Ever since I first used hulu.com, I knew that it was a work of a great team. I was even more delighted to learn that the product was developed partly in China with the help of an offshore team. The core teams are located in Los Angeles, Chicago and Beijing.
From the CNN article, “Money, it turned out, was not an object for Hulu. In May, Providence Equity Partners offered a cool $100 million for a 10% stake – giving the nascent operation an astonishing valuation of $1 billion.
But the secret of Hulu’s initial success – the thing that made believers out of the skeptics – is the power and simplicity of the website itself. Hulu’s creators focused with almost obsessive attention to detail on the user’s experience.”
So how do companies become great and create ground-breaking products? The answer partly lies in the underlying philosophy behind the organization.
Here is an excerpt from “What defines Hulu”: “We are passionate in our opinion that the world has long since exceeded its quota in the mediocrity department.
We believe our professional calling is to deliver quality. And not simply run-of-the-mill, five-star quality. For Hulu, nothing less than brain-spray awesome quality* will do, down to the finest detail. This atypically high quality bar leads us to sweat every pixel, every second of transcode, every customer.”
So when you are making your next product, ask yourself this question: what is the definition of quality for you? Will your product get a response like “My first hulu experience made my head explode in a brain-spray of awesome.’
This entry was written by , posted on October 6, 2008 at 4:23 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
How long will we keep building software that has 10 search boxes on its search page? Google launched in year 1999, and its user interface has one text field and two buttons(one too many in my opinion). Today we are still building screens with more than 50 items, numerous buttons, drop-downs, long scroll after scroll. When will we learn that users need less not more user interface.Choices = Headaches
Imagine you are building a user interface for the Army, for a battle decision control system, where pushing wrong buttons could result in loss of lives. Now rethink the interface from the army commander’s perspective – how would you present this information. Suddenly you become sensitive to throwing more drop-downs, text boxes and buttons on there. I think you have started to see the picture of the impact of your user interface on the day to day life of the end user.
How do we innovate our user interfaces. Certainly not by “asking” the users what they would like. Innovation is creative solutions to user pains that may come by “observing” the user, their context and their larger world in general. It cannot be accomplished simply by “asking” the user. “Why” is a friendly weapon in an innovator’s arsenal to determine what the user motivations are, and what the current pain points are. Of course, it takes creative software development team to convert the idea into working software that resembles something that understands the user. This is why it is my firm belief that great software can only come from teams that have user empathy at the core of their effort, whether their contribution is that of a requirement writer, designer, developer, or tester. If every single person on the team cannot envision their product in the hands of the eventual user, they will not be able to build a very effective piece of software. Every small decision that a requirement writer, developer or tester takes has eventual impact on the usability of the software. It is virtually impossible to make software development “factory like” work with specifications, in my opinion. The states that the executing code be in at any given moment explodes once developers start converting requirements specifications into executable code. At this point, developer make conscious decisions on the behavior of the software, sort of “reading in-between the lines” of the specifications. How good the product will end up to be will depend on what developer wrote and what the tester interpreted as the requirement to be.This is as much art as much it is science. The quality of your people will determine the end result.
So we owe it to our teams to teach them to write software with less interface and coming up with innovative ways to solve the problems that the users don’t know need solving yet.
This entry was written by , posted on at 4:17 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Opening defects is time consuming. So why not let the code automatically enter defects in your bug tracking system. Of course, this means your bug tracking software should provide ability to open defects via APIs, via Emails, or any other programmatic means.
Second, all untrapped exceptions must be logged as defects automatically by the exception handling code. Now how do you determine if the same defect is already logged and prevent a flood of the such defects?
One easy way to uniquely identify a defect is Line Number of the Code. Every time an exception occurs it originates at a certain line of code in a certain class. Thats the unique identification.
Before opening a new defect, the bug tracker should check if a defect exists with same class and same line number. If it does exist, then the new event gets appended to the existing defect instead of creating a new one.
Want a bug tracking/project tracking software that already does all of the above? Try FogBugz.
This entry was written by , posted on at 4:17 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
When porting a thick client application to a web based application, there are some significant challenges that the team needs to think about.
Let me illustrate this transition by hypothetically taking away some of your favorite thick client applications. Imagine your boss comes in one day, and tells you “We are getting rid of all thick client applications because this is 2008 and we will be moving all application to web based interface. So tomorrow you will be receiving new computers that will only have a web browser (kinda like the machines you see if you ever used Denver Public Library computer).
No more MS Word or Excel or PowerPoint or even Outlook. Eclipse? ha! use an online text editor. Instant Messenger? use web based chat.
Just imagine going one day by just using web based versions of your favorite applications. Not a pretty picture. Why is this? Many reasons, but primarily because most web based applications do not provide the same user experience as a thick client does. That and our need for speed. Many web based application still perform poorly compared to their thick client cousins.
Web usability guru Jacob Nielsen talks about response times highlights pretty interesting facts:
1) 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
2) 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
Jacob also provides some useful advice on how to design the interface so as to make it more responsive to user needs. Notice that there is a difference between actual response times and perceived response times. What matters to end user is perceived response time.
So when rewriting an existing thick client application to a web based interface, these challenges must be kept on top of list or the application will be what Outlook for Web Access has become. A nice to have alternative that you will use only if Outlook thick client is not available.
This entry was written by , posted on at 4:16 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
When an existing application is being replaced by a new application, performance and usability requirements become intricately linked. In case of data entry applications, what matters is the speed and agility with which the user can get through a given scenario. This is where things get tricky. The speed is not only a function of how fast the system responds (performance) but also how is the interaction design of the application aiding in that agility(usability).
Consider a call center customer care application. If your boss comes to you and says “I need you to plan a new call center. Let me know how many people will you need to answer calls and manager those who are answering calls”, you may naturally ask questions such as “how many calls do we receive on average and peak times?” and “what types of calls are coming in?” and “how long does it take typically to get through a single call?”. Since you are a math genius, you figure, you will do some math and take number of calls on an average day, multiply by time it takes to handle a single call and divide by 8 hours.. and ta da you should have a magic figure of how many people you need. So some years pass by and existing application must be replaced with a new application. How is your life as a call center manager going to change?
Is the new application making the customer service representative take longer to get through each call or its making their life easier by taking less time than before? Is the application high friction and making the life of the customer and the service representative much harder?
So how do performance and usability play into this? Performance testing in isolation is only step one. Step two must be a combined usability drill during peak load conditions to validate that the new application indeed makes life better.
If you were the customer paying for the new application, wouldn’t you expect this validation?
This entry was written by , posted on at 4:12 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.