Picture My World

I finally got out to shoot some photos this morning.  Shula came with me and took her own pictures with our older Sony Cybershot.  I had been dreaming of the time she could accompany me on one of these outings and not be a) totally bored or b) totally annoying.  It was great fun.

Here’s a sample of her work:

 

   

 

  

 

   

We’ve been in Boston for about 6 weeks now. Executive summary: Boston is nice. Moving sucks.

Prior to the move we heard that Bostonians were a little cold or aloof and really bad drivers. So far, the former is false and the latter is true, but they are no worse than Vancouver drivers (and definitely better than Richmond drivers!). One local that we met said Bostonians are obligated to tell outsiders that they are cold and aloof even though it’s not true. I hope they don’t come get me for revealing the truth.

We haven’t had a lot of time to explore Boston proper yet. We spent our first month out in Framingham in a hotel, so didn’t get into the city at all. A couple of weeks ago, we went to the Boston Common which was quite nice. The architecture here is fabulous — and now that I’ve finally unpacked my camera, I hope to start photographing it.

The move has been a series of little pains the entire way - and it’s still going.  The MathWorks provided a really good relocation benefit, but many things outside of their control were imperfect.

We were “professionally” packed and moved from Vancouver by Great Canadian Van Lines.  There were 2 packers - one knew how to pack but not how to keep his trap shut and the other couldn’t do either - he was constantly on his cell phone and, for example, had tossed an unwrapped silver cup carelessly into a box (I only found it because I had to find some things they shouldn’t have packed).  We were not impressed at the time, nor when we had to unpack some of these carelessly packed boxes.

On the other hand, Arpin Van Lines (who sub-contracted the Canadian side) were pretty good overall except for passing on my complaints to Great Canadian before the guys had loaded the truck…  We’ll see how well they respond to my claim for 3 missing boxes, though.  The other headache is our car arrived with a brand new noise.  It’s also to be seen whether the shipper will deal with this.

We nearly didn’t make it into the country because we didn’t realize our daughters needed US passports when entering by air. We thought their Canadian passports were adequate ID, but we got a lecture about how wrong we were about that.  Again, this is something the immigration lawyer should have picked up on. Luckily we just ended up with a stern warning.

Besides the physical move, we’re dealing with starting with essentially no credit here.  AT&T wanted a $500 deposit per phone if we wanted a contract, so we’re on an expensive pay-as-you-go plan until we build up some history.  We’ve applied for some store credit cards and been denied.  It’s great fun.  However, we’re about to get a mortgage, so that should help on the credit problem.

We also had some fun navigating the health care system almost immediately.  First Kim got conjunctivitis and then Lior came down with a fever.  I was so used to walk-in clinics in Vancouver that it was a shock not to have them here.  You actually have to 1) be a member of a doctor’s practice and 2) call your doctor to make an appointment.  If you don’t or can’t do either one you need to go to the ER.

We still need to register our car here.  After that, I think we’ll be done with the biggest parts of the move.

Twitter got me my job.

When I first discovered Twitter, I was very skeptical. Who cares about what I’m doing now, let alone what other people are doing? The public timeline is a mess and filled with too many “going to bed” posts. However, I started to warm to Twitter when I started following people I knew or had only met briefly at conferences. Many of them are interesting and smart and there’s the occasional link or discussion of interest. It’s also a great tool for a procrastinator like me looking for a diversion. (OK, maybe I should do something about that.)

Last month I was looking around for a new job. (Side note: After 13 years at Creo/Kodak, some people thought I would be there forever. Why is that?) I was updating my resume for an interview in Vancouver and twittered:

to which Matthew, whom I had met only once at a UPA conference a couple years ago, replied:

If not for what happened next, I would still be cursing Matthew for such useless advice.

And the roller coaster ride started.

One stupid message about fonts and we’re moving to Boston. It’s amazing.

PS: If you want to follow me on twitter, go to http://twitter.com/jzip.

I recently accepted a job at The MathWorks and we’ll soon be moving to Boston, MA.  (”Soon” being a relative term if you consider the magnitude of this move…)

I’ll be doing more of this usability stuff and I can’t wait for my March 24 start.  I’m joining a 30-strong usability team and a huge usability community in the Boston area. The story about how I got this job deserves a post of its own.  Stay tuned.

The rest of the family is also excited by the move.  Not only is Boston an old city steeped in history, but it also has a much larger Jewish community that we’re looking forward to joining.

Lior was inspired by the walking kids at Oakridge Mall’s Scream Pit play area yesterday.  I caught some of Lior’s first steps on my crappy phone camera.

(Note: She did not cry after the crash at the end.)

