Posts Tagged ‘User Experience’

Experiencing coaching an user experience graduate

Excitement…

The moment I was asked to coach an User Experience graduate from the Hogeschool Rotterdam, I was enthusiastic. In my professional career I’ve been coaching several students and to me this has always been very inspiring. When you are working in the area of User Experience for quite some years like me, working together with students provides me with new viewpoints and insights. These new insights stimulate me to look differently to my own assignments and that is very refreshing.

Feeling of insufficiency…

This time there was one difference with all the other student projects I’d coached before. This specific graduation assignment was defined by my UX colleague at Approach without my consolidation, because I was involved in other assignments at that time. Thereby this graduation project consisted of a topic of which I had very little knowledge. This definitely was a hurdle to take, especially at the start of the project. Regarding the content I wasn’t able to give the graduate much of advice.  That felt as a shortcoming on my behalf.

Fortunately Approach employs more professionals, who were able to help the graduate with his topic. By asking relevant and provocative questions, we tried to stimulate him to focus his research and come up with refreshing insights and conclusions.

Tip: As a graduation coach you don’t need to know all about the subject. In the end the graduate will be more experienced on the topic than you are anyway. However with your knowledge and experience, you can still stimulate the graduate to explore all far corners of the subject by asking the right questions.

No sense of urgency…

It’s in a sponsor’s interest to keep the graduate on the right track regarding the planning and deliverables within a graduation project which should come to an end within a specific amount of months. Some graduates might find this quite a difficult task to accomplish, possibly because their school assignments mostly have predefined milestones and shorter time spans. Therefore I requested him to set up a planning. Being his sponsor from Approach, I wanted him to think about what he expected to deliver to me. I also asked him when he would deliver. Due to my experience in coaching other graduation projects, I noticed that for graduates, content often is more important than planning. In a business however as well content as planning are both of equal importances. If the agreed content isn’t delivered in time, it might not be useful/relevant/valid anymore.

Tip: As a graduation coach you need to stimulate (help) the graduate to set up a planning including deliverables and liaisons. The planning should be fine-tuned during the graduation process and deadlines should be kept.

Desperateness…

I expected/asked the graduate to keep me informed about his way of working and his progress. Most of the working hours we were sitting in the same office, so I expected communication would not be a problem.

During their education UX students appear to learn a lot about gathering content and applying design methods. However they seem to have hardly any experience in dealing with a sponsor and the related communication expectations.

Despite of, maybe even due to, all my experience with experienced professionals, I didn’t realize that. I waited in vain until the graduate would keep me posted about the outcomes and hands-on deliverables. I repeatedly asked for information, but it didn’t help. Like this, I didn’t get any information. Instead, I should have planned a regular meeting, at least once every two weeks.

Fortunately, social media can be of great help. I started to follow my graduate on Twitter. I tried to figure out what the problem was. I gave tips and tricks to support his way of working. I gave him deadlines. I felt I wasn’t able to coach him properly. I had become a policewoman.

Tip: In case of a graduation project it sometimes is better to assign the coaching and the sponsoring task to two different people within the guiding company. Then the coaching professional can focus on coaching, while the sponsor plays the role of the ordering customer.

Relief…

Together with my UX colleague Nils Vergeer within Approach, we each took on one task. This worked great. Nils told the graduate what he as a sponsor expected him to deliver at what time and told him what would happen if he didn’t. In the meantime I could go on supporting the graduation process and supply him with tips and tricks on how to deliver in time.

Tip: As a sponsor you have to be clear in expressing your professional expectations according to deliverables and planning.

Joy…

This worked remarkably well. The graduate found his way and graduated in time by presenting a great report on the subject, supported by a tool he designed to support UX-designers and software developers working closely together.

1st international SOA Symposium

Yesterday the first international soa symposium started. The location is very interesting: the Ajax soccer stadium. The line up is great: Thomas Erl, David Chappell, and Dirk Krafzig are among the speakers. The content is very good. For the first time in a long time, I had trouble choosing the right track because I would like to follow all of them!
It was also the first time we (Approach) were sponsoring an event. We have a great spot for our booth. It is a nice mix of tool vendors, consultancies and customers at the conference.
The keynote yesterday was by Thomas Erl. He addressed three groups: He appealed to vendors to stick to standards, to the Industry to make standards understandable and to practitioners to make a distinction between different disciplines of SOA.

We are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA
The first session I attended was by Paul Brown, a well known author from Tibco. The presentation was well organized, and he made relevant observations. The thing that stood out for me, was that he approached the problem of SOA and BPM from the business. He talked about the current silos and stated that these would not go away, just because we are doing soa, or as he eloquently put it “we are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA”

Another track I was interested in, was the SOA and Web 2.0 track. I attended two sessions. (For some reason, the first one was in the track “SOA Industry”). It was presented by Edwin Sanders and he talked about user interface services. The concept and architecture was interesting, his approach lacked any acknowledgement of common user experience principles. Either the product (corizon) lacks this vision, or the presentation was just unclear. I hope for them, it is the latter…

The presentation by the Burton Group about user experience was very focussed on User Experience. Anne talked about persona’s, Donald Norman etc. Unfortunately the relevance for SOA was explained very clearly. I believe there is a strong link, hence our user exerience service….

In general the sessions and content is very interesting. It would be nice if the program would mention the company the speakers represent. This is very relevant when you select the sessions that you want to attend.

I am sitting in our booth, typing this. I am looking forward to another interesting day. For me this is already a success and I hope that this conference will be continued next year.

Mike in the Approach Booth

User experience can’t be generated

Lucas Jellema posted a very interesting blog on the AMIS site recently about a topic that I love to argue about .

His claim is, and I quote: “My claim in this article is that there are very few ADF projects that will not benefit from using JHeadstart.” I disagree vehemently, I think there are several reasons why you don’t want to use it , both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective.
Let’s start with the IT perspective:

• you become dependent on the JHeadstart (consulting) team for version upgrades, they tend to lag a little behind. This might not be a big issue, but it is something that you should at least be aware of.
• Generating does not encourage separation of concerns: the same code can be generated into different pages and is not refactored by a developer (because it is generated). When you want to change this code, that is repeated everywhere in the application, you need to change it by hand everywhere or regenerate the page and lose post generation edits.
• you can not reuse generic JHeadstart components in other applications than in JHeadstart applications.
• It is designed to generate (relational) data driven applications very fast. In a SOA environment data is not in the form of relational tables and rows, but in the format of hierarchical XML data and objects.
• You edit properties not directly in the screen (direct manipulation) but indirectly in a property editor. It takes some (a lot?) of learning to estimate the effect of an edit.

However, this is not as important as the business reason.
An application that is used to bind customers to your company (marketing sites), saves operational costs by applying self service, or that is used in a mission critical situation (hospital environment, military type) has totally different requirements. The user interface can add real value to your application and organization in this case. It should be designed independent of the database or any other technical implementation detail! See for a good explanation of this concept this book.

In a SOA environment this becomes even more important. Because you have more information from different sources that you can combine (services), it becomes very important to think about the experience you want to give your users. If they don’t understand it, or they get lost, you can lose business.

Finally, software development costs are not the biggest IT costs in most businesses. Losing potential customers to competitors, maintenance of existing applications, license and hardware costs, correcting technical and business errors (for example incorrect orders), staffing and training the helpdesks etc, etc are a much bigger issue. Saving on your development by generating the most visible part can be a an expensive mistake.

There are different types of applications, of course. An application that is build to maintain some reference data in a database can easily be generated by JHeadstart or any other data driven tool. The question is, does this really save you any money?

My claim is: in most cases it will not