The California Department of Transportation is investing over $102 million on the Carpinteria to Ventura section of the 101 road construction for the next 4 years. Being a commuter of this stretch of 101 among many co-workers, I rarely experienced traffic in this route, unless there was a road construction; neither do my colleagues.
So I emailed them, out of curiosity, why. Curiosity kills the cat, I know, I know.
I did get a prompt reply, stating:
“Our studies of traffic volumes and patterns conducted in 2005 and 2008 indicated that this stretch of Route 101 is congested for several hours in each directions – predominantly northbound during morning peak hours and southbound during evening peak hours.”
Even back in the academia world, we didn’t cite literature that’s around 8 years old, unless, it’s very very compelling.
I pulled the Google traffic on Mondays, 8am, 9am, 5pm, 6pm – both directions are green at those rush hours.
What can I say? It was a 8-year waterfall process: before you ship it, customers no longer need it! And what’s worse, it’s making the customers life harder – the commute is going to be miserable.
More sadly, it’s a $102 M undertaking – the tax payers’ money could have been spent at somewhere else that’s more meaningful.
Google Traffic at 8am on Mondays, and stays the same:
Having an experience designer’s heart and soul, traveling is native to me. It’s a fantastic way to draw design inspirations, to think outside of the box, to embrace cultural shocks, and to understand people and become more open minded.
Coming to the US six years ago I barely had any cultural shocks: my mind was open enough that any culture differences were expected. But going to UK over the week of Thanksgiving, it was a total shock but sweet experience: men or women, are dressed up stylish and properly; it’s expected that you finish your appetizers before the waitresses bringing you the entree, or they offer to take them away from the table; they have almost no trash cans in the subway but seriously, their subways are pretty darn clean; I did not see any homeless people even in the hustle and bustle of the city center (in LA, NYC or Chicago even in extreme cold weather you can still see a handful of homeless guys camping outside), so on and so forth.
There were also some moments of lost in experience. For example, I was standing in front of a map for a few minutes titled “Northbound Underground” but all the destinations on the map are in the South, meaning they are below “you are here” on the map, and I was obviously trained to read the map in the way that anything above is North, below is South. Despite the occasional confusing maps, the subway system in London is by large visitor friendly but the on-the-ground trains are so hard to figure out, no easy-to-find time tables, no numbering of the lines whatsoever and you either need a geeky or lucky intuition or, have a local friend who may direct you out of the dark.
But in general, good food (surprisingly), nice people, laid back countryside and town cities, designer interior designs at most service places: it was a pleasant trip. And my major take away, besides they have surprisingly good food and pastry:) is that you really got to understand people, knowing their mindsets, stereotypes, expectations, to be able to design for the experience: because we are so different, even speaking the same language.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
I was just trying to parse the life experience redesign yesterday, Jobs answered the question back 7 years ago: remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
What Jobs left us is his striving for quality and excellence. It’s not just in Apple product but things he did. I heard tough stories about his personality from his Cupertino Apple staff for but for a man to attain to that success level, you got to have a hard core personality, you got to be ambitious, aggressive and most importantly, working hard, very hard.
Talking about hard work, thanks to Andy Ta, as guilty as I am, by making the man who works 12 hours a day 18, we finally got the two edited and compressed videos up:
Part I: Amber Brown gave us a talk on how their UXR team adopted Kanban as their day-to-day practice. It did not happen overnight. Scrum was first adopted to help manage the overload of projects. A year later, Kanban came in to accommodate the team’s and stakeholders’ needs. Amber detailed us on the several aspects of Scrum that they did not want to let go; the course of the Kanban adoption; and the current process they like to call “ScrumbanUX”.
Part II: To extend Patrick’s talk on Rapid Prototyping in August’s meetup, Zach Forrest gave us an overview of building Citrix Online’s web component library and how UX researchers and developers benefit from the library.
A few months back I made a trip to Big Sur and there was this old man sitting on the chair over a creek, having a beer, quietly enjoying his peaceful moment. We started to have a conversation while I took some photos of him. Briefly telling the story about his life, “life is about love” he said, “work is always there. treasure your love and enjoy the life.”
That was around the time I had a significant change in life. With the old man’s words of wisdom in mind, I started to really think about how to live a meaningful life to myself, to my family, my friends, people I love, and those who love me.
