Lunch and Adventure, my new blog: loudlunch.com
Hey all, I’ve been busy blogging at work behind the firewallz so I haven’t been so keen on updating my personal blog. But I have been pretty passionate about lunch-time lately. So in that vein, I decided to start writing about it on a new blog, Loud Lunch.
Loud Lunch will be dedicated to my favourite meals and adventures that I have in that one hour of midday primetime. Starting small, but maybe one day I’ll have a couple of co-writers, preferably one in Guelph and one in Waterloo as well. If you’re interested, please let me know. All of the graphics and the setup are all pretty experimental, and up for a complete re-design once I get into a writing groove and the idea flushes itself out.
So yeah, feel free to check out what I have to say about pizza from a local good-cause cafe and a mango-rich rice dish from the local chinese place.
xo, d$
Getting lucky with free mobile WiFi
Like lots of people in tech, I have a Blackberry with WiFi. Regardless of how good Rogers has been with their 3G network, WiFi is faster to browse with, and free-er. With that in mind, I’ve added my home and work WiFi networks to my connections (Manage Connections -> Set Up WiFi Network), and just let them connect when I’m in range.
I’ve also added a few SSIDs that are the hallmark of an unsecured network. I don’t put a password or try to hack anything, just hope to occasionally connect to a random unsecured network:
- linksys
- default
- NETGEAR
- Belkin54g
- Wireless
- dd-wrt
I based this list on the most popular SSIDs that wardrivers have found, as well as some local experience.
This has come in useful only once: in the underground train station in Warsaw, where I had no data but some local restaurant had their WiFi open. :-)
So yeah, enjoy.
TorCHI Presentation: Sprint Zero and Agile Design
My co-workers Khan and Brian and myself went to the University of Toronto for a presentation at TorCHI. It was by Lynn Miller, a Senior Manager at AutoDesk (Maya, 3DSMax, AutoCAD, etc.)
The presentation was about Sprint Zero: the lead-up work that is required before a team embarks on an Agile project, or any project that has an iterative nature with many stakeholders.
Bottom line was that in her experience, and in conversation she has had with designers at UPA, CHI: Without the Sprint Zero and a Pre-Sprint, designers felt lost and products tended to “fail.” Historically, Agile organisations have dismissed the need for a Sprint Zero. In practice this has lead to designers that were disconnected from the final product.
For the rest of this summary, there are a few assumptions:
- Sprint One (first 2-3 weeks of development) typically doesn’t require much design.
- One project per designer. Any more than that, and it’s too much to deal with.
- All resources working on the project are full time on that project. The definition of “project” was larger than at my workplace, but perhaps typical for industry: ex. 5 devs, 3 designers, 3 QA, 2 documentation people, project manager, product manager.
Pre-Sprint Zero
Before Sprint Zero, there is actually a long pre-Spring Zero phase that that conceives of the project. This is where the Executives, Sales, etc. get involved to offer insight, feedback, and direction.
- It lasts several months
- Anwsers marketing and sales need, defines the business scope.
- Creates the research that is used throughout the rest of the process, specifically identifies Personas.
- It includes the competitive investigation.
Sprint Zero
Sprint Zero itself is actually not very long, but focuses on an aggressive building of common ground and understanding amongs the stakeholders. Without it, there’s a risk of no ”big picture” cohesiveness, early buy-in before complete understanding of the risks, and lots of ”thrash.”
- Sprint Zero Lasts 1-2 weeks
- No coding, no designing: just big picture envisioning so that everyone understands. Motto: “Maximise the amount of work not done.” – Create work, do not do any of it.
- Priorities are determined, though that they are difficult flush out in detail.
- Who is involved: PM, Design Lead, Dev Lead, Doc Lead, QA lead
- Get “just enough” that you have a “shared understanding” to begin design, development, test planning.
Steps in Sprint Zero
There are five steps to Sprint Zero.
1. Determine Shared Product Vision
If you haven’t done so yet, determine a vision for the whole product. This vision will not change throughout the life of the product. It helps keeps the project focused. TPM usually leads this, though external facilitation helps.
