Author: James Kebinger

Kickball is good: winning is better

My kickball team pulled out its first win of the season last night, and in exciting fashion. We were down 2-0 going in the bottom of the last inning – our offense was sputtering as usual, but we were still close. Eli steps up to the plate and boots a home run. That’s one in. Then Erica gets on base, followed by me with a bunt up the middle. Chip pops up, Erica gets home and I’m on third. Chris kicks one deep bringing me home for the come from behind victory.

Now we’re 1-2 with one of the losses a forfeit. Hopefully that explosive inning is a sign of more offensive output for the rest of the season.

Wisdom of Crowds and IBM

I’m working my way through James Suroewiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which is excellent. I was struck by an observation about the difference between socialogical diversity and cognitive diversity in a discussion about the culture at NASA around the time of the shuttle Columbia disaster. From page 183:

What was missing most from the MMT, of course, was diversity, by which I mean not socialogical diversity but rather cognitive diversity. James Oberg, a former Mission Control operator and now NBC News correspondent, has made the counterintuitive point that the NASA teams that presided over the Apollo missions were actually more diverse than the MMT. This seems hard to believe, since every engineer at Mission Control in the late 1960s had the same crew cut and wore the same short-sleeved white shirt. But as Oberg points out, most of those men had worked outside of Nasa in many different industries before coming to the agency. NASA employees today are more likely to have come to the agency directly out of graduate school, which means they are also far less likely to have divergent options. This matters because, in small groups, diversity of opinion is the single best gurantee that the group will reap benefits from face-to-face discussion.

This paragraph immediately made me think of IBM. IBM has always been one of the leading corporations in valuing sociaological diversity, but the vast majority of its new hires are fresh collge graduates. In my (limited, since I was never a manager) experience, hiring a so called “experienced hire” was like getting blood from a stone, whereas there always seemed to me lots of money earmarked for college hires. In fact IBM seems to focus large amounts of energy on gobbling up as much of the latest graduating class as it can, particularly the top N computer science programs with internship programs like Extreme Blue.

I can’t knock the value of hiring under-represented groups like women and minorities into a company, but does that really give you a pool of diverse cognitive experiences if everyone went to the same schools? If a person is fresh out of a given school, I doubt their opinons on things will vary much because they’re male or female, black or white – given the same crowd a few more years to get some experience, see what works and doesn’t work; that’ll give you cognitive diversity.

Crossing Ladies and Cheese Curds

A couple of quick comments from the last few days…

Crossing Ladies Conversation

The times I leave the house by 8:30 in the morning, there are always a couple of crossing guards working the rotary near my house. They seem to help many more adults cross the street than school children, but that’s neither here nor there.

I was waiting for my bus this morning and since it was a little late, I got to see the crossing lady interact with quite a few people. Every conversation seemed to cover what a beautiful day it was at long last – after it rained for five days straight. I’m not sure how anyone can take part in so many practically identical conversations (as eve 6 sang “talk so small I can’t remember every single word) over and over again. Or maybe she’s providing a valuable pick me up in the morning, especially in a place where one probably otherwise wouldn’t talk until showing up at work.

Cheese Curds

I love cheese, so one of the things I was looking forward to about my weekend trip to Wisconsin with Kristi was tasting my first cheese curds. And hearing them squeak. I was disappointed on both fronts. I like my cheddar cheese as sharp as I can find it. Only cheese curds are rather mild so that was disappointing. As it was pretty cold during the weekend they never warmed up enough to squeak upon ingestion either. 🙁

Jury, Have You Reached a Verdict

I don’t know if Judges really say to the jury what they do on TV when a verdict is to be rendered, but it always irks me. Usually the judge reads a piece of paper that presumably has the verdict on it, then hands it back to the bailiff who gives it back to the head juror. The judge then says “Ladies and gentlement of the jury have you reached a verdict?” – doesn’t the judge already know the answer to that question?

Gmail notifier stops checking when you’re idle

I’m not sure why this amazed me so much this morning. I got to work, unlocked my computer and suddenly my gmail notifier tells me I have mail – only that mail was some spam I didn’t bother reading this morning on the way out the door. It didn’t just arrive, so what must have happened is that it detected one of: screensaver turning off, machine being unlocked, or keyboard/mouse activity and then resumed checking.

It seems obvious thinking about it now that its pointless to tax an infrastructure by checking for updates that the user won’t even see – I guess I just never thought about it all that hard before.

I know based on what I’ve read about the effects of interruptions on productivity that its counter productive to for me (or anyone) to run any sort of mail notifier; indeed I’ve hated the way my organization has tended to use email as a lame substitute for IM. Problem is I’ve gotten into the bad habit of compulsive mail checking anyway – which puts me in the browser and then there I am checking my feeds and digg. Trouble. So I think for me, right now it turns out to be better this way.

