Category Archives: User Experience

User Experience is the Daily Renewal of Enthusiasm

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“Sales is Simply the Transferral of Enthusiasm”

That’s what I heard at the recent IBM PureSystems event I demo’d and spoke at. It resonated with me because, while I’m not a sales guy, I do spent a lot of my time transferring my enthusiasm for IBM Flex System Manager to those that use it and sell it. In fact, my recent trip to Shanghai and Dubai was solely because I have a way to successfully transfer enthusiasm through demonstrating and speaking about Flex System Manager that makes both end users and sellers excited about the product.

However, what I am discovering is that regardless of how successful I am at transferring my enthusiasm to others, their new-found enthusiasm will fade fade quickly if it is not continually renewed.

How is enthusiasm for a product best renewed?

Through its user experience.

I am finding with our latest release of FSM that our new user experience is being very well received by both users and sellers alike. It is this new user experience that is renewing their enthusiasm every day, not the memory of a well-executed demonstration.

Think about it: How many times have you seen an online video or in-store demo of a product and you get so excited to use it you quickly part ways with your money so you can bring it home…only to discover that the product is far too difficult to set up and use for your particular needs? I know I have … especially with music software. The bullet points are exactly what I need to accomplish my goals, but the interface is so confusing I end up uninstalling and wishing I had not been suckered in by the flashy demo.

Maybe that is the ultimate litmus test for a product…for the user experiences I own: Can the level of enthusiasm I transfer to sellers and end users during the initial demo be constantly renewed by the user experience they interact with every day after?

What do you think?

Tell A Story With Our Designs – For A Better Future?

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I love to write songs.

My best songs are story-based…you know, in verse one we meet the character, the bridge describes what their struggle is, and the first chorus what they’re feeling. Verse two brings in detail or a new wrinkle to the story, followed by a slightly altered chorus that applies to the situation. Of course after that is a killer guitar solo, and then verse three or a B-section brings a surprising twist…that not only makes the song memorable, but by the end of the final chorus makes the listener think about how it applies to their life in hopes that they will become a little bit better person.

I’m starting to wonder: should our user experience designs tell a compelling story, too?

In this case, instead of the story being about a character we hope the listener likes, the story told by our designs would be about the users data, or their systems, or even the users status updates, photos, and chats. We know these are things our users are already passionate about and they are rooting for to win!

…so why do some of my designs seem like a documentary? “Hmm, your system is this, that, the other thing. You data takes up this much space.” …Distant…sterile…

…Boooooring.

In these standard designs, there is nothing to connect our user emotionally to their data/systems…nothing to draw them in so they WANT to invest their time helping the story along.

Instead, what if I told a story? What if I introduce their systems as characters in a story…knowing that there are challenges ahead, relationships to nearby networks and storage that deepen the story? What if I make the user interface react to what the characters want instead of asking what the humans that use the product want?

For example, I currently define a target user (persona) along with what goals they have. I then design the software to help the human accomplish their humans goals. What if I turned it around and defined my central character as the users data or the systems they are managing, and then showed in the UI what the characters need?

I know the first push-back would the classic rule saying that I shouldn’t personify a non-living object…

…but what if this is what our next-generation of IT professionals need?

Maybe our future IT professionals need software that help them relate to the datacenter systems…help them connect on some emotional level so they will want follow the systems status, help the system through struggles, and feel empowered and feel some deep satisfaction when their systems succeed and thrive.

Stories have been powerful tools to help motivate and capture human attention for centuries…maybe it’s time we start telling stories with our software?

What do you think?

What if we started our software experience with, “Once upon a time…”?

2013 Mission: Create The Best Designs of My Career

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Every January I walk into work with a fresh outlook, clear mind, and am brimming with ideas on what I want to accomplish for the year.

…for exactly 17 minutes.

At the 18th minute (17:03 to be exact), the emails, calls, and instant messages come rolling in asking for my advice, help, work, skills, along with memories about unfinished business from last year. Very quickly I get a full list of to-do’s that have nothing to do with what I really want to accomplish. If I’m not careful, I could spend the whole year fighting these little fires (hence the lateness of this ‘welcome to 2013’ post).

