 talks accepted for this conference, and our (my colleague Nalini and my) abstract was one of them. Personas and user research hit the big time at Sun ... we'll see how we fare.

Wish me luck :)

I found out last week that the talk I'll be giving in Aptos, CA (on the Monterrey Bay) for the Innovation@Sun (IAS) conference was also accepted as a talk for Sun Service's annual technical conference, CEC (Customer Engineering Conference).

CEC is a much larger conference, because Sun Service is a bigger group than our population of Distinguished Engineers, Technical Directors, and Sun Fellows. CEC used to be hosted every year out of San Francisco, but this year, it's being run in Las Vegas. I've never been to Las Vegas, but the reviews I've heard so far are all good.

CEC is only a few days after IAS, so we'll likely stay out West in the interim. We have family to visit, so the three of us will go on the lecture circuit together. Truth be told, we were doing that anyway, because my husband will be attending CEC this year. Now we have to wait to find out when my talk is scheduled to see if Tom can take Rachel during my talk, or whether we need my mom to join us for a day or two ... logistics ... I was impressed when I got all the flights worked out (4 legs, none of which are round trip, for 3 people, one using frequent flyer miles, all sitting together), so now we just need a little more info and we can figure out the rest.

I just hope that the reviewers for the ACM CHI conference are as interested in this work as Sun has been, and that the paper we submitted yesterday gets accepted ... please keep your fingers crossed for me!

Here's my problem — I'm a sprinter. I'm either on or off. Stopped or running full speed ahead. The good news is that I'm making progress. One of the conference papers I wanted to write is nearly done — good thing, because it's due Wednesday.

The other paper, I've had researched for months, and now it's time to put words on paper. I'm ready. It's in my head, and it wants out. It's also due Wednesday, so I'm running out of time.

And that's the push I need; an immutable deadline. Sprint to the finish line ... or fail. Most times I make it, but sometimes I don't. When I was in Grad School (like that was so long ago ;), once a semester, I'd rush to the finish and come in a little late to class. Everyone assumed that I'd gotten stuck at work, but the reality was that I was still typing when class started. So, we'll have to wait until Wednesday night to see how the story ends. I don't want to fail. But sometimes, I just do it to myself.

I received news a few weeks back that an abstract I'd submitted to the Innovation@Sun conference had been accepted. This is particularly cool, because it gives me a chance to present the work that a colleague and I did to all of the Sun Fellows and Distinguished Engineers.

In late 2006, we conducted user research to develop personas for Sun Learning Services. Along the way, we came up with a new technique to develop personas that is faster and more reliable than traditional methods.

With any luck, we'll also get to present the ACM conference paper that I'm writing about the method next Spring.

I have two conference papers in my head. One has been percolating for nearly a year, and the other is going on six months. I've done all of the research, and written up most of the bibliography on one. I've reviewed the literature for that paper, and even made some notes. I've downloaded the Word template from the conference web site.

The submission deadlines are only 3 weeks away, and in that time, I need to draft, have my co-authors add to the papers, have the papers peer reviewed, and make the resulting changes.

Deep breath...

I don't have any trouble blogging, but there's not a trip to Florence, Italy on the line when I blog.

There's a quote on Katy Dickinson's internal web site that always comes to mind at times like this: "Done is better than perfect." And then there's the fortune cookie fortune I have taped to my monitor at work: "The secret to getting ahead is getting started".

Here I go -- really...

This past May, I attended my first CHI conference, which was held in exotic San Jose, California :) CHI is short-hand for the ACM special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction, and the annual conference is the premier spot for presenting academic work and reports on what has been newly created or discovered in the field. I'd co-authored a paper that was published at CHI 2005, but didn't attend -- my colleague, Nicole Yankelovich presented our paper that year.

About this time last year, I was busy writing up what my class-mates and I had worked on as a project for our Spring 2006 semester Master's class, Measuring the user Experience. The class was offered at Bentley College and taught by Dr. Joe Dumas, who is world-renowned for his work in the field of usability. Our class was experimental, in that it hadn't been run before, and Joe brought in real clients from industry for whom we could do work. The team that I was on was assigned to perform a massive heuristic review, but we faced a couple of problems: how could we combine the results of our reviews to present a single face to the client, and how could we prioritize the issues that we uncovered?

While several papers had been written on classifying the severity of a problem uncovered by usability testing, there was nothing that we could refer to regarding how to classify the severity of a problem uncovered by heuristic evaluation. The other challenge we faced was how to combine our ratings -- after all, we needed to evaluate more than 25 website features across 8 websites -- but the only guidance we found was from Nielsen, who recommended averaging the scores of the reviewers. We found two problems with that approach: first, to produce a reliable result, Nielsen recommended using 15 evaluators, and we had only 3; second, when we tried averaging our scores, we found that we had a result that none of us could defend.

The resulting method that we (okay, mostly my colleague, Hanna Yehuda) came up with, and its benefits were the topic of our Experience Paper for CHI 2007. I presented the material both at CHI, and then 3 weeks later at the Boston UPA Mini Conference on Usability and User Experience. Both times, the paper was well received, but the discussions that arose from the presentations were very interesting; so interesting, that a former professor of mine and I will be submitting a paper to CHI 2008, to discuss the topic fully and openly.

Two months ago, the Boston chapter of the Usability Professionals of America (UPA) hosted its 6th annual 1-day mini conference. Thanks to my director, Kartik Mithal, for agreeing to have Sun be a sponsor (it may have helped that I was already committed to be a presenter).

I had attended the two previous years, but didn't present until this year, when I gave two talks: a new talk on creating innovative and intuitive designs, and a redux of the talk I'd given at CHI 2007. The former of the two talks was a collaboration with Jen Hocko of the MathWorks (a Bentley alum) and the latter was a collaboration with Hanna Yehuda of EMC (also a Bentley alum).

My friend Manya (you guessed it -- a Bentley alum) snapped this picture of me and my former classmate, Mike Ryan. Manya has yet to take a bad picture of me :) Andrew, on the other hand ... well, keep working on it Andrew ... I know I'm not photogenic, as proven by this shot during the second of the two talks. But I appreciate that he got it, none the less :) Andrew is nearly done with the Bentley program, but I was horrified to find out yesterday that I'm ~old enough to be his mom ... he was born while I was in high school. Gawd. Did I mention that I'm turning 40 soon?