This YouTube video makes it clear why camera lenses are so expensive.  (ht to daring fireball)

I was just reading Joshua Ledwell’s blog where he wrote:

User experience is an organizational value. Either the organization understands and values UX, or it doesn’t … and it can be very, very difficult to “bubble up” a corporate value. Now, you may still choose to do usability at a company that doesn’t hold the customer experience as a core value.  The important thing is to recognize that going in, and temper your expectations accordingly.

Truer words could not have been written.  The challenge for those caught in companies or organizations like this is to choose your course of action carefully.  Either path may lead to gray hair, so be prepared.

For those of you who decide to fight to make UX a core value, you must take that fight up the corporate ladder.  It’s not enough to woo the engineers and designers, though it helps.  Management has to be on board and supporting you.  All the usual advice applies — start small, communicate clearly, and set excellent examples.

We are kicking the TV out of our house. It’s not that it’s done something wrong — instead, it’s simply time to give it to someone who can take better care of it. We’ve been neglecting the poor thing for too long and it deserves better.

Neither my wife nor I watch much TV although we have been briefly addicted to various shows. I have a current addiction to Battlestar Galactica and my wife was recently watching Desperate Housewives. What we find, though, is that once we miss a few shows (easy when kids are in the mix), we don’t miss them. TV is probably one of the easiest addictions to kick - just turn the thing off.

It will be nice to rid the living room of the box. Have you noticed just how the TV or “home entertainment system” dominates the room? If you have enough space for a dedicated entertainment room, perhaps that’s fine for you. We just have one room big enough for guests and a 27″ TV. We’d like to shift the focus back to people.

We are not banning all video entertainment from our home. We just signed up with Zip.ca (Netflix for Canadians) and will watch the movies on our computers. The subscription offsets the cancelled cable charge, so in the end we are entertainment neutral, I guess.

If you got rid of your TV would you miss it? For how long?

It’s another “wow, I haven’t updated this blog in a long time!” posts.  I won’t dwell on it.
I am transferring my domain to A2 Hosting so there may be a few bumps in the next few days.  Not that you’d notice though as there’s no reason to be visiting!

I’m a procrastinator.  As a result, I have discovered a number of online procrastination groups and web sites.  I can’t help but think that all the people visiting these sites are just procrastinating.  Many of them even admit it in their comments.

According to 43things.com, over 19,000 people want to stop procrastinating.  That’s 19,000 people who were procrastinating on 43things.  There must be another 19,000 people procrastinating on a different site. I think almost every facebook user is suffering from procrastination.

Do any of these sites or groups help people with their procrastination? I find that most of them offer simple tips that are not effective by themselves.

Are you a procrastinator?  Are you a former procrastinator?  What was your cure?

And I don’t mean baking with their Easy-Bake Oven.

Apparently, this is still a problem (I thought I blogged about it a while ago, but can’t find it).  This SFGate article talks about the issue and includes tips so you don’t forget about your kid. Reading it, though, I have to wonder if the underlying cause of this problem is our crazy, multitasking lifestyle or simply… daycare.  Every example of accidental death cited was a parent forgetting to drop the kid off at daycare.

I could go on about how this article nicely summarizes so many underlying problems with our society, but I don’t have time.

Thanks for the link, Merlin.

It’s true. Read it here. Don’t let the fact that Eileen is a fiction writer give you any funny thoughts.

Growing up, Sony was it.  They made the Walkman and good TVs.  Later in my life, I started to hear rumblings that Sony quality really wasn’t all that good.  More recently in my life, I’ve experienced poor quality first hand with a defective laptop, defective desktop computer (neither of them mine, thank God), a defective digital camera (covered under a recall, I hope), and two short-lived DVD players (kicking myself).So, now I’m looking for a replacement DVD player on the inexpensive side.  I’ve looked at online reviews at places like epinions.com and LG, Toshiba, and others are not getting good reviews.  However, one company is getting good reviews and that’s Panasonic.  I found the same thing when looking for a microwave a few months ago.Is Panasonic the way to go for my future gadget needs?

It seems everyone at the conference has a Blackberry.  I don’t recall so many of these thumb-damaging machines at the conference last year.  What’s going on?

Bill Buxton gave an insightful and inspiring opening keynote at UPA2007 today.

He talked about design and specifically about the role sketching plays in the process (the subject of his new book, Sketching User Experiences).  He also nicely tied the topic into usability.  He prefaced his talk by saying he was introducing some ideas not mentioned in the book, so the reference to usability might be one of them.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow of his entire talk, but I want to capture some of the more interesting points (and one joke).