This year, I’m going to be very intentional about achieving my 2013 mission…

2013 Mission: Create the best designs of my career

I know. Lofty. But if I shoot for anything less, our customers lose out. What follows is a list of what I’m going to do so I focus on my mission.

Make My To-Do List MY LIST
My default reaction when I get a request is to agree, then break it down into nuggets I can work on. The result is that each nugget is identified, a solution is defined, and I work to complete them successfully.

The problem?

Most of those to-do’s are either too small to help achieve my mission (just fixing an issue in an existing user interface), or they are to-do’s that contribute to someone else’s mission! While I love helping others succeed, I can’t lose focus of helping our users succeed by providing them the best designs I have ever done.

This year, every time I see a task, I’ll ask myself, “Will this help me accomplish my mission”?  If yes, then onto the to-do list it goes. If not, well, I will say no or delegate to someone who can do it.

Team with “Better Than Me’s”
In the world of user experience, it’s always a plus to have a team filled with folks that are better than you. For me, it raises my game and in the end I produce a better design for our users. I’m fortunate to be in a team that is filled with awesome designers, crazy-great developers, and fellow inventors.

Let my game rise!

Design Less
In 2013, I want to reduce how much UI is needed in designs. In the same way I edit down a song to make the lyrics and music better, I need to constantly  reduce the amount of UI so the interaction is better.

If I keep cutting ‘bells and whistles’ in the design, at some point one sweet tone will ring true…that’s when I’ll know it’s ready.

Design so Users Succeed
This may seem obvious, but many times my focus has been “How do I fit this feature into the product”, or even, “This will provide the feature AND be simpler to develop”. This year my focus will be, “How can our user succeed in their goals…and does this feature even help in that success?”. If I can’t answer that, then maybe the feature shouldn’t be added.

Start. NOW.
I will not wait for the perfect moment, or the muse to strike. I won’t get coffee first…I’ll start the design NOW. The hardest part is to get something on paper. Once there’s something there, you can easily see the gaps, the bad stuff to replace, and the good stuff to keep.

Then, once a draft is done, walking to the coffee lady can be filled with mental iterations on making the design better…then my draft 2 on paper is really draft 18.

