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June 2, 2010

Introducing the Boston Azure Project

Posted by Bill Wilder under Azure, Boston Azure User Group, BostonAzure.org web site dev, Open Source, Programming, Software Engineering, Web development on bostonazure.org | Tags: foss, open source, oss |
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Cloud Computing on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform is still new, but will be big. I believe that. That believe fueled my interest in starting the Boston Azure cloud computing user group (henceforth in this blog post, simply “Boston Azure”) back in the fall, even before Azure was released. Boston Azure is a cloud computing community group focused on learning about Azure.

Currently Boston Azure meets monthly on the 4th Thursday of the month in Cambridge, MA in the USA. This is an in-person meeting. I have received a loud and clear vibe from the Boston Azure membership that there is a thirst for more hands-on stuff. That was fueled further first by the hands-on Azure SDK meeting we held April 29, then again by the all-day Firestarter held May 8. But we need more. So, I had this idea for an ongoing community coding project that we can hack on together at Boston Azure meetings and other times… I bounced the idea off the community at the May meeting… since I received a really positive response, I now officially declare I plan to go ahead with it…

Introducing the Boston Azure Project

Why are we doing this Project?

The community wants to code. There is a desire to learn a lot about programming in Windows Azure – and what better way to get really good at programming Windows Azure than by programming Windows Azure.

The primary goal of the project is to learn – to get good – really good - at Windows Azure.

How will the Project work?

To be hands-on, we need a project… so here’s a project to provide us with focus:

We shall build a “gently over-engineered” version of bostonazure.org.

This “gently over-engineered” version of bostonazure.org:

(a) will provide a productive environment where participants (developers and otherwise) can learn about Azure through building a real-world application by contributing directly to the project (through code, design, ideas, testing, etc., …), and

(b) will do so by taking maximum advantage of the technology in the Windows Azure platform in the advancement of the bostonazure.org web site (though thinking of it as “just a web site” is limiting – there is nothing stopping us from, say: adding an API; exporting OData or RSS feeds; being mobile-friendly for our visitors with iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices; etc.), and

(d) will provide an opportunity for a little fun, meet other interesting people, and enhance our skills through sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

When will we code?

We will reserve time at Boston Azure meetings so we can collaborate in-person on a monthly basis. Participants are also free to hack at other times as well, of course.

Wait a second… Does it make sense to port a little web site like bostonazure.org to Azure?

It does not make sense – not in isolation. Go ahead and crunch the numbers on Windows Azure pricing and compare with an ISP-hosted solution. However, this is the “gently over-engineered” part: we are doing it this way to show off the capabilities of Windows Azure and learn a bunch in the process.

What is the output of the Project?

This project will be feature rich, easy to use, accessible, flexible… and open source.

Keep in mind: Since bostonazure.org is the web presence for Boston Azure community…

It Has To Work!

This project is for and by the community.

Anyone can contribute – at any seniority level, with any skill set, with many possible roles (not just developers).

Then how do we reconcile anyone can contribute with it has to work? The community process needs to be able to make the code work before we put it into production. We have to make this work. And we will.

So, now you’ve heard it all – the whole idea – at least the Big Picture. I will post more details later, but for now that’s it.

Next Steps

Please contact me (on twitter or by comment to this blog post or by email) if you want to be one of the very first participants – I would like a couple of folks to be in a “private beta” to get some details squared away before I make the CodePlex site public.

Update 23-June-2010: The project is now live on CodePlex at bostonazure.codeplex.com.

March 21, 2010

Software Development Lessons from the Movie Industry

Posted by Bill Wilder under Software Engineering
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Which is more important: Good People or Good Ideas?

The following video of a talk by Edwin Catmull, Ph.D., President of Pixar, is loaded with insights from the Movie Industry (specifically Pixar Animation Studios) that are applicable to those of us in Software Development – in fact, applicable to those of us in any team-oriented endeavor of any complexity. Every technologist who works on a team should listen to the talk. Then listen again. Any place where he talks about movies, substitute Software Development (or your team-oriented, complex vocation of choice) and think about how it applies to you.