• Sketching is not design, but he’s never seen a design process without sketching.
• Buxton’s personal mantra (as highlighted on his site) is “Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.“  That really resonates with me. I think it’s easy to dismiss my development goup’s  commercially oriented products as “things”, but they have a huge impact on the people that use them. We sometimes get a glimpse of this from enthusiastic customers, but we need to internalize this idea.
• Many design sketches focus on the states but not the transitions.  Designers need to communicate the detail about these transitions.  As we all know, it’s the journey, not the destination and that applies to our interactive interfaces as much as anything else.  This leads to the joke:
• Q: What do Canada and transitions have in common? A: They are both dominated by the States.
• A key attribute of sketches is that they are ambiguous. Buxton says, “you need holes in order to let the imagination run around.”  This way, you get more out of a sketch than you put in it.
• Another key attribute is that sketches of an idea come in multiples.
• The software design industry needs to do more up front ideation.  We need more sketches. He spoke of one studio manager that demanded his designers came to the table with a minimum of 5 well thought out, valid design sketches or they were shown the door. Ideas are cheap. We are all creative. Practice.
• Usability today focuses too much on the phase following ideation and exploration. It focuses on “getting the design right”, not on “getting the right design”.
• Buxton advocates earlier usability involvement, evaluating multiple sketches of alternative designs.  We should expose users to these different designs so they can compare and contrast. He presented some research showing that this technique results in better, more critical feedback from participants.

I’m very excited to take these ideas back to work. From now on, any design work I’m involved with will follow Buxton’s advice and I want to develop techniques to quickly and easily usability test sketches. I think we have most of the tools already - as Buxton mentioned, this is similar to paper prototype testing but at an earlier phase.

I’m in Austin, Texas at the UPA conference.

Last year, there were a few people blogging about the conference, but this year I can find only one, Pat Kennedy. I hope this is not a sign of things to come, but there looks to be many good sessions regardless of the lack of online buzz.

Off to the opening reception…

I lost my cell phone a while ago. It was a recent-model Nokia and I replaced it with another recent-model Nokia slightly different than the lost one.

I was quite surprised to find many small differences in the interface. Many of the menus were subtly different for no apparent reason. In some cases, the phone was worse, in other cases, better.

In my old phone, if I wanted to change the current ring profile (for example, to switch to silent or vibrate-only), I could hit the power button and I’d get a menu that included all the profiles.  In my new phone, the power button doesn’t do anything like that.  There’s a “Go to” menu mapped to the left soft-key that allows me to pick either the “normal” or “silent” profile (among a million other options) but doesn’t reveal the other ring profiles.  If I want to switch to “meeting” or “vibrate”, I need to navigate many levels into the main menu.

On the other hand, the new phone has dedicated volume buttons on the side, which the other phone lacked.  I always wondered how Nokia missed those — aren’t they mandatory for a mobile phone?

So, what’s up, Nokia? Is this an example of the constant iteration and tweaking you do on your handsets? Did you make these subtle changes for a good reason or just because different teams designed the two phones?

It’s not that bad.

We’re travelling with a 3 year old and a 5 month old.  I’m taking the morning off and the rest of the family is at a friend’s house.

I was ready to write a rant about how tough it is to be away from home but, as I reflect, it’s really not that bad.  The worst parts, so far :), are:

• The baby starts to hate the car more and more as the day wears on.  There’s a lot of driving (we are in California, after all) and that’s a problem.
• Shula is a little home sick and asks to go home at least once a day.
• Eating out most of the time gets old and Shula doesn’t eat as well as she does with home cooked food.
• Good naps are hard to find.

However, the novelty of being somewhere else does keep things manageable.  Shula is turning into quite the park fiend — she loves new playgrounds.  The kids also did really well on the flights down here.

Speaking of flying — if you’re flying with a toddler, check out this harness from CARES.  It turns the airplane seatbelt into a 5 point restraint and means you don’t need to lug around a car seat.  Highly recommended.

Where have I been?

The answer, sadly, is that I was immersed in a terribly addictive game. However, I’ve completed my last quest and cancelled my subscription. I had started writing a post about the game when I first started, but I never got around to publishing it. Ironically, I had written that I wouldn’t be signing up for the game after the trial…

I could tell you all about the great job Blizzard did with World of Warcraft, but I won’t.  Read a review or play the game yourself.  However, I don’t recommend it if you have an addictive personality.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back.  Maybe I’ll even write a little.

Now for a lighter topic.

I just got a new LCD monitor at work. It’s big and beautiful, but do you know what its biggest problem is? There’s not enough room around the screen for post-it notes!

What are office workers around the world going to do?