Put Pencil to Paper
Seriously. I will actually get blank paper and pencils. Nothing is faster than capturing inspired designs than a pencil drawing on paper. I lost my way trying to create realistic mockups for the first iteration of the design. This year I’ll wait until it’s the 7th iteration.

~~~~~~~~

Welcome to 2013! Happy to have you as a reader, and I can’t wait to create some awesome user experiences!

Question: How are you going to create the best designs of your career?

Usable vs. Useful: It’s All About Being Relevant

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The Great Interweb is filled with sites about designing a product that is usable as well as sites about designing a product that is useful. If you google “usable vs. useful” you’ll even find a lot of great conversation debating the two, but I’ve never really internalized the difference.

My personal moment of clarity came with I picked up my wife’s iPhone.

With its familiar interface, fluid navigation, and multi-touch gestures, I can tell you right now that her iPhone was instantly usable. But after just a few minutes of frustration, I can also tell you right now that her iPhone was completely useless!

…for me.

Using her phone I couldn’t get to my email, my personal calendar, and and I couldn’t even tune my guitar with my favorite guitar tuner app!

That experience was a very eye-opening for me and made me realize that regardless of how shiny the presentation is, and how easy the navigation of a product is, if it is not relevant to me personally, the product is not worth my time.

That made me think: Is it more important to be useful than usable? Can you have one without the other? Also, why do I love products that are not shiny? Craigslist, for example…or my Library app? Neither are examples of awesome visual design, but they are so relevant for me I don’t really care.

That led me to think a bit deeper: Is it an individual personality/generational/character thing that determines which user experience characteristic is most important to a user? If a person is more concerned with the kind of car they drive or other external appearances, does that affect their opinion of a products outward appearance regardless of how useful it is?

How about you? What is most critical for you to have a great user experience?

Demoing A (You-Tell-Me) User Experience

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It’s time.

Our over-a-year-focus on user experience enhancements is now being seen by the world. We couldn’t affect our whole product, but instead focused for this release on what customers said they use/need the most.

These enhancements are for our product IBM Flex System Manager, and it includes some really big user experience changes that our design team has been designing/iterating on for over a year. I haven’t been this excited about a release I’ve been involved with since my album (check it out here or on iTunes/Amazon… it ROCKS!)

We have received very positive feedback during our customer testing, and our own internal users seem thrilled. We have measurements that tell us we’ve reduced time/effort to get things done, that it’s simple to use, and it just looks pretty 🙂

But I wonder if I, or anyone, can really declare a level of user experience has been achieved until users get their hands on it and use it (probably for at least a month)? Because, in the end, it’s all about our users and if the product is useful to them…and delights them.

Be that as it may, check out what our new user experience is like…

How about you? Do you have a favorite way to share your improved user experience to your users? How do you get feedback?

User Experience – Communicating A Core Principle

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In a recent talk I gave, I described our overall mission for Flex System Manager as, “To provide a best-of-breed experience in managing physical/virtual resources across compute, storage, network so that business-critical workloads can thrive.”  I also described that, in order to achieve that mission, we defined a number of core principles that we drive to and measure against.

I had just finished showing off our new mobile app and enhanced UI in our new Flex System Manager release, and it was clear from the audience applause that we are delivering some really great enhancements that looks pretty darn cool.

I then got to our core principle, “Enhanced User Experience”.

To help the audience fully understand what we mean by user experience, here’s what I said:

“User experience is far more than shiny objects and cute iPhone apps. To us, it’s also about reducing the time to set up the whole PureFlex environment and manage it…it’s about providing automation users can trust so that when they press a button, they trust our software to relocate and optimize their production-level workloads…it’s about providing relevant actions and showing relevant data to help users trouble-shoot and make the decisions they need to manage their data center”

Yes, ‘shiny’ is important, but ‘fast’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘relevant’…that’s what makes a great, and lasting, user experience.

How about you, how do you communicate what user experience means to you?

 

You can say more in 15 minutes than 35 minutes

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I just killed a keynote session where I was asked to talk about Flex System Manager…our strategy and future directions.

“Great content…outstanding delivery” said one VP. “This was the first time I understood the value of this technical product” said a non-technical sales lead. “You’re like a technical rock star”, said a technical sales specialist.

But 12 hours before, I was a complete wreck.

Originally I had 35-40 minutes to talk…

…I practiced several times and was ready

Then, at 8:30pm the night before, I was told they wanted a Q&A at the end so my section was shortened to 15 minutes

My heart sunk…

…I had a great arc and story that would most likely be shattered

…I had 10 minutes of demo I was showing to illustrate what we’re delivering today that was cut

I mourned

…then I regrouped, rethought, recovered

I reshaped the talk…sharpened the story arc…cut out duplicate, less-relevant content

…and delivered a potent talk that was much more effective than my 35 minute talk

That makes me wonder? Should I do that for everything I do? For speaking: Is there a way that can take 1/2 the time yet be twice as effective? For UI Design: Is there a way to give users 1/2 the details and be twice as effective?

What if we were always given last minute changes to our best-laid plans? Would we all benefit with a reshaped and refocused effort?

What do you think?

Everything I Know About User Experience I Learned From Jimmy Buffett

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One of the best ways I learn about user experience is to, well, experience it. In 2009 I went to my first Jimmy Buffett concert, and while I enjoyed a great show, what I learned about user experience I will never forget.

I was so affected that I had to write what I learned. I initially wrote this for an internal publication, but my organization thought it was ‘not right’ for our development org. To be honest I was sad since I really thought it could help others understand the importance of paying attention to the WHOLE user experience.

Since one of my long-term goals was to get published in “Interactions” magazine, I put on my ‘get it perfect’ hat, re-edited for a while, and submitted it. To my delight it was readily accepted, but in trying to get the right mix of articles, I had to wait around a year to receive the published article.

It was very much worth the wait.

Click HERE to read the article

Not only was I inspired by a great concert, but my love for music helped me directly achieve one of my career goals. At the time it was my 75th published article, and while have 92 published to date, this one still holds a special place in my heart.

I look forward to chatting about how I’ve positioned user experience in my work…

Question: Where have you had a great user experience that affected how you design in your work?

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