Adventures in UX

I joined Corillian Corporation in July, 2004. I spent about a year in tech support then switched to training, where I’ve been ever since. Last June Corillian was acquired by CheckFree, an online bill-payment provider. In December, CheckFree was acquired by Fiserv. In the space of about six months (without changing jobs), I’ve gone from a company of about 250 employees to one with over 22,000 employees!

One advantage of working for a larger company is the opportunity to explore different roles within the company. I’ve been fascinated by user experience (UX) design since I read Alan Cooper’s Guest Opinion columns in BASICPro (now Visual Studio Magazine). Those columns were excerpts of Cooper’s first book, About Face, which I similarly devoured as soon as it became available. And I found his VBITS keynote presentations in the mid-1990s thought-provoking and inspiring.

As an independent software developer, I wanted to create applications that were not just functional, but were a pleasure to use. My clients were usually more interested in having their apps delivered as quickly and inexpensively as possible. This conflict was a repeated source of stress to both me and my clients, and contributed to my decision to leave software development for the less schedule-driven disciplines of tech support and training.

When CheckFree acquired Corillian last year, I was excited to learn that CheckFree has an entire team (“User-Centered Design Solutions”) devoted to UX. The team was in the early stages of a major research and design project and, aware of my interest in the field, invited me to participate as an intern. It has been an incredible experience. It’s one thing to read about personas and how they can be used to inform the design of an application. It’s quite another to actually participate in field research and data analysis, to help design an application that will help real people achieve their goals.

Just before Thanksgiving, three teams of two visited the homes of 20 online banking users in Atlanta, GA; Columbus, OH; and Portland, OR. I was a member of the Portland team. We showed up with audio and video recording equipment and spent two to three hours talking with each participant about their financial and life goals, their current online banking experience, their desired experience, and how an ideal online bank could help them achieve that experience. (For more information on participatory design research, see Making Connections Through Participatory Design.)

Next, we spent several days going through our notes and recordings, entering data items about each participant into an Excel spreadsheet and assigning the items to various categories (e.g., demographic info, breakdown/frustration, ideal experience, quote, etc.)

At this point, I had spent about 15 hours with six very interesting people, and another 30-40 hours entering and coding their observations. They had shared some fascinating insights, but it wasn’t clear to me how we could distill all this raw data into something actionable. Thankfully, the team invited me to join them the following month at Lextant in Columbus, OH for the data analysis phase.

We began by having each field team present an overview of their participants. Our data entry items had been printed on Post-It notes; as we discussed what we thought was significant about each participant, we stuck the associated Post-It on a large sheet of paper representing that person.

As we talked about the participants, we began to see patterns emerge. At the beginning of the analysis phase, we had no idea how many personas we would end up with, but it soon became apparent that our 20 participants fell very clearly into three distinct groups. We created affinity diagrams to determine which characteristics of each participant were statistically significant. Next, we analyzed the three groups to determine the differentiating factors that caused an individual to belong to one group but not the others.

I’ve just described the process in two short paragraphs (and unfortunately I can’t go into detail about our findings for reasons of confidentiality), but in fact it was a full week of intense, exhausting, rewarding discussion. There were numerous inspired brainstorms and “a-ha!” moments. By the end of the week, I wanted to start my own online bank to deliver some of the amazing ideas we had come up with!

So, would I want to do this for a living? Yes and no. I find UX research extremely interesting, and interaction design is a wonderful creative outlet. I’m passionate about usability, but therein lies the problem: usability is not a verb. Toward the end of my week at Lextant, it began to dawn on me that ultimately we must create an application that Fiserv can sell to banks, which are primarily interested in “optimizing the online channel”: finding ways to separate customers from their money. Usability is a tool to attract eyeballs, but it’s far from the top priority.

I’d consider a career in UX if it were in an environment in which usability is a first-class citizen, where the people making the decisions are as passionate about UX as I am. Otherwise I would just be tilting at windmills.

  7 Mar 08 8:44 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Career, Software, Usability

Shrinkage

There’s nothing like traveling with a bunch of skinny Asians to make one feel fat (take a look at this photo while singing, “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)”). Looking at our photos from China, I decided it’s time to do something about my expanding girth.

I’m rather a picky eater, so the thought of changing my diet to lose weight does not appeal to me at all. In an ideal world, I would eat whatever I feel like and simply exercise enough to burn all the calories, but that’s not going to happen, either. I needed to figure out how many calories I actually use, then consume slightly less than that in order to lose this excess baggage.

