The EchoUser Experience

Michael Arrington on TechCrunch recently wrote a post about his frustration with folks blaming *him* for the lack of women in technology.  You can read it here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/women-in-tech-stop-blaming-me

I felt the need to respond, since I have many thoughts about this topic.  I’m including my response here:

Hi Michael,

[ignoring all the bickery comments and just commenting on your post]

I understand why you would be frustrated with people blaming you and other men in your situation for the lack of women in tech when you feel like you’re doing everything you can to encourage them (and it’s probably not just women blaming you, although you say “the next time you women want to start pointing the finger at me…” which seems silly and a bit alienating).

I agree that the problem of “too few women in tech” or “too few women who start companies” is not necessarily based on the end of the line - whether women get hired or paid attention to or written about on TechCrunch - but starts a lot earlier. And it’s not because of genetics.

I’m currently working in the tech field in San Francisco, and I was the only graduating female in my undergrad computer science department (recently, in 2006), which is an old story I know, but what people don’t talk about as much is that there were a lot of women in my intro to computer science courses.  In fact, the course was about 40% women.  By the end, however, most of the women had dropped out.  It wasn’t that women weren’t interested in technology, and it wasn’t that they weren’t “smart enough” - they were getting comparable if not better grades than the male students.  It had to be something else.

I was/am clearly interested in this topic, and so for a sociology course I spent a year writing a paper on women in tech, and found variety of “reasons” that might account for these dropout rates.  You’re welcome to read it if you like.

Bottom line - self-confidence is one of the major issues here, even when girls & women perform well, many women just don’t think they’ll cut it, in the tech and the entrepreneurial field.  And this lack of confidence is based on the way girls tend to be raised as well as the [lack of] experience they tend to have prior to college.

Banister mentioned risk-taking as one of the reasons women don’t tend to start companies as much, and I would agree with the basic concept, although disagree that it’s not “in their nature.”  I agree that girls aren’t encouraged to take risks as much as boys in our culture and many others.  For the sociology paper I wrote I cited a paper (written quite awhile ago, but still completely relevant IMO) that measured how far parents let little girls go in playgrounds before calling them back (as opposed to little boys).  The distance boys were allowed to go averaged 2,452 yards, while the girls were called back after an average of only 959 yards.  This is just a small example that encapsulates many other situations throughout childhood.

Because self-confidence is one of the major issues, encouraging women to start companies by writing somewhat aggressively, like so, “there are women like Sklar who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start companies (like this one). Let’s have less of the former and more of the latter” is probably not the best way to encourage women to start companies and write to you about them.

Thanks for your post,

Shawna

I’ve been using the Swype keyboard on my Android Incredible for the past few days and I’ve found it pretty great to use.

When I first read about Swype I was a little skeptical - how much faster could it really be / would it actually be useful for people used to regular typing?

I’ve found, however, that Swype is useful for more than just typing quickly (which it does quite well albeit with a learning curve). It’s also fun :)  And it also is much more efficient when a user prefers one handed, vertical-oriented typing (like I do). In order to type quickly on a normal touch keyboard, the most optimal position for me was the horizontal position, using both thumbs. In reality, however, I hardly ever turned the phone this way, it was one extra step and it required a bit more “commitment” to the typing process :). Plus, it sometimes hid some important fields on the screen itself. This meant that I would always type on the vertical orientation, which meant that I would often accidentally tap letters since the letters were so small and close together.

Swype actually works best in the vertical orientation, with one hand. And it benefits from all the letters being small and close together.

David Pogue at the NYTimes recently wasn’t really sold on Swype (and I agree with some of what he has to say), but I also feel like he was only taking speed into account - he wasn’t taking into account the other slight ux issues that the normal keyboard has.

I had a great chat with Johannes over at IDEO last week. Johannes is in charge of bringing some quantitative flavor to IDEO’s magic, and he’s up to some interesting stuff. After our morning coffee conversation, though, a few ideas stuck with me:

1. User churn

Me and the team at EchoUser have been getting more involved with start ups of late, helping them with usability, general user experience and the like. General start up concerns revolve around reducing “user churn”, or in other words, “how to keep users interested and encourage ongoing usage of our product/service.” It turns out that this is a sticky problem, especially when it comes to balancing the needs of new users (who might get “churned”) and “habitual” users who already use the product on a regular basis.