Dr. Catmull ultimately answers the question of which is more critical: good people or good ideas? In doing so, he concludes unequivocally that People are more important, but doesn’t stop there - it is really those People on Effective Teams that makes the difference. He also peppers the talk with interesting insights, such as competitors (in all industries) are always copying ideas – but often they copy the wrong ones – they tend to copy only ideas that were previously well executed (and, thus, usually successful), but should perhaps pay more attention to the far more numerous good ideas that were poorly executed.

Successful products have got thousands of ideas. There’s all sorts of things necessary for it to be successful. And you have to get most of them right to do it. That’s why you need a team that works well together.
-Ed Catmull, Ph.D., President, Pixar Animation Studios

I stumbled across the video when reading a post by Jeff Atwood admonishing us to Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas; Jeff’s post is also worth a close read.

Notes and Quotes

Notes I took of Ed Catmull’s illuminating talk follow – mostly direct quotes (prefaced with where in the video it occurs):

@ 10:45 “We had confused the orgizational structure with the communication structure – a very common thing that happens to a lot of companies. They are different.”
@ 13:30 “success hides problems“
@ 15:25 (on doing “A” bug’s life and “B” toy story/direct-to-video) “We shouldn’t be thinking that it’s okay to be doing something that isn’t great.” (so they stopped the non-great ones)
@ 21:55 “What’s the central problem, finding good ideas or finding good people?” – answer is very clear:
@ 22:07 Teams are more important than ideas: “If you have a good idea and you give it to a mediocre group, they’ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it, or they’ll throw it away and come up with something else.”
@ 22:27 “We think about ‘an idea’. When we think of ideas for movies, we think about ideas for products. And it’s usually thought of as some singular thing. But the reality is, these successful movies – as well as successful products – have got thousands of ideas. There’s all sorts of things necessary for it to be successful. And you have to get most of them right to do it. That’s why you need a team that works well together.“
@ 23:49 On teams that function well together as a key competitive driver.”On the way we measure progress, is on how well that team gets together.”
@ 23:57 “The first time you do it, it’s a mess.”
@ 24:07 “The only failure is if you don’t learn from it – if you don’t progress. So the way you measure it, is this team functioning well together? And it’s a thing that’s never let us down. When that team functions well together they will succeed. When things are going wrong, they will fail.“
@ 25:00 “People like to copy the wrong things.”
@ 25:25 “They always remake good movies. And rarely do they beat the good movie. But the fact is, there are thousands of movies out there that are actually great ideas, but are poorly executed. They should be remaking bad movies.”
@ 25:38 “How does it happen with products – the ones that do better are the ones just copy somebody else’s good product, they actually take the thing that’s going wrong and fix that. That’s the better idea.”
@ 25:52 “They could copy the technology, but they couldn’t copy the process we were using to come up with the story.”
@ 28:07 (on post-mortems) “Get a lot of facts about the process. When you put the facts up, and you are fact driven, it actually stimulates discussion. And it’s those discussions that are very valuable.”
@ 28:39 “Summarize a few of the things we’ve learned:
1. Constant review
2. It must be safe for people to tell the truth
3. Communication should not mirror the organizational hierarchy
4. People and how they function is more important than ideas
5. Do not let success mask problems; do a deep assessment.”
@ 29:55 “Everybody says that the story is the most important thing, even if the story was drivel. It might be true – in fact, it is true – but it doesn’t effect behavior.”

March 11, 2010

BostonAzure.org “Subscribe to Email List” Form gets UX make-over

Posted by Bill Wilder under UX, Web development on bostonazure.org
1 Comment

There is a “subscribe” form on the Boston Azure web site from which people can ask to be added to the group’s email list.

I just made some updates to improve the user experience (UX). Here are the changes I made, and I list the handy web resources I used to help me decide (where applicable).

For field labels, I place the label directly above the field it describes. I use <fieldset> and <label> to describe my markup, presumably making it friendly to screen readers. (Credit to templates provided with ASP.NET MVC for making this part easy.) This is the layout that Luke Wroblewski (author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks) recommends in his Best Practices for Web Form Design for scenarios where you want to maximize speed, and the user is likely familiar with the data being requested.