I don’t deny that I’m a workholic, sometimes. I love my job. I love designing for the experience. But when it comes to designing my own life experience, I was intimidated. There is no user research I can conduct, no contextual interviews I can poke around, no data I can back up my design. I read other people’s lives but those are not apple to apple comparisons.
My new roommate, a Brooks Visual Journalism student who was pursuing an acting/singing career since she was four, recently switched her life to be a student and producer at the back stage working behind the scenes. She shoots beautiful photographs and documentaries and in her own words, it’s “a new awareness”.
I admire those who has the guts to push for a life experience redesign. People hate changes. Every time Facebook launched something new, people hated it but after a while life goes on without you realizing it.
It’s a daunting task to design the life experience, or at least proactively, as one third of it is bed time, a quarter is to run around, commute, run errands, eat, and go to the bathroom, and after the deduction we only get less than half of the time to look for or define who we are, what we do, how to live our lives, meaningfully, and where we want to get at in the next 10 years. Often times we follow the mainstream, and sometimes disruption may not mean everything is bad.
Recently came across a video John Jay talking about creativity. The best part I like is that he advised to “put yourself in an unusual situation, put yourself with people you don’t hang out with, and put yourself out of the comfort zone. Our job is never let anyone define who we are in their terms.”
And to take a step back, before diving into self definition, collecting the experience might be an easier task. As Morris, Inc. puts it, “A designer must collect life experience from beyond the computer screen. They must observe culture, travel, watch movies, read books, and attend seminars and live life. This mindset creates well-rounded vision, adds solutions to your memory bank and builds connectedness between your ideas.” They also put together this short video on the wisdom they discovered in their explorations:
Writing to here, I don’t think I have a clear answer to my very first question: I wish I could:) But it helps to think aloud as I’ve been intrigued by it for quite a while. Maybe there is no better way but listening, observing, caring, learning, pushing, and always trying to pursue the true self, and follow my heart to wherever life brings me to.
Four years ago about this time I accepted the PhD program offer at University of Washington and declined a few job offers in the East coast. A hiring manager at NYC whom I turned down called me up trying to convince me to change my mind. He said, working on your PhD is to explore your own territory on your own, while working in a team you live the joy and savor the pain with your team. It’s a family.
A year later, I decided to join a family.
In this world of craziness called web/software development, the fun part is to work with the team, breathe the joy, feel the pain, live in the stress, eat the mistake, fight for what’s good, do what you think is right, pour your hearts and soul, to make things happen, large or small. It succeeds, it’s the team’s success; it fails, it’s the team’s failure. That’s why we are called a team, a family.
Constantly asked “would you recommend it?” after a 2-day training I went to in La Jolla San Diego, and the answer is, yes it’s worthwhile. lynda.com sent us to this scrum training by Mike Cohn, the guy who authored User Story Applied, Succeeding with Agile, and Agile Estimating and Planning, long heard of his name through word of mouth, and turned out, it’s an excellence course.
A bit user experience lost though the first morning when I was trying to find the room. Every sign says “Mountain Goat Software” but I didn’t associate the name of the company with Mike Cohn or Agile. It took me a while but it’s okay.
Mike started with this “Agile Manifesto” which is basically a agile over waterfall statement:
individuals & interactions OVER process & tools
working software OVER comprehensive documentation
collaboration OVER negotiation
responding to change OVER following a plan
And my major take-aways from this training are:
1. Team self manages themselves in scrum. (love it!)
2. Dedicated teams for projects. Mental switching cost is not affordable.
3. A buildup of technical debt (a lowering of the intrinsic quality of the software. e.g., missing automated tests) leads to the need to rewrite the application.
4. And most importantly, communication. Scrum to me, it opens up those commutation channels and constant check-ins with team all the time. Waterfall creates barriers from staying in the loop, ending up throwing stuff off the fence and constant check-in may create discomfort to team.
Some characteristics of team and product owners concluded by Cohn:
Typical scrum team 5-9 people. 2-pizza team:)
Members should be 100% dedicated to the sprint
Should sit together in a shared space
Self-organizs in response to challenge provided
Cross functional: include all skills and disciplines to go from idea to implementation
Product owner characteristics:
Understand the market, customer and users
Has good working relationship with stakeholders
Empowered to make decisions, is decisive, is willing to say no
A leader who is respected by the team
An individual, not a committee
Typically works with one team, maybe two
He also raised an interest question: does the role of the project manager exist any more? Now that the team shares the risk, defines the scope, be willing to communicate, and is held accountable for final deliverables, it makes better sense to have a role as a scrum master to protect and shield the team. Mostly likely PM in the waterfall environment becomes scrum master in agile, but it’s also a change in roles and responsibilities.
