Category Archives: UX

Lovable SharePoint Event

Over the last few months, I’ve been making a big splash around town with my latest crazy invention: Lovable Sharepoint. It’s a new service offering, that proposes to take a behemoth of a gas factory, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, affectionately known as MOSS, and implement it in full-scale, gas-factory enterprise environments… with UX spearheading the effort. 

 

Title slide for LSP. Image by Peter Alexander.

Title slide for LSP. Image by Peter Alexander.

I’ve put together a presentation, most unlike the typical Microsoft-Gold-Partner Bullet Monster, consisting mostly of one image or word per slide. I’ve worked together a nice 30-minute speech, worked in some blocking and staging, and performed it, first at an INS sponsored event at the Microsoft offices in Denver. We had a full room, while most of these marketing events usually draw about ten people. I had set a single red rose, and my business card, at every seat. Warm breakfast was steaming at some tables in the back. Lights were dimmed a little.

 

It went very well. My friend Cliff Burton was opening for me, with a review of the MOSS feature set, and he was wonderful, turning this dry subject interesting with his deadpan self-deprecating humor. He rammed through the feature set in twenty minutes, connecting everything to what I would say next. He left the audience awake, in a good mood, and expecting more bullet points and clipart.

Then I went up, and I killed, man! I killed! 

I appealed to the grand vision of freedom and joy: enterprise transformation. I showed pictures of a peace march, and described adoption as a very passive-aggressive form of protest. How can we miss the mark so much, with such great intentions? I showed the tower of Pisa. I stressed that an intranet is a process, not a product, I described the user-driven process, the focus on goals, not tasks. Expanded it to a new vision where top-down and bottom-up feed off each other.

User-driven process, Goal-directed approach, Community focus.

I finished with a plea to approach this work with love. The lights came up and everyone was still awake. They were quite alert too. Hands shot up and I took questions, good pointed questions. Handshakes happened with our sales guys. Cards changed hands. I got some personal thanks and good-jobs. I also got the best set of speaker evaluations to date. And my sales guys were drooling at the leads. In the room were IT and Project managers for a large Christian charity, and I think the “love” message struck a chord.

I love it when that happens. When I can be passionate in a business setting, and the reaction I get. People are starved for authentic genuine passion, in the tech world, but it’s as necessary, if not more, as good requirements and functional specs.

MOSS envisioning engagement

The final site map

I’ve been sent to Los Angeles to help a CTO make a case, in one week, for a MOSS implementation. I approached the process with personas & goals, ethnographic interviews, and a usability-oriented review of their current systems. I also established a good rapport with the CTO, by listening to her business goals and inferring her personal goals. She wanted to shake things up, to streamline the bureaucratic machine while empowering the splinter groups, the internal startups that had developed in a vacuum of control. I can respect the wisdom of that approach, especially when dealing with the potential bureaucratic armageddon that can be unleashed with tools like SharePoint.

I applied my goal-directed approach to navigation, yielding a site map that provided a “Cathedral” area for corporate unity, and local, flexible “Bazaars” for the mavericks. We accommodated the security requirements of the compliance division, putting a key ally in our camp. In one week, we put together a solid plan, and the client invited me to help her present it to her boss.

It was a very quiet, subdued moment, after the chaos of trying to piece together a company in a few days. Just the company’s president, my client, and myself. He appreciated the potential for a healthy balance of corporate types and entrepreneurs, as well as the value of our plan. His questions afterwards were related to the logistics of making it happen. The dialog was productive, good decisions were made.

I head back to Denver, with another feather in my cap. The local sales guy is amazed at how calm our client seems to be. It’s not calm, dude. It’s focus!

Default to Worst Practices

I’m currently taking a training class on K2.Net, a .NET-based workflow system. It’s an interesting tool, quite powerful and usable, and the training is also of high quality. Still, it has me shaking my head, because it teaches worst practices.

The lab section of the training has us building a sample workflow, and it is riddled with bad choices. For a start, the approval step in the workflow is captured by an “Approval” variable which is a string, not a boolean. Okay, that’s minor, and I can see that it makes the lab easier. But then other fields are mis-named, or mis-used, as the lab progresses.