Luke’s work is packed with clear, actionable, useful guidance that is easily applied and backed by user research. A gold mine…

Other recommendations I adopted from LukeW include:

Since I have two required fields and three optional ones, I removed the (Required) labels, and stuck with the (optional) ones only.
Added field length for optional Notes field.
Made the Primary Action of the form (the Subscribe button) green, just like Apple Store (got the idea from UIE mailing).

Also from LukeW, but from a different source (The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, which I learned of from a UIE mailing):

After the form is submitted, the user does not get an immediate email. I made that clear in the resulting text.

More improvements I can make in the future, also based on LukeW, include:

Validate the data entered. In my case, this is currently only that a well-formed email address is provided.
Provide more context on why data is being requested.
Disable the Submit (Subscribe) button after it is clicked to avoid double clicks.

Other changes, outside of LukeW’s guidance:

Mentioned “low volume” and “will not spam you” – though also need a privacy policy. Will get to that eventually..
Programmatically set focus to the first field in the form when the page is loaded. I used the jQuery technique described here.
Dropped “:” (colons) at end of labels while also changing labels text from leading caps style to mixed case (“Job title” instead of “Job Title:”). While not decisive for me, I found an interesting discussion around whether to use a colon in form labels.
Made sure users could press Enter at any time to submit – but this will only work if they are not in the single multi-line field on my form. Need to consider removing that field … Need to consult with Joan on that one.

Used semantic mark-up to implement the green Submit (Subscribe) button mentioned above:

Submit (Subscribe) Button

HTML:

<input type="submit" id="primaryaction" value="Subscribe" />

CSS:

#primaryaction
{
 padding: 5px;
 color: #FFFFFF;
 background-color: #267C18;
 font-weight: bolder;
}

Old form:

sign-up form BEFORE the make-over

New form:

The AFTER screen shot

February 7, 2010

Steve Krug on Rocket Surgery Made Easy from Dec 2010 BostonCHI Meeting

Posted by Bill Wilder under Trip Report, UX
1 Comment

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

Steve Krug speaks at BostonCHI

Notes from 08-Dec-2009 meeting

Steve’s new book - Rocket Surgery Made Easy - due in bookstores in a couple of weeks – material from this talk will be in his book…
Passed a copy of his book around through the audience for quick peek
150 or so people in attendance

Writing process

writing process: collect years of notes
need deadlines to force you to write (and finish)
collect relevant articles for each chapter and post them all on a wall
once you’ve begun to panic, start throwing things overboard
Outline, write, iterate
get help
throw things overboard (save for next book?)
FAQ at the end of every chapter – good idea
Doing usability (vs How to Think About Usability)

Doing Usability

A morning a month – that’s all we ask
Run tests – with whole team – at our site – scheduled monthly and well ahead of time – and debrief immediately after over lunch
1. maybe do right before iteration planning
2. company-sponsored lunch
Start earlier than you think makes sense
The sooner you get information, the better use you can make of that information
Don’t wait until the site is “finished” – test it as soon as it is testable
Don’t worry that “you already know about the problems”
If you have nothing built, test other people’s sites
Are you working on the site? –> Yes ==> test now!
Recruit loosely and grade on a curve
Beware implied domain knowledge
Some testing can be done w/o your target audience
Usability testers say many things that are similar to what therapists say – “what did you expect to happen when you did that?”
Keep yourself out of it! It is about the user and what the user being tested is thinking.
Make it a spectator sport
Get everyone to come and watch the test – frequently the observers suddenly just “get it” that they are not their users
Have high quality snacks. Keep the sessions short and compact. Do them on site. Make it easy for everyone to join in, hard to have a good reason to skip it.
Record sessions with Camtasia ($300). Get a good USB desktop microphone ($25). Don’t record user’s face (“useless and distracting”). Use a screen sharing service (like GotoMeeting, $40/month?) to control the UI. High quality audio is important, and should be channeled to the observation room via GotoMeeting or Skype.
Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems
Serious because everyone will come across them, or serious because for those who do encounter them will be seriously impeded.
Don’t feel you need to come up with the “perfect” fix
Ask everyone in the observation room to write down the three most important issues they observed. These are raised at the debriefing session over lunch.
When fixing problems, always do the least you can do ™
Prioritize the list, then work your way down the list until you run out of time/resources
Sometimes a tweak is better than a redesign – don’t get suckered into a redesign – the perfect is the enemy of the good!
Focus on the smallest change we think we can make to address the problem we observed
Q&A
Remote Testing?
Remote testing is handy – saves travel time, recruiting pool grows, … do over skype or GotoMeeting.
How to get it off the ground? Try a group usability test of competitor’s site – everyone can get behind that. Do one and hope people get enthused about it. Make the cost of swinging by to watch the testing really small.
Be very cautious about asking users how to fix the problems they’ve encountered. “Users are not designers.” “Hopefully you know a lot more than they do about design.” Listen to them, but be careful that they’re ideas are not well thought out. The purpose of testing is to “inform your design intelligence”.

September 14, 2009

The Fountainhead of Open Source

Posted by Bill Wilder under Essay, Random, Silliness | Tags: open source |
1 Comment

Just watched the The Fountainhead movie from 1946 (yes, from netflix).

Howard Rourke hacking Open Source

Here is the plot summary, brought up-to-date:

Open Source is represented by the protagonist, a brilliant architect named Howard Rourke. Rourke is idealistic, does his own thing, is uncompromising, and is not driven by money or recognition – and certainly not by Big Business.
Big Business is represented by newspaper magnate Gail Wynand. Wynand wields substantial influence and is in perpetual pursuit of any means to incite the populace – an energized populace buys more product.
Consultants and Certified Vendor X Developers and Vendor Partners are represented by architect Peter Keating. Keating goes with the flow, producing whatever the powers that be say is desirable. At one point, he mentions to Ms. Francon he’s polling folks on what they think of Rourke’s latest building to which she responds (with some disdain) “why, so you’ll know what you think of it?”

Lessons:

Talent != influence. Keating’s influence is limited to those who recognize his greatness. Most only recognize as great what they are told to recognize as great.
Passion can be directed constructively (Rourke pours his love into his life’s work) or destructively (Wynand devotes his career to controlling the masses through his newspaper).

The movie is based a book of the same title. The author, Ayn Rand, became well known for her Objectivism philosophy of life, exemplified in the movie by Gary Cooper who played the lead character, Howard Roark. [I wonder what Richard Stallman thinks of the book?]

I wonder how many professional software developers identify more with Howard Rourke or Peter Keating? And which is more desirable?

Any my clean analogies fall apart when one considers the combinations of Big Business and Open Source. Microsoft just announced CodePlex.org and the CodePlex Foundation “to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.”

A dirty little secret of Eclipse, Linux, Apache and other high-profile projects is that they also have professional, full-time staff – sponsored by Big Business (like IBM) – since the success of these endeavors is strategic for their business.

Maybe Open Source isn’t as pure as the romantic notion of developers from around the world contributing since it was a nice thing to do. The world-wide altruistic contributions may still be there in some cases, just supplemented by Big Business. Which is okay with me, though might not be with Howard Rourke.

(more…)

May 30, 2009

Jared Spool on what makes a UI Intuitive

Posted by Bill Wilder under Events, Trip Report, UX | Tags: UX |
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Jared Spool spoke at a Refresh Boston user group meeting on Thu May 28 in Cambridge, MA. During his talk, which was titled What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?, Spool delved into some common ways User Experience (UX) goes wrong and some ways to make sure this doesn’t happen to you. My personal notes/interpretations follow; if you think I got it wrong or want to offer alternative interpretations, feel free to comment.

Executive Summary

Understand your users and their levels of skill/knowledge
Understand the skill level needed by users of your software
Identify any gaps between the actual and needed skills (see two points above)
Design the software to bridge these skill gaps (which may vary from one user to the next)
Test your assumptions with real users to make sure you did everything right (Yogi Berra was right when he said You Can Observe A Lot By Watching!)