Do this by creating a “Vision Statement.” The statement can have the following format:
For … <users>
Who … <do stuff>
NAME <name your product something useful>
Is a … <thing>
That … <does stuff>Unlike … <competitor>
… <who does this>. (repeat)
2. Create a Project Objective Statement
Define an objective statement for this specific release. Used to make decsions against. Result of a 2 hour meeting, led by TPM.
“Remove the top obstacles that prevent people who download our product from purchasing it.”
“Kill 3DS Max.”
3. Flush out a Project Data Sheet
A product data sheet (of which there are many examples of online) create alignment between stakeholders Answers the Who, What, Why? Makes it easy to grasp fundamentals. Unlike the previous steps, lead by the Development lead, with all stakeholders involved.
The PDS will include:
- Personas
- Object Statement
- Client benefits
- Tradeoff matrix: Excel (perfect, immovable), Improve, Accept (flexible) vs. Features, Schedule, Resource, Stability
- Specific features defined as “able to ..” statements. “Colour picker” is not a feature. “Able to pick colours while drawing” is.
- Milestones and schedule.
- Prod architecture and performance considerations.
- Risks and risk management.
4. Define an Operational Model
At this point, you can get the team ready to go. Physical planning is very important. Whiteboards, decisions on what remote software to use, determine what software for note taking. Physical environment is often neglected in planning. Determine roles and procedures for the project.
- Led by Dev Lead.
- Determines meeting times and format (stand-up, scrums, formal, etc.)
- Good time to review “lessons learned” from last release: well, didn’t go well, surprises, expectations, etc.
- Who fills the customer role?
5. Have an Initial Planning Meeting
The first planning meeting is pretty intense. It results in a speculative high-level schedule with sprints laid out. It establishes priorities and accepted timeframes. The “Able To” statements are broken down into chunks, which results in a planning board with story cards: Estimations, ”Able to” chunks, timeboxed. List out employee vacation.
Once you have a first run of the schedule laid out, expect things to be more mutable as you move left to right.
The pieces on this schedule are called Story Cards and Feature Cards
- Tight estimates in “Feature Points.” FPs are kinda like a “person day” but adjustable to the role, person, etc. Takes care of things like overhead, quantifiable to figure out your “velocity.”
- Story card is higher level, feature card is subset of story card.
- Each card is associated with a developer.
- Each card has an acceptance criteria from all the stakeholders: Docs, QA, Dev, Design.
- User Story cards can be used to illustrate strategy and tactics, but with loose estimates. There are things that are a bit too big or in the future to even break down. Usually things that can’t be estimated are user stories.
- Risk cards are used to identify specific risks. Make these red. You can have specific risk cards, such as design risk cards, external dependency card, engineering/dev risk card.
These cards are place on the schedule in a timeline. Watch for janitorial staff re-prioritisations (ie. take pictures). The physical cards are moved to prioritise:
- Product requirement: must to nice
- Workflow: essential to additional
- Development Risk: high to low
- Dependencies: many depending on it to none
- Design risk: high to low
… and that’s it. At this point, you’re in Sprint One and you’re following your Agile method with a shared understanding and lots of decision-making material.
Best Practices for Design in Iterative Environments
There were a few best-practices that could be taken away by designers, irrespective of the SDLC.
Design is always being done for the next cycle, before the developers ask for it. Special attention is paid to future high risk items. This gives you time, and reduces pressure.
You have to pre-plan all your client visits, preferably during Pre-Sprint Zero. Assume that you’re going to use them. Customers don’t mind seeing you over and over if you show them progress every time you see them.
Always go on site with at least two people: a project manager to see purchaser/client, and another UX person to get end-user access. Those needs are different, and impact your design in different ways.
Every once in a while offer a more public larger release, such as a free preview, feature complete alpha, etc. This may be hard to do, but is very worthwhile in holding trust and engagement from the customer.
Blue Beanie Day 2009 @ Desire2Learn
blue beanie day. Originally uploaded by jclhicks.
So some of the design and standards people at work wore blue toques today in celebration/encouragement of designing with web standards:
Doug Vos’ Writeup on Blue Beanie Day 2009
If you’re interested in showing some web-standards solidarity, take a look at the Facebook group. We’ve been really struggling at the bleeding edge of ARIA and other web-application accessibility stuff lately, so some encouragement (especially from the browser and assistive technology vendors) would be appreciated!