Also, the basic form we build to initiate workflow asks the user for a name and email, even though this is an authenticated, registered user, whose name and email we already know from context.What is worst: We later send notifications to the authenticated user, not to the email address they provided in the form.

It’s like death by a thousand cuts. A slow accumulation of slight design errors and inconsistencies, which eventually amount to the wrong way to design a workflow. Okay, I understand that the training is not about workflow best practices… But shouldn’t it be?

The way I see it, this training will result in a dozen people having the ability to use this product, but no idea how to do it right. Builders with a flawed approach to design. And I see the same problem cropping up everywhere. For instance, on a recent article about Atlas (Microsoft’s upcoming implementation of AJAX), a sample showed how to dynamically change the label on a form button to the current time, when the user clicks it. With Atlas, you can do it without a page refresh. Yeah, but WHY? Why would you ever want to put the current date and time on a button label? I know this is a technology demo, but why demonstrate how to do the wrong thing?

This problem is pervasive in developer training, code samples, programming classes. Developers, who often end up having to make design decisions without extensive training in interaction design, get bombarded with examples of bad design. Why do we keep training bad habits into them?

Extranet with secure webmail

Extranet with SafeMailSometimes all a complex problem needs is a better metaphor.

This higher-ed consultancy, client of ours, has been struggling for years with transfers of large data files to and from their clients. Statistical analysis works best on large data sets, and in this case, the files reach in the dozens of megs, and they usually are burnt on CDs and sent in the mail.

Some more courageous institutions had been uploading files through a web interface, but that was fraught with problems, mostly with dropped connections and uploads. Also, there was a lot of back-and-forth on the phone with clients, trying to determine which uploaded file was which, which was outdated, which had changed.

We had finally come up with a semi-reliable way to allow web upload, and decided to revisit the whole user experience before we implemented it. The developers had a clear vision of an online file manager, but I insisted we look at the actors, context, and goals.

It turns out that these files are always exchanged in the context of customer service, always accompanied with conversation and clarifications. And there is a better metaphor for this kind of file exchange: Email attachments.

I proposed a prototype of “Safe Mail”, a new set of pages on the extranet where clients can check their mailbox for messages and announcements, send messages with secure multi-meg attachments, and keep track of the entire process. I made sure to include thumbnail photos of the client’s consultants with their email, and to demo an announcement from the big boss, to highlight the customer service, marketing and sales value of this relational tool. 

The client loved it. The entire office has been abuzz about it since the demo, and the developers are working hard to make it real. It’s going to simplify a whole lot of things around here, and everybody’s very busy trying to find the right photo to use on their profile.

I love it when looking at context and personal goals allows for a complete mind-shift into a better metaphor. We’ve done more than solve an issue here; we’ve changed the nature and tenor of customer service, making it both more rational and more personal.

Hello operator!

Finished another one of my “deus ex machina” one-week fix-it-all stints, this time at the offices of a large cable operator. As usual, this was a SharePoint project, attempting to find some value to deliver to the operations. More specifically, a way to connect the distribution hubs of Video-on-Demand services, with coordinated schedules.

After a half-day being walked through the technical requirements, and attending meetings that were more about politics than tech, I finally asked my team: “Where are the users?”

We descended out of cubicle land and into the depths of Ops, which looked like the interior of the death star. Hallways made of server racks. Finally to a dark room where a few operators sat at a large console, consulting giant screens plastered on the walls, beaming Video-On-Demand by satellite to the four corners of the country. And I spotted the current solution: an excel spreadsheet, prominently displayed on one of the bigger screens, that one of the operators was busy hand-editing.

It turns out, of course, that the users weren’t directly using the current system. They were copy-pasting from it into a master Excel spreadsheet, basically a glorified list. Then, a few times every day, one of them would copy-paste out each hub’s portion of the master sheet, and send each hub their own version of the spreadsheet. It was constant manual labor, yet still outdated every few hours. But it worked better then trying to tease out the relevant info from the cumbersome legacy system.

Once more, a little ethnographic research saved the day. I pointed out the low-tech, instantly usable solution: Import their master spreadsheet into SharePoint. Allow them to mark different rows for different hubs, and have SharePoint automatically replicate this into each hub’s team site. Total time to code and test: 2 days. And the users loved it. We walked back down into the death star, showed it to them, and they had it on the big screen in ten minutes.