Our work inevitable hunts for what we’ve come to call “the aha moment”, or that one particular experience that helps turn a casual/new user into a habitual one. Of course, we all know it’s probably not one single experience that does the trick, but the simplification is helpful nonetheless.

In talking with Johannes I drew out what usage paths look like for a given product:

user churn paths

Ideally, you want users to take the path going up and to the right, because this means they’ve had their “aha moment” and have now become habitual users.  And for start ups looking to raise funding from VCs, being able to say “our usability work has shown we can improve user churn by X% because we can guarantee an aha moment” is a very good thing.

2. Switching

Then it was Johannes’ turn to pick up the pen. He drew this, which deals with a marketing concept called “Switching”:

User switching

Basically, switching refers to the idea that many people, when trying out a product or service, will tend to switch between different ones - this is represented by their degree of “loyalty” to a given product.  The general point is to try to get users to either extreme, either 100% loyal to one product, or 100% to the other (to me this is a little simplistic, given that it’s a zero-sum outcome, but more on that another time).

It’s interesting to note that the Churn graph is a loose inversion of the Switching graph: users who have yet to experience their “Aha!” moment are less likely to become 100% loyal to a particular product - and therefore more likely to switch (as well as churn).

We’re finding more and more that startups have to balance design changes that appeal to both habitual users and new ones, changes that try to straddle the divide between 100% loyal and “I’m not so sure just yet”-loyal.  The balancing act is an interesting one to say the least, and we’re using our usability special sauce to make it that much easier. More to come.

Living in San Francisco it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the social media bubble.  There’s always a new service to use, an iPhone app to try out, a social network to join - it’s a constant game of catch-up, and I have to be honest that some days I positively hate it.

That said, I’m constantly learning about myself and my friends (and total strangers) by being so immersed in all this web 2.0 stuff. Who knew that I’d love broadcasting short messages to the world about what happens to be on my mind (good and bad)? Or that I’d feel compelled to log each entry into a cafe, office, or surf spot with one of my location-based apps?  If you’d asked me 2 years ago, the answer would be have been a definitive “not me!”

But things are different now, and as I adjust to a life where I’m always connected, I’m starting to rub up against some social “seams” I had totally ignored. For example, it turns out that not everyone I know on Facebook wants to know when I’ve “checked in” to a bar or cafe - especially when I change locations a half dozen times a day. Equally surprising is that my friends who use Google Buzz complain about the same, which is weird because it means that they monitor Buzz religiously since I barely ever notice new Buzz notifications!

So while I’m theoretically meant to use these tools with abandon and feel free to send out the minutae of my life to anyone who cares to pay attention (which isn’t always that many people), it turns out that what I actually have to do is carefully tip toe through the social media minefield, censoring myself as I go.

I wonder if social media tools will eventually take into account the social seams they’re potentially bowling right over, and try to maintain a little social order and sensitivity. For now, I’ll be sure to tread lightly…

It’s almost as if the speakers and panelists at South by South West 2010 had all prepared together beforehand. Time and again, no matter what the topic of the panel, the same theme came up again and again:

Gaming is where it’s at.

From the more obvious cases, like Dennis Crowley’s location-based Foursquare app (effectively a multi-player game replete with rewards and badges), to the more esoteric, like crowd-source astrology platform GalaxyZoo, more and more examples of game-based platforms are popping up.

While it’s clear that certain web-based services can benefit from a game-like component given that typical incentive structures simply aren’t there (like the social need to be recognized as a “local”, represented in Foursquare as becoming “Mayor” of a particular place), it gets really interesting if/when applied to other examples. Like tacking on a game component to a hospital’s internal report tracking system to encourage nurse diligence, or rewarding taxi cab drivers for picking up fares on time, or rewarding kids for reading newspaper articles online - the list is endless, which I have to admit is slightly scary.

In the Augmenting Maps with Reality panel, one of the audience members asked what the endgame (pun intended) of this “life as a game” is meant to be: will every part of our lives be represented as a game? Will I be competing - with myself or others - when I go shopping for groceries (10 points for buying kale!), buy a drink at the bar (minus 5 points for the carbs), or meet 3 new people in one day (You’ve received the social butterfly badge!)?

The panelists’ answers were mixed: Dennis Crowley thought it was totally fine that social interactions are rewarded through a game platform, while Flickr information architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea felt that games are an intermediate step - that a world where we need such explicit, constant incentives to do basic activities is likely the poorer for it.  Casey Stengel’s quote, “Most games are lost, not won” comes to mind, along with apocalyptic visions of our Pacman-like future.