Wódka or Vodka? Or why being Polish is tough.
The team at Vice, recently put out this great, short little documentary-style film about the origins of vodka. As the writers allude, many countries lay claim to being vodka originators the way the Russians do, but none with so much difficulty (and legitimacy) as Poland.
Despite starting off a little slowly, and not doing the Ruskies any favours, the movie really hit me in the core. Why? Well, there’s something really difficult about being Polish. This movie picked up on that, but it found hope, and did an epic job of capturing in the last 10 minutes of the film.
The crux of the problem of being Polish: Despite being a central part of Europe for well over a thousand years, the birthplace of Chopin, Copernicus, Curie, and John Paul II doesn’t get much consideration from fellow Europeans and Americans alike. (Though I feel even worse for the Ukrainians)
History Hurts
It’s no secret that the last 60+ years of European history have been unkind to Poland. The glory days were around 1410 – 1790; following that, a rapid decline hurt. A couple of things happened that really pushed Poland out of its place in modern, Western culture.
1939+ Sucked
World War II did a number on the Poles. Watching American movies you’d think that World War II started in France and was won with American bravado. This is infuriating (and dehumanizing) being from the place that lost so much, fought so hard, did a stand-up job in Italy, and was then abandoned by foreign leaders at Yalta. We still can’t get one good blockbuster movie out of it (The Pianist notwithstanding).
Then there’s Communism, but that ended. Who got the credit? The Berlin Wall. My lord, what an unfortunate press whore that was. The Poles had just gone through a decade of strife and struggle, Martial Law, threats of Soviet invasion, a victorious free labour movement, cultural upheaval … and then that stupid German wall came down, and stole the highlight reel.
1981+ Mixed, But Better!
So behind this Iron Curtain of Soviet and American invention the Poles sat overshadowed, relegated, and drinking. And it’s here that Vice picks up the story, with the one thing that is undeniably Polish (other than heliocentrism and a solid cavalry): wódka.
The Future Looks Blurry and Bright
A history of 80-proof booze is not a great vehicle for cultural hopes and dreams, but it’s pretty telling. It’s telling about Poland’s difficult yet shared history with the Russians, about the nonchalance of Poland’s return to the world market, about Poland’s need to convince its neighbours of things that it shouldn’t have to defend. But it’s also telling about the nations belligerence: it’s art, youth, palette, and night clubs.
As Ivar puts it, to the Poles it feels good to be back at the table, even if it just to share a shot or two. Na zdrowie!
Vice Guide to Travel: The Wodka Wars (http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/wodka-wars)
The birth of the Microsoft Office “Ribbon”
New ideas for user interface components don’t come by very often. For example, the pointer, icons, and toolbars have been around since the late 1970’s courtesy of the work done at Xerox PARC. It’s safe to say that the computing environment in the late 70’s was quite a bit different than it is today, so it’s only logical that some of the paradigms developed then need a modern refresher.
There have been high profile attempts at designing new, complete, usable components to solve specific problems such as interactive assistants and horribly bloated CD lists. But in recent memory, all pale in comparison to the Ribbon that Microsoft introduced in Office 2007. The Ribbon is what replaced the toolbar system used in previous versions of Microsoft Office.
The ribbon effectively solves the problem of displaying the functionality of a very complex and feature-rich piece of software like Word or PowerPoint much more effectively than toolbars, tabs, and other competing concepts. In combination with gallery views of icons, and organising things in use-driven groups, the solution is elegant and ages well. It’s unfortunate (read: fucking brutal) that Microsoft is patenting this idea in the current climate of software openness and growth, but I digress.
Jensen Harris did a presentation at MIX ‘08 about the history of Office and how the ribbon was developed. A must watch for any employed interface designer: the ideas about religious tenets, building lots of high-fidelity prototypes, evaluation over a number of months, and constraining ideas to make reasonable decisions are worth discussing.
YouTube video below, but the complete presentation is available from Microsoft.
My new Dell Mini 10v: The First Day
Since I haven’t bought a laptop in over 3 years, I decided to follow the trend and pick up one of the ultra-portable notebooks / netbooks. After reading some reviews, I picked up this Dell Mini 10v. It arrived today, only seven days after I placed the order via a Dell Chat.
Rather than offering an extensive review, I wanted to share some first thoughts.
Arrival
I was extremely happy to find out that the packaging it was shipped in was both secure and minimal: very few things came in the box, and the box itself was small enough to hold with one hand. The Mini 10v doesn’t have a DVD drive, but it came with a copy of Windows XP and the restore disks anyways. Hurray! That fact got a few chuckles in the office.
The AC adapter is not a brick, but instead, looks like my Nokia cell phone charger! Very nice. Those brick monsters with two cords make portable laptops oxymoronic.
First Boot
The Mini 10v I ordered came with Windows XP SP3. I use XP at home and at the office, so it’s cool, but I’m wondering what happened to Vista. Where is my voucher for Windows 7? This is an eight (8!!) year old Operating System. I will be looking into the Ubuntu 9 Netbook Remix very shortly.
The netbook doesn’t come with Microsoft Office unless you’ve installed it, but I’m very glad to have Microsoft Works with the Office 2007 compatibility pack installed by default. But this is insane: Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is the default browser – the broken one circa August 2001. I honestly feel like I’ve been cheated, and need to speak to someone at Dell about it.
More immediately, some fixable things were show-stoppers:
- The “function keys”, (Fn-F7 to mute, for example) were not installed. This took me a while to figure out, I just thought they weren’t responding or something. After navigating the Dell website, I found the utility (or via FTP) and installed it. Very bad form, Dell.
- Windows is installed with 120dpi fonts by default on the Mini 10v. I love this font setting on my big LCD monitor at home or at work, but on the 1024×576 screen, this is bad news. Most notably many dialogs cut off on the bottom. In the Dell Wireless utility I could not press “Apply”, “OK”, “Cancel” without blindly pressing Tab and Enter. So after changing the font size to 96dpi, and restarting, the dialogs became useful again.
- The preference for “Large Icons” out of the box is … questionable given the small screen. Cranking down the icon size is available in the Display Properties.
Hardware
Out of the box, the hardware looks and feels way slicker than I expected it to. It doesn’t suffer from the same “hollow rattle” as some of the old Dell laptops I’ve owned or used; it feels solid and well put-together. The screen hinges particularly stand out as being hard-effing-core. Having three USB ports is pretty great.
My only concerns are about the touchpad and the screen glare. The screen is shiny. I mean SHINY. I’m sitting here between two other laptops and my LCD, and the Mini 10v is a mirror compared to the other devices. Hopefully this subsides over time and fingerprints.
More seriously, clicking touchpad buttons is straight up frustrating. The touchpad looks great, and the material is nice. Akin to the Apple touchpad, there are no segregated buttons, and clickable areas are in the bottom right and bottom left. This sounds great, but the execution is poor (and perhaps can be improved with some driver tuning). Once you move your finger over to the bottom left to “click” you inevitably end up moving the cursor about a third of the time. If I do the tasks seperately, it works fine .. but when navigating normally, it’s a constant bother.
Performance
One small note about performance: coming from full-powered dual core machines, going to netbooks is an adjustment. One recommendation I ignored is splurging for the 2GB upgrade. I immediately regret that decision. Do it: buy the 2GB of RAM.
The wireless performance with the Interl (802.11n) adapter is really great, and better (in terms of -db readings) than with my 2 year old, full size Dell Inspiron.
If you do have 2GB of RAM, turn off the page file. I’ve noticed this is particularly great on laptops that crawl if the 5400RPM mini-drive trird to page a few hundred megabytes of stuff. I turned off the page file on my 1GB Mini. It’s noticably more responsive when switching between applications (Firefox, Messenger, and Microsoft Works, for now), but this puts an aggressive cap on the work that you can do simultaneously.
More to come!
Internet Literacy in Education
Wanted to share a pretty great video about internet media literacy, and higher education. For someone finishing up a Masters, some of the points he makes ring very loudly. From the YouTube video:
Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, “Michael Wesch and the Future of Education.” I found it fascinating! He describes how he so naturally incorporates emerging technologies into his courses from the smallest seminar type class to the largest lecture theatre filled class.
More importantly he not only talks about the technologies but how he encourages extraordinary participation and collaboration from his students by engaging them in meaningful learning activities.
[...]
During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.