The solution was so elegant and simple that I even had time left, the last day of the week, to put together and deliver a little training session at one of the hubs, for the other users of the system. They were shocked and delighted that someone came to see them, with a solution instead of questions, and even more shocked when they realized that I’d just come in out of nowhere and cut their workload down by 20%.

Anytime there’s a SharePoint implementation that has not leveraged any Usability/ User Experience skills, coming in is like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka. Too darn easy.

It was a fast-paced week, but the client’s happy, the users are happy, and my boss is happy. I’m going to enjoy the weekend.

Clinical Trials and Tribulations

A humanized flow diagramWorked on a whopper of a project, for Microsoft. My company was picked to help develop a “Solution Accelerator” for the Pharmaceuticals industry, providing a SharePoint implementation template for clinical trials, as well as some InfoPath data-gathering tools.

Clinical trials are enormously complex, regulated, and expensive. We focused on the protocol creation and approval process, which contains aspects of collaborative document authoring and workflow, regulatory submission and approval, etc. I had always thought enterprise software projects were big things, but taking a look at clinical trial protocols helped put that in perspective.

The challenge was to learn a lot very fast, in order to be able to add value. In about five weeks, we nailed down the realities of the process of protocol creation and submission, and I insisted we also focus on the context and goals of the different actors and stakeholders. I designed a nifty cast of characters, which we used in process diagrams to make the workflow come to life. They proved unexpectedly useful.

What happened is that the little sketch you see here helped everybody on the team stay on the same page in terms of user functionality. Developers working on a module could see the gal in the white lab coat and glasses using their module, and they made the interface precise and data-rich. UIs were markedly different, more verbose and action-oriented, for the suit-and-tie users.

I created countless flow diagrams, worked closely with developers to ensure all requirements were covered, and designed the SharePoint UI to host and unify it all. On a project of such scale and urgency, the difficulty was to not let user considerations get buried under the colossal weight of enormous and dense requirements. Tensions ran high, but we delivered, and the client was satisfied with the result.

Beyond HTMLeum

Oil Industry UI DesignDid a one-week stint in Houston, Texas for a large international oil company, helping fix an internal accounting app. As is common with enterprise engagements, we were not only putting together a unified dashboard for a set of disparate and incompatible financial and accounting systems, but also walking the slick tightropes of high-flying politics. 

It was a quick intervention in a middle of a dense financial project. I was brought in late (post-requirements phase) but since the project was already starting to unravel, the client was ready for a semi-radical realignments of priorities.

I confined my work mostly to the UI, where I applied a whole heaping load of goal-directed thinking, and reduced the multi-screen app to a single screen with 3 tabs. I also noticed that speed was the big unvoiced issue with the application. Demos and training sessions were tense because of these dead moments of waiting for pages. Since the app was presenting results from batch-processing systems, I made the developer implement a quick and dirty caching system, that made the app nearly instantaneous. I also reorganized all data into a matrix, with a clear action column, as well as visual progress bars. Add to that a nice clean design in company colors, and the next demo was a raging success.

I’ve done my week in Houston, everybody’s happy, I’m going home.

Boot Camping at Baxa

Baxa Website thumbnailConducted, with my friend Peter Alexander, a hardcore two-day Usability, Information Architecture and Design Training session for the marketing team at Baxa. Trying to distill everything in two days is always a high-adrenaline challenge, and I think it went very well. The designers at Baxa are a cool team, eager to learn, and I think they picked up imediately on a lot of what we had to offer. 

We had a good chuckle at some of their product names. They manufacture high-quality, reliable, sterile medical equipment like the “3-way oral port stopcock.” There you go, I’ve said it, and my blog is now on every parental-control blacklist!

For Baxa, I also helped lead a Personas-and-Goals exercise, which helped elucidate a lot of debates and clarify the goals for different sections and tools of the site. I also delivered an information architecture review, and a sitemap.

We’re reviewing their next set of comps, and will help them stay on course with spot-checks. I already like what we’re seeing.