Part of the Process

It's a well known phrase with software developers that "naming things is hard", but what about hardware products? What are the worst offenders and how should it be done?  This post was prompted by a couple of social media posts, taking a look at two culprits. The first was camera model names Whoever designed the Canon's camera naming schema deserves a good talking to. Impossible to know what's newer/better, and all the models have multiple names across the world, making searching for info really hard. — Ben Sauer (@bensauer) August 5, 2020 and this one humorously takes a peek at how monitors get their names View this post on Instagram How companies name their Monitors 😂 Via @system32comics Follow @techgang_ for more . . #programmerhumor #gamersofinstagram #gamersunite #gamerslife #programmerlife #codinglife #programming #programmingmemes #codingmemes #computerscience #programmingjokes #computerengineering #workfromhomelife #gamerlife #ga...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Nathaniel Shuman  on  Unsplash New short term goal One of the bigger things to happen to the project in the past month is creating a new short term goa l to  “make it as easy as possible to get resume info in and a PDF out”. This came from engaging with a potential user on Twitter that really bought this use case out as a good hook. As a follow up to that we also got four new  users  organically . Finding our product/market fit has been very heavily influenced by a) how we show the complexity of the product and b) how opinionated we make the process of using it. Succeeding in this short term goal...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Etienne Boulanger  on  Unsplash Following on from my post on  Building an onboarding process for a green field product  we have building the experience. One of the lessons I pulled out previously was about launching something to get feedback . Even if you don't feel ready. It's easy to know the theory, but hard to put yourself out there! I'm really glad that we did as it allowed some feedback and integration issues to be tested while we polished. Background  One approach that we have taken is to slowly refactor the experience as we add functionality into the edit screens. To start with we had a l...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Riku Lu  on  Unsplash Onboarding is an important part of B2C and pure "pay to play" SaaS. With so many tools to use, why would any user put effort into getting up and running? With B2B SaaS platforms that include professional services to get up and running then this isn't important. The same impact comes through the service that accompanies the product. I have been lucky to experience a great onboarding experience when evaluating product management software for work. The best by a country mile was ProdPad. This had two elements, the first was the trial and flow to get up and running. The second was the emails the accompanie...

Many years ago I used to live with someone who commuted an hour longer than I did. This was way before smartphones, social media, or even cheap laptops. So I used to do the washing up as part of my evening ritual of winding down from work - luckily she was also as relaxed about leaving the washing up as I was. Thinking back to this time the main method of communicating online was via forums around interests. So Eurogamer, Get Your Boot On, and North Stand Chat for example. Here the conversations are around topics. The nature of content on the sites is discoverable and predictable. I could easily see new information that I was interested in. I could also easily show someone else something interesting later. Fast forward a decade with smartphones and pretty widespread internet connections I can get a notification ping up on my phone instantly alerting me that someone I know has posted something for the first time in a while. It will probably be a cup of coffee. Do I reall...

I love travelling, not because of going to new places - although that is great! - but because I enjoy the journey. Mainly because I'm a travel and systems thinking nerd. My latest holiday was a chance to look at airlines and airports in a different way. Scheduled flights to hubs for business are one thing, package holidays to small airports proved another thing entirely. In fact, comparing Gatwick airport to Heraklion it is a good example of this quote The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.   William Gibson It got me thinking about two major challenges to objectives of the IATA fast travel program being the norm across the whole industry. Culture The first is customer culture. Self-service common use technology is still in its infancy. Previously there has been a consistent expectation for example of what travel means, and how desks work, this is now being replaced with different tech and varying security rules. For example, even a large...

Slightly delayed post due to going on holiday! My week's reading started with Hofstadter’s Law and Realistic Planning By Jane Collingwood where she outlines how "pessimistic-scenario generation is not an effective de-biasing technique for personal predictions .”  this got me thinking about how much of what we do in our lives is shaped by the people who provide us with the services and products that we use. This article by Monzo is a perfect example of ethical product design should be done. They have thought about what their mission is, who their users are and what issues they might face. Compare and contrast with stories of how Uber use psychology to exploit drivers to see the negative face of "disrupting industries" when that is the sole aim.  Again working conditions can have an impact even in subtle ways. There is a case here for Product Design and OS professionals to   provide more support on reporting usage to users . Computers are much better at this...

Chatbots are an interesting example of how supporting technology can be the catalyst for innovation. In this case smartphones with messaging apps, constant fast network connections, and an API economy. All these enable comparatively low-tech chatbots to be viable (even I wrote a production text interface to an asset DB in 2000!). So, it's not new technology that's the innovation, it's combining existing technology in ways that change behaviour. This article in the Harvard Business Review is spot on. AI systems much more like employees than traditional IT. Because it "learns" you often can't just lift the data/business rules into a new system. So you need to start thinking about "handover periods" and " training " a lot more. (Also make the jobs-to-be-done framework about hiring tools to do a job much more apt!) There is much promise in Artificial Intelligence , this article on what to think about machines that think  contains some ...

This post is the story of a personal journey. It starts with a legacy product. Both powerful and flexible having grown to meet needs over time. But it is my view on steps to improve the process in my context - so your mileage may vary. Phase 1: Transactional DB as source Started with looking at the transactional data. Some things were obvious, one option in the UI is recorded as true/false in the DB. Some were more complicated and required more investigation. To back this up we conducted a user survey. Followed up by a workshop to find the most important user journey to concentrate on. This highlighted three related journeys. The key characteristic of activity in this phase was mining different structures of data. The format of the data coming from custom reports. Getting to the questions to ask was guided by a user survey to almost the whole user base, a smaller workshop looking at the "job to be done" for the platform. Other than that the skills needed where accessib...

The Nike+ running app underwent a drastic transformation to become Nike Run club. Gone is the old r ed and white branding, replaced by black and volt yellow. Impeccable timing as Brighton and Hove Albion switch ed their away strip to the same colours (with Nike as the kit supplier). The whole focus of the app appears to have altered from a useful run tracker in a "quantified self" category. To a more limited - albeit focussed - coaching app. This wasn't the most popular update if my friend leaderboard is anything to go by. Shrinking from 6 regular people every month to me and one other and even then only on some months. I wasn't running regulatory when the change happened but remember some complaints about users losing their training plans . We runners are a funny lot. To illustrate, I had a conversation at the weekend with someone who was upset about running a marathon in 4 hours and 2 minutes rather than just under 4 hours . Our training plans are the ...

Keeping An Eye On Time by Ian Foss So the Apple Watch event caused lots of brouhaha today. The main aim/selling point seems to be getting your attention quickly, but is that a good thing? You don't have to look too far to see articles already on how to stop your phone from interfering in your life and personally along the same lines I've turned off certain apps from sending me notifications - the main one being Facebook. My phone also won't alert at all between 10pm and 8:20pm to give me a window of interruption/calm ... although I do ruin that by checking twitter every now and again.  It will be interesting to see what the market is like for this, looking at traditional wrist watch stats smart watches are around the premium Swiss watch level. The majority of watches sold average out at $3 a watch from China and slightly higher at $19 from Hong Kong, a commodity price for something that just works. Are these watches going to have that feeling of craftsmanship to co...