Thoughts? Is gaming here to stay, and if so, is it a good thing?

Does not compute image

This morning, while recruiting participants for an upcoming startup usability study, I stumbled upon a mythical creature I didn’t think existed. After chasing it through the underbrush of the internet to no avail, I eventually gave up, disgusted and disheartened, for the creature was gone - potentially forever.

And the creature in question? That rare breed of human who doesn’t have access to a DSL connection.

I know, I know, breathe in deeply - I didn’t think they existed, either. But it turns out that this kind of person is out there, and we have to plan for them accordingly.  More and more I find that people respond to my online recruitment ads, often for a remote study that needs screensharing and the like, without having the necessary technological hardware to actually complete the study. Like that story where from the band of monkeys eventually one will write Shakespeare, sometimes potential participants make it into the pool when they really shouldn’t.

It would be easy to blame the participant - I mean, who doesn’t have DSL access these days in the U.S., anyway? As it turns out, quite a few people don’t, so in the end it really is our bad as user researchers, not the participants. We need to make sure we’re designing studies - and recruitment procedures - that aren’t exclusionary from a technological perspective, even when we’re building a product or service that requires (relatively) advanced technology.

Examples of non-traditional recruitment abound: Etan once stood in a BART station for hours to recruit BART riders, while Mick loitered in a Best Buy (with permission of course) hoping to snag potential wireless hub buyers. The main problem, however, is that these methods, while often very effective, are time consuming - and expensive.

So how to recruit in an internet-ready world, when we’re not all on the same technological page?  Any thoughts? Examples?

Fatal error message in a terminal window

While I understand that command line interface programmers don’t feel like they need to adhere to the same rules as UI designers, I think it would be best if they reconsidered.

Under no circumstances is it necessary for an error message to tell me something was “fatal”. It evokes feelings of panic and makes me feel as though I’ve done something irreversible. In the example above I simply called “git pull” (grab the latest code from the repository) on the wrong folder.  Because that folder wasn’t tracked by git, it doesn’t do anything… it just exits.

Consider using another response, such as “Not a git repository, nothing has been pulled. Are you in the right directory?”. I don’t need to hear about what process was killed or how it died, I just want to know what happened and what I should do about it.

Thanks

A rainy day, in SF town

I went to my first TED(x) event this past week.  I’ve never been to TED or a TED affiliated event before, so it was a real treat to see it live and in person after hours of watching luminaries on my laptop.  Hosted by the cool crew at Parisoma, the venue was far more intimate than I thought: about 45 people in attendance - including a few speakers - in a nifty loft space on Howard; not a bad way to spend a rainy day, IMO.

So how did TEDxSoMA compare to the TED we all know and love through the videos? Other than the world’s most uncomfortable chairs, I spent 4 solid hours totally captivated.  I was lucky enough to get a front row seat (literally) next to my new friends Simon and Ted, which let me see the talks up close and personal.  Overall the speakers all seemed well-versed in TED-style speaking: clear, very little reading, and lots of pictures if they chose to have a slide show. From Phil Libin at Evernote, to Heather Fleming at Catapult Design, to the intense Damon Horowitz from Aardvark (who reminded me vaguely of Gene Wilder in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), it was a great lineup, and when you add in a great duet with the stunning Solenn Seguillon and beer from the folks at 21A, it was a recipe for success.

Common thread?

The only gripe I have is this: the talks, while fascinating, didn’t cohesively tie into the theme of the event, “Interactivity in Different Realms”. Sure, it was great to hear Libin’s theory on why man’s brain has changed little in 20,000 years (hence why we need Evernote), and Howard Roffman’s well-versed (and read) story of Star Wars over the years, but I found the common thread tenuous at best. But with an eclectic mix of people in the room we had little trouble brainstorming and chatting during the intermissions, and overall it was a great time.

One of the interesting consequences of working at a start up is that we all get to wear many hats. My role at EchoUser has always been part designer, user researcher, programmer and software development manager.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the blogs and sites that I frequent lately that help keep me somewhat sharp in these various disciplines:

Design / User Research

• Konigi
• Boxes and Arrows
• UXMatters
• http://johnnyholland.org/

Software Developer / Manager

• http://www.agile-software-development.com/
• Slashdot
• Signal vs Noise
• Ruby Inside
• RailsTips
• Ruby on Rails API

Feel free to add suggestions to my list in the comments!