How to Create Non-Intuitive User Interfaces

First, some counter-examples – easy paths to UX Failure – how to be Non-Intuitive:

Do the unexpected: Spool showed an example of a site that used * (asterisk) to indicated those field “not required” which is opposite of popular convention. UX Fail.
Implement non-standard & sub-substandard behaviour: Spool showed a beautifully designed (visually appealing) site with custom scrollbar that didn’t work right (pretty but not functional). They had implemented their own scrollbar functionality to get the look they wanted – but a fully-functional scrollbar is really hard to do well – theirs was jerky and unpredictable. UX Fail. (Plus a bonus Form Follows Function Fail.)
Be non-intuitive: Spool showed “Hay Net” - a very simple site to help sellers and buyers of hay find each other. This site had two main choices on the front page – “have hay”, “want hay” – but user testing showed that about half the time “have hay” was chosen to find someone who has hay, and the rest of the time chosen when I am the one who has the hay. (This might qualify as what my old friend Julianne would call “Escher words” – where the meaning flips back and forth in your mind between alternative viable interpretations much like certain of M. C. Escher‘s artwork). Wording was not intuitive, even though it was very simple. UX Fail.
Add non-core features until your application is large and complex: The larger and more complex an app, the harder it is to keep it intuitive. This was a general comment from the Q&A, supported by examples in his talk [Wang dedicated word processors were very complex (requiring 1-2 weeks of training to use), supplanted by WordStar, supplanted in turn by simpler Word Perfect, later supplanted itself by simpler Word (after Word Perfect had grown more complex), and now Word is really complex - tens of toolbars, including one for editing 3D graphics]. But simple does not imply intuitive (see “Hay Net” example above). UX Fail, again and again.

Different Kinds of People

Key point: Intuitive is personal – maybe it works for me, not for you — it is unlikely that all possible users have identical knowledge
Prior experience of the user matters – where are the on the Knowledge Continuum?

What is this Knowledge Continuum you speak of? Imagine a continuum where the left-most end is “No knowledge” and the right-most end is “Full knowledge” and your UI is designed for users somewhere on that continuum. If the user’s current level of knowledge is less than the level to which you target your design, your software has a problem – there is a gap that needs to be overcome.

A design is intuitive if the Current Level of Knowledge = Target Level of Knowledge, or if the gap is small enough such that it can be bridged with good UI design. If the gap is too large, you may need training (whether online on in-person).

Two types of Knowledge

Tool Knowledge (for a specific tool – Word, Visual Studio, TurboTax)
Domain Knowledge (independent of this (or any specific) tool - writing, developing in C#, creating personal tax return with weak tax-code depth)

Techniques for Creating Intuitive Designs

Field Studies (watch your users in action)
Usability Studies
Personas
Patterns (reuse known good patterns)

Specific Examples for Creating Intuitive Designs

Bring Target closer to Current w/o resorting to training or help. This means your software needs to target the right knowledge level – find that target using the techniques listed above – remember: Developer/Designer does not have same knowledge level as User (at least mostly true).
Wizards can reduce target knowledge requirements (bridging that knowledge gap).
If your user base consists of very different Current Knowledge levels (e.g., home tax preparation vs. professional tax preparers) you can create two (or more?) specialized/targeted applications.
Every six weeks, every member of design team needs to watch users using the design for two hours.
Don’t hire an agency to design your experience. (Spool thought it was fine to have an agency implement your application, but you need to design it first if you want to be successful.)

Further Information

Here is an older article by Jared Spool on the same topic as this talk: http://www.uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/ (thanks Joan).

UIE Resources

UIETips – newsletter (free)
UIE Virtual Seminars (looks like they are $129 each - about 30 of them)
Reports ($?)
Conferences
Blog: www.uie.com/brainsparks
Site: www.uie.com
I don’ t recall Spool mentioning their podcast, but that’s another free resource: http://www.uie.com/podcast/ (I have it on my ipod)

Coding Out Loud

Software Engineering