Rachel Ganz – Page 3 – Soluble problems

Happy crashes and the world of risk analysis

There was a great conversation at work today, about what a real emergency is. Someone pointed out that a real emergency is something you haven’t planned for. In this case, it wasn’t the total system crash (that’s all in the disaster recovery plan) or the mirror server not being online when it crashed (because that’s not really a problem and it was only a couple of hours of data lost). It was that the crash happened at the end of the month, when pay normally is transferred into bank accounts, and the four hours recovery time would make a significant difference to how long the pay transfer took. And there were a couple of members of staff who had mortgages to service and credit card bills to pay and speed of access to their dosh was a bit vital. So the manager at this GP practice went round the car park and emptied all the parking meters. And with the fine collection of £1 pieces and other items of change, managed to procure enough cash to provide emergency tide-over to anyone who really needed it.

It was wonderful. I only heard about this second-hand, because our IT manager/support queen was out there with tranquillisers, damp towels, caffeine tablets and the off-site back-ups. Apparently the manager told everybody what the situation was, and they all decided who really needed the money. Of course, that might be because it’s a doctors’ practice, and let’s face it, doctors are normally in the job (or at least started in the job) because they wanted to help people one way or another, so it’s not really surprising that that’s how they dealt with the problem.

Could the problem have been averted? I don’t see how. Even if we’d done a full model and considered the effect of different scenarios at different times of day or coinciding with crucial events, we probably wouldn’t have done anything about it. And let’s be honest, we wouldn’t have spent the time or effort modelling, what happens if … the crash happens during a royal wedding. We might have got as far as thinking, what happens if it crashes with someone in the office/no-one in the office, but I don’t think, realistically, we’d have considered what happens if the four hours downtime coincides with payday. And if we had, we would have decided that it probably wasn’t worth the effort of providing cash on the premises to tide people over.

So I might blog about risk analysis another day, but until then, I want to send many many thanks to the guy who saved our bacon by opening the parking meters. Or rather (because our bacon is absolutely fine, thank you very much) the guy who helped the staff members who would have been severely disadvantaged by the side-effects of a risk that had been assumed to be acceptable.

Last minute featurettes

Did I say that we’re heading for a release? This is always an exciting time in the office. (Especially when one crucial member of staff was off for two days after an after-show party. I have my suspicions about whether said tin man was in bed with a hangover or something else, but I hope he had a lovely time either way.)

It’s especially challenging at the moment as David came in looking somewhat stressed and very excited.He has made a massive sale (he hopes) to a whole group of GP practices, but (there’s always a “but” isn’t there) they have an extra set of financial issues. They have been using some other package, and want to be able to export all the current data from package X and put it into our package (hitherto not given a name but let us call it “VAT’s up Doc”). And their database and our database have some differences of opinion.

Now Ian, lovely Ian, treasures databases as if they were his third child (and more than his five-a-side football team). He is happy when thinking of such things as efficient sorting tables and effective queries. I don’t talk to him much about it, but occasionally I hear snippets as I go by. Apparently incorporating this other system means a total restructuring of the data tables (whatever that implies). I, of course, want to get my filthy, little hands on the interface and see how their work method compares to our work method. But I won’t get a chance. They are pulling Ian out of the development push to the release date so he can restructure his tables. Worse than that, if he restructures the data tables every other transaction that we use on the data will have to be checked, tested, and possibly rewritten. So there are some heartfelt meetings going on as to how they’re going to organise the development effort and what features are going to be cut so they can squeeze in the restructure and whether the sale is absolutely guaranteed with a signed contract with plenty of exciting trailing zeroes.

And I know that they will cut it and hack it and do whatever it takes and it will require some front end re-design to make it work and no-one will have the time or effort available to ensure that the re-design is going to be user-friendly because what matters is that the transfer is going to work first time.

Oh well. At least I know it’s doomed and I understand why. And at least there’s something fairly stable there for them to hack about with. And looking on the really bright side of life, this does mean that David won’t put any other featurettes in.

What is maths for?

Some of you will have been following the controversy about Michael Gove’s (the education secretary) ideas about the curriculum for primary and secondary education. Some of this has to do with how maths is taught and what it’s for.

There appear to be two views about education: one that it is designed to equip people to operate in the world. So you teach people how to hew wood and draw water, so they will be efficient and effective wood-hewers and water-drawers and increase the country’s GNP and so on; the other that it teaches people to think, so they suggest maybe we could have an aqueduct.

And maths can be seen as a set of tools in your toolbox, to tell you how much wood to hew and water to draw, or even how to set up the aqueduct at the correct angle and flow rate. Or it can be seen as a philosophy, a way of thinking about the world. Or even an art form, an occupation that is a human pleasure and delight and not necessarily for anything.

One of the thing that concerns me about interface design is that sometimes, it is a series of incremental improvements to make things easier, rather than a question as to whether the thing that is being done is worth doing at all. Yes, I know, that it is seen as a luxury. firstly, there are the bills to pay and the food to cook (and the wood to hew and the water to draw). But occasionally, if you have the time, ask yourself if there is something of delight in what you are doing. If so, it is probably worth it.

Organisational culture

I promised everyone an organisational analysis of the GandD’s company. You’ve probably already worked out that I’m a bit of a fan of soft systems methodology (Peter Checkland). NO, you probably haven’t, after all, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before. Well, I am, because it tries to deal with complex problems.