Enter Diet Diary from CalorieKing.com. Tell it your age, sex, height, weight and activity level, and it will tell you roughly how many calories you should consume to maintain your weight, or in my case, to lose one to two pounds a week. Then use its extensive foods database to record what you eat and track your progress.

I’ve been using the software since December 5 (nearly four weeks) and so far I’ve lost about 4½ pounds, so it seems to be working. Now I just need to exercise more than once a week, and my waist will be smaller than my chest in no time. Watch out, skinny Asians!

 30 Dec 05 3:45 PM · Comments (1) · Tags: Palm, Personal, Software

Cool Utility

Scott Hanselman swears by MaxiVista (they even have his face on their home page!), a utility that allows you to use a networked PC (typically a laptop) as a second monitor. But what if you want to actually work on both PCs? I suppose you could Remote Desktop from your primary PC to the second, then use MaxiVista to drag the RD session over to the second PC’s monitor (think about that for a second!) Here’s a better solution...

By way of Ofer Achler, I have discovered Synergy, an open-source utility that lets you share your keyboard and mouse with a networked machine. Simply move your mouse pointer off the edge of one screen, and it instantly appears on the other; keyboard and mouse events are sent to that device. It even merges the clipboards of all connected PCs (or Macs; Synergy is cross-platform), so you may copy and paste among them.

Very cool free utility; highly recommended. Now, if they’d just put my face on their home page...

 30 Dec 05 3:29 PM · Comments (1) · Tags: Software

Spam Filters

I'll never forget my first e-mail address. Back in 1986, I signed up for a CompuServe account; my address was 72451,3401. Several years later, I opened an account with a "real" ISP and started using my new e-mail address in newsgroups and on my Web site. It was then that I was introduced to the scourge of spam.

Three years ago, when I registered the philweber.com and philweber.net domains, I thought, "Here's my chance to retire an address that's on every spammer's list and get a fresh start!" I informed my friends and family of the new address and scrupulously avoided using it anywhere it might be seen by spammers. Or so I thought.

Then the spam starting trickling in. How had they found me? Turns out I had used my new address to register my domains! D'oh!

Rather than change addresses again, I began using spam-filtering tools, starting with Qurb, a PC Magazine Editor's Choice. Qurb works well enough, but it integrates with your e-mail client; if you check your mail on the Web or with a mobile device, you're out of luck.

To address this limitation, I've been using a server-side spam-filtering service, MailSift. I simply set my POP3 server to forward all messages to MailSift, then point my e-mail software at MailSift's server to retrieve my messages. (MailSift can also poll your mailbox if your ISP doesn't support forwarding.) The service works great, and at $2/month it's quite affordable. (My current stats reveal that since I signed up two months ago, I've received 767 spam messages, but only 247 legitimate e-mails.)

Another annoyance with which I've been dealing recently is comment spam. If you host a blog on Movable Type 2.x, I recommend MT Blacklist, a donationware plugin that blocks comment spam by comparing the commenter's URL against a list of regular expressions. It can also despam your comments if one of those parasites slips through your defenses.

  7 Dec 04 12:44 AM · Comments (1) · Tags: Blog, Software

Longhorn Killer App

Since the PDC last Fall, Microsoft has produced a series of concept apps to demonstrate how Longhorn's key technologies will enable the creation of groundbreaking new applications. The sample apps certainly look cool, with lots of 3D graphics and animation, but so far none of them have made me want to install Longhorn as soon as possible. Until now.

Check out this video of an app from Microsoft Research called Photo Triage. It (apparently) employs Avalon and WinFS to visually categorize collections of digital images. Some have questioned how Windows will obtain all the cool metadata WinFS needs in order to sort and search our data; this app nicely demonstrates one way it could work. I want it!

via John Lam

 30 Jun 04 11:10 AM · Comments (0) · Tags: Software, Windows

Life Balance

I discovered a revolutionary piece of software last week: Life Balance, from Llamagraphics, Inc. Most To-Do List apps encourage you to prioritize items by urgency: their due date. If you're like me, your life is full of things you consider important, but which aren't really urgent. Some of mine are: Be a better husband; learn to speak Chinese; improve as a musician; get in better shape; cultivate personal relationships, etc. Life Balance is revolutionary because it helps you prioritize by what's important, not merely what's urgent. (Not only that, but it's the first widely-available Windows app I've seen that's written in .NET.) I urge you to check it out.

  4 Dec 02 3:46 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Palm, Personal, Software