Boston Web Innovators Group

On Monday night I went to a meeting of the Boston Web Innovators Group. It’s basically a bunch of folks either with their own Web 2.0 startups and those that wish we worked on much cooler stuff than we actually do. I fall in the second group.

It was alright – its mostly a shmoozing/networking session. There were two main presentations: the first ProxPro is this location aware application for phones/pdas to facilatate chance meetings. Sort of like dodgeball for business. They also have this application can you can look up background information on business folks so you can find out how to best exploit your chance encounters.

The second, and by far the cooler of the two (or at least more conceivably usable for me) is Plum Its a web-based tool that lets you connect snippets from the web and save them, online, in their original form. One application demoed was group trip planning – you can save a collection of web pages (even in the middle of sessions) and share them with other people. Sort of cool. There’s aleady a firefox extension that does this, and at least one Mac app I know of, but there are certainly some benefits added on here like community, tagging and autofinding of related content in the plum system.

The complete list of demonstrators can be found here.

As a schmoozing-handicapped individual, I would have liked there to be more time spent on formal presentations (it was only ~15 or 20 minutes) rather than rushing through to the free for all afterwards. Or I could just talk to strangers. What would mom think though?

Tivo: Infallible no more

I’ve long considered my Tivo one of the few pieces of technology that just works – set up a show to record and it gets done. Maybe it records three extra episodes of a show, but it gets the one you want. Until now.

I got home Sunday night expecting to sit down and watch the second to last episode of West Wing. The only problem was that it was recording Family Guy. I scratched my head and checked the season pass listing: West Wing is top priority, so it should take precendence over everything else. The problem extended to next Sunday as well, so I had to manually record the final episode. What gives? The only remotely feasible explanation is that these episodes have their rerun flag inadvertantly set.

Its unfortunate that Tivo has fallen into the larger category of devices that I need to keep my eye on. Oh well.

At least the pope is still infallible.

Input Output Disconnect

I think its interesting that calendaring tools can understand the definition of complicated event reccurence rules, as well as exchange those definitions in a powerful standard format, but that the user interfaces on the tools I have used (ical, google calendar) don’t actually support creating events with anything more than the simplest recurrence relationships… Goes to show that the bottleneck in many systems is still the interface between the human and the computer.

The other day I received my first $50 parking ticket of the street cleaning season. The rules on my street, even side cleaning on the second and fourth Wednesday, odd side cleaning on the first and third Tuesday seem simple enough to follow, but I still think Somerville’s chief revenue stream must be parking violations.

I thought perhaps I can set the events in iCal, upload that file to google calendar, and get SMS reminders. Turns out one can’t specify a recurring event like second and fourth Wednesday in iCal or google calendar. iCal’s interface allows one and only one “nth day of the month” recurrence. This made me wonder – is this stuff even possible in the iCalendar format?

So I checked the iCalendar spec in RFC2445 and sure enough, it supports powerful enough recurrence rules to handle any conceivable event schedule. Here’s an example that will handle the odd side street cleaning, April through November of every year:

RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;INTERVAL=1;BYDAY=1TU,3TU;BYMONTH=4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11

I edited the one 1st Tuesday rule generated by iCal in a text editor to arrive at this iCal file. Imported it back into iCal, and it rendered the recurrences perfectly. Google calendar also reads the file well even saying under details “Every first and third tuesday”.

Its a shame there’s all this underlying power, yet the user interface allows only a small sliver of it. The 80/20 rule probably dictates an organization doesn’t put in the resources to develop and support a really complicated UI for creating event reccurences, but I would think some user facing tool would support that. Are there any out there?

Class final project: smoke and mirrors

The presentation of our final project managed to compensate for a complete lack of quantitative data with visual humor and gadgets. I’m still shaking my head.

Note: Beware this post is pretty much rather stream of consciousness, and worse was typed in a couple different sittings, so its not even the same conciousness.

The Project

Our final class project was an interactive prototype of a bike computer / navigation system. We split up into semi-randomly assigned groups of four, where the group consisted of one person who had self identified as a researcher, two people who self identified as good at design, and one who self-identified as a good prototyper. I made the mistake of identifying myself as a prototyper.

Some Pictures

Before the rest of this rather long winded post, I’d better throw up some pictures so you know what the hell I’m talking about. Here’s a couple of screenshots from the flash prototype.

The map and stats screen:
Map and Stats Screen

The trip planning wizard:
Map and Stats Screen

The team

My teammates were all undergraduates. That presented a problem constantly, because they had a different definition of last minute than I did. The class was on Tuesday night, so at the latest, I needed to get things done Monday night, preferably Sunday afternoon and night. They seemed to love working through monday and tuesday, ignoring this whole job thing of mine. The procrastination thing really did a number on my schedule ultimately.

The schedule

First week a two page research doc plus a conceptual map and a ui structure was due. Week two screen templates and renderings are due. Week three a prototype and presentation are due, along with usability testing. I looked at that and immediately knew that life as a prototyper was going to be rough unless we got ahead of the curve. Did that happen?

Not so much. I don’t know that it would have anyway, but any dreams I harbored of getting ahead were fucked because two people went away for passover. One from wednesday to sunday, the other like thursday to monday night. Hows that for a kick in the pants.

Week one

This week we met briefly a couple of times to get research going. We did have some really good ideas, some of which ultimately fell through the cracks (which i was reminded of later in other team’s presentations) – but the conceptual diagram and structure map were pretty much phoned in because no real meeting of the minds had happened yet. Not a good start.

Week two

This is a little fuzzy, but I don’t recall getting off to a good start. I think there was a little spurt of design before everyone disappeared, and there was a lot of design generated and shared through email and the dreaded blackboard system, but I still feel like things would have been easier and the results better if we were in the same place. There were some good ideas floating around, as well as some not so good ones. The design was always a little too frilly for an embedded device that should have been centered around simple information delivery.

I spent quite a bit of that easter/passover weekend designing the visual identity of our team, creating a rendering of our hardware and creating a splash movie in flash before finally jumping in to redesign our stats screen (things like speed, heart rate, etc), which as the time was this hard to read muddle of data – it was in rows and columns, but it wasn’t chunked well and the units and category labels had as much weight as the actual data, which clearly would be more important to see as the labels should melt away for an experienced user.

As I both expected and feared, the visual design deliverable was “finished” minutes before class on Tuesday night, leaving no time to get a head start on the prototype. To make matters worse, there weren’t nearly enough screens designed, there was no real concept of how the workflow would proceed within each screen and how the user would move from screen to screen. I also saw the visual design as far from finished.

Week three

Now it’s white knuckle time just a bit. Need to develop a prototype in Flash in under a week so it can be usability tested – and I’m refining the team’s design on the fly. Terrific. Suffice it to say that I spent a lot of time in Flash and Fireworks that week, and not nearly as much time sleeping.

My biggest regret of the prototyping effort was misallocating resources from visual fidelity to functional fidelity. (the prototype was supposed to be higher visual fideility than functional) I had made the same mistake on the previous prototyping project where I had cutesy windows sliding in and out rather than polishing the visual design; I made the same mistake again in actually implementing our trip planner screen which acted as a wizard so the user could set any one or more of 5 ride parameters (distance, end point, terrain type, etc) and then be guided through choosing a route based on those parameters (see the second screen shot above). I had argued against it in a design meeting, but somehow suckered myself into giving it a try. Oops, that took about 6 hours – and of course it was almost there after just half that time.

This is where some conflict started arising among the team. Okay mostly between me and the rest – my prototype was visually more simple than what their designs had (loosely) specified. It was fun to dance around that by pointing out that their designs didn’t even agree with each other.

During this week, usability testing is happening in parallel as much as possible with my prototype development – which is the crux of the problem with the schedule…

The Presentation

Come the deadline, the team has put together a slide deck for our presentation, and we’ve very briefly rehearsed the presentation. We’re going fourth out of five teams, so we got to get a feel for how ours stacked up against the rest, which was good and bad. Bad because the teams presenting before us actually gathered and presented quantitative usability results – that didn’t even occur to me or the team, so we don’t have anything to show on that front. A little annoying seeing some of the really good ideas that we either didn’t come up with or more often had in early brainstorming but let slide through the cracks at some point. Good because I’m starting to feel better about our design; the prototypes we see are vindicating my resistance to needless glitter like background images. At least for me, working on something flat out like this totally breeds contempt; I could see all the flaws in our design and not how it might actually not be so bad after all.

I insisted on going with pictures rather than bulleted lists as much as possible, and I think that turned out for the best. Instead of presenting usability test results against the backdrop of ugly excel charts, we did some hand waving in front of a picture of a team member with a notebook wearing flip flops in hot pursuit of someone riding a bike, and more pictures of a mockup of the device taped to a bike. We even had a color printout attached to cardboard to pass around the room (this was fun to watch. I’d designed the device with a curve so that it would be easy to pivot the thumb between buttons, so a lot of people actually tried that on the mockup) We had the Queen song “Bicycle Race” playing behind a list of acknowledgements. If I remember correctly we got applause before even taking questions.

I have no idea what grade we got on the project, but one of the “bicycle experts” brought in to be part of a panel of judges said we had “the best presentation so far”

All’s well that ends well I guess.

Anglicized Names

I just switched projects at work to one in which a significant percentage of the team is based in India. One thing that strikes me all of a sudden is how many members of that team have made-up “American” names like “Austin” or “Joe” that have no bearing on any possible pronunciation of their real names. Granted some of them take a syllable of their name that may sound like an American name – I’m just not sure what to make of the phenomenon.

Part of me thinks they should stick to their guns and teach people how to pronounce their real names, but another part of me realizes by giving up, they’ve effectively made their own lives easier too, because now they don’t have to spend all that time correcting people.