OK. Back to organisational models. You can think of an organisation as made up (like Gaul) of three interdependent parts. These are:

Systems: the functions that are carried out
Structure: the layers in the hierarchy
Culture: the norms and values of the environment in which you operate

Systems and structures are pretty straightforward. Most people can say what they do and where they stand in a hierarchy. Culture is a bit more complicated.
This is because the culture of an organisation arises from its history and previous purposes, as well as its current ones. It can also change according to the people who are in post.

The notes |I have refer to four types of culture:

Power
Role
Task
Person

You’ll have probably worked out (oh, I was wrong last time when I said that)… Maybe you’ve worked out that GandD operate a power culture. They have it, and they want to keep it. One of the weaknesses of a power culture is that it is static. Information flows to and from the hub, but it doesn’t tend to move much between departments horizontally. Also, the owners of power don’t tend to want to train up successors.

GandD have each other, and they’ve pretty much split the company between them. You can think of them as the left and right hemispheres of the brain. There’s a lot of communication running between them, but they have one to one communication with each part of the body. They see their company very much like that. They can’t see why Ian would need to chat to Jeanette or Jeanette would want to chat to me, because you don’t get hands talking to ankles, or ears chatting to livers: except of course, you do. There isn’t just a nervous system running through the body, there are other ways messages are carried, most obviously in the blood. You can think of gossip as all those molecules being transported about, from lungs to heart to liver to pancreas to skin…

I’m quite enjoying this analogy. And then you can have new people coming in like blood transfusions, and how your muscles behave differently when they’re tired, and how the placebo effect works and, well, anyway, I think I’d better stop there before I go too far.

Oh, did I mention it’s Nick’s show this weekend? I don’t know who sneaked onto his computer when he’d gone out to get some coffee and changed all the system sounds to snatches off music from The Wizard of Oz, but they did a very thorough job. Even now, you’re never quite sure if “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” is suddenly going to come pouring from his speakers when he’s compiling a library.

The value of installation guides

I was updating the installation guide today. This is not one of my favourite tasks. Obviously, I have to install the software as often as possible, on as many different operating systems as possible, locally and on a network and so on and so on. (Did you say that sounds like testing? You’d be right.)

I wonder how many people ever look at an installation guide these days? Download the program and there it is. Perhaps you might have a CD or DVD drive with a disk that needs installing, but mostly it is an unnecessary item.

Except for all the other messages it carries. What to do when things go wrong. What your license number is. Whether the company is solid, reliable, reassuring. Some of this is to do with human emotions. Although we may be suspicious of marketing, we still succumb to it, the weight and glossiness of an object. The sense that somehow it has value. The booklet is the only tangible evidence that we have that we have bought something. It must represent the value that we have paid.

I haven’t mentioned much about the developers lately. This is because they all have the “heads down, arses up” aspect of extreme concentration before the release date approaches. The steady ones are getting more frazzled: Ian, normally calm in all situations, is drinking more coffee than usual. Nick is going straight from work to rehearsals. Loadsoftime Jack seems to have realised that there isn’t loads of time, and is frantically flip-flopping between all the different bugs that he is fixing and introducing. And GandD are both very happy. There is a very very big contract in the offing. Yes, the re-organisation of the NHS, so disturbing to so many, has been a wonderful gift to them.

Data, capta and astonishment

I’m starting today with a digression about data and a slightly mind-boggling quote.
The quote is from an article by Richard L. Lanigan, “Capta versus data: Method and evidence in
communicology”, Human Studies 17: 109-130, 1994. (If nothing else, doing an MSc teaches you to cite, cite, and cite again.)

“Like most other human practices, research is largely a symbolic activity
in which “evidence” is mediated by converting experience (“observation”)
into consciousness (“measurement”) and calling it “humanistic” or
“naturalistic.” Postmodernity has come to favor this methodology and
names the evidence thus produced as capta (quod erat inveniendum; which
was to be found out). Capta is that which is taken as evidence; it is the
methodology of discovery (Lanigan, 1992:215).”

OK. Have you recovered? Basically, I can summarise his position as data only has meaning once it has been organised, whereupon we call it capta (not a term that has made much headway in the world, as far as I know). Organised data, plus significance, equals knowledge.

So, a string of numbers is data. An organised string of numbers can identify your bank account.

Letters can be organised into random arrangements, into words, into sentences, into this blog. But they only have meaning if you have the knowledge, the mass of education and culture and abilities and humanity to read them. And they only have value to you if they stimulate some response. Interest, amusement, anger, whatever…

It is your emotional response that matters here. Boop boop a doop
Why did the turkey cross the road? It was the chicken’s day off….
Arise, ye starvelings from your slumber, arise….
My country, tis of thee

And so on and so on and so on. Maybe each one of those organised clumps of data triggered some sort of response in you. And from our shared culture, I might have a pretty good idea about what they might be. Perhaps I’m even toying with you, setting up one expectation to enjoy watching it crash and burn.

And I can hear quote my favourite user experience recommendation (wherever I roam, I get back to UX eventually) by Harold Thimbleby “the principle of least astonishment”.

In normal life, we love being astounded, amazed and delighted. It’s rare that this is a good scheme in user interface design. Much like the rubber chocolate biscuit or the exploding cigar, an user interface that thwarts our expectations makes us feel that the world is a little less to be trusted, that our understanding of how it works is not as reliable as we wished.

And….
…..
……
I’m not going to say anything more about it.

It’s been a long week

First of all, have I name checked Dekker’s Just Culture book in this blog? “Just”, in this case, doesn’t mean merely culture, or only culture, but a cultural environment that is fair, based on justice. My mind has gone off at a tangent here – it’s Friday and I no longer have to pretend that I am a serious person. I