Another FAQ was “should product owner and scrum master roles shared by one person?” That was pretty straight-forward. No, conflicts in interest.
Day I was less intense, fun play with ideas (our team exercised a fun Netflix story), user stories, elevator pitch; Day II got more intense and serious with all the practical stuff: prioritize using relative weighting (relative benefits, relative penalty, total value, value percent, estimate, cost percent), velocity, etc. etc.
A fun fact: gender ratio in this training male v.s. female approximately 7:3.
All fun stuff, now we are back, it’ll be challenging but also interesting to see how we apply scrum in this traditional huge huge waterfall environment. And we are going to keep in mind that in the first few sprints, we’ll probably fail, and fail miserably:)
At a winery in Ensenada Mexico over a weekend getaway, I picked up a travel magazine over the counter and began reading. I flipped the pages for about five minutes, until my girlfriend who’s travelling with me reminded to go.
She asked me out of curiosity what this magazine was about and I looked at it one more time, and realized, oh wow, I wasn’t really “reading” the magazine, because it’s all in Spanish, the language I know nothing about (except a couple of words and broken sentences). So what I was reading, are solely those pretty pictures of wine, food, and scenery.
That’s funny.
But given it a second thought, it makes absolute sense. We are (well, at least I am) trained as fast food readers; we scan the information as opposed to perusing it. A cliche coming out of our usability testing later last year was “people don’t read.”
A study I read some years ago back in grad school showed that there was a significant statistical difference on human comprehension among the control group plain text; experiment group A icons only; and experiment group B text aided with icons. And the winner, went to experiment group B.
It’s becoming more and more true if you look at some user interfaces on iPhone, or the Web.
Just a friendly reminder for this Sunday’s UX Brunch Meetup at Stella Mare’s located at 50 Los Patos Way. I’ve reserved their popular room Green House under my nickname kk.
It’s going to be a small group in a cozy setting. And this meetup’s topic would be how do we want to develop this small but tied community going forward. (Thanks Jaimi for sparkling the thoughts.)
Looking forward to see you there!
A couple of notes:
1. There is another Stella Mare’s at Mission, please make sure go to this one at 50 Los Patos Way, Santa Barbara, CA, closer to the ocean.
2. If you have decided to come but have not RSVP yet, please let me know as soon as you can so I can coordinate the tables.
Having dinner with Jill and Elizabeth (two UX Designer/Researchers at Citrix Online) last night at Petit Valentien, a small and cute French restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara, we realized we are the Santa Barbara UX group. Rather than having dinners every month in the name of good friends catch up, let’s do Santa Barbara UX Meetups! We were talking about usability testing, news in UX, and working with dev teams anyway.
Without further ado, our next Santa Barbara UX Meetup is going to be a brunch at Stella Mare’s in Santa Barbara, another French cuisine place.
Address: 50 Los Patos Way, Santa Barbara, CA
Phone: (805) 969-6705
Date & Time: 10:30 am 12/12/2010 Sunday
We may go hiking after food, depending on if people are interested. San Ysidro trail or Cold Springs.
Santa Barbara UX designers/researchers, interaction designers, information architects, product managers, UX directors, and whoever are interested in or passionate about UX, see you there!
RSVP to this blog or shoot me an email at me@kejunxu.com.
Thirsty at the airport, I bought myself a bottle of smartwater. Till I got on the plane, I still couldn’t figure out how to open it.
Well, I know I can screw the whole cover, but I paid extra just for the small widget at the top that I can pop it open and drink water like a baby (forgive me if the industrial designers didn’t mean so but I always have this wired association every time I see bottled water covers like this.)
I read thoroughly on the bottle, no instructions. I looked closely at the top, no indications.
I have to say, this is the extreme minimalist design, w/o any cracks, hints to cue problem solving. (Sorry for the image quality it was a bumpy ride.)
The bottle sat at my lap for two hours and with my determination compounded by the fact that I had nothing to do bored on the plane but playing with this water bottle, I finally made my way through:
Back to home, a bottle of Arrowhead caught my attention. Crystal clear cues and detailed instructions, as easy as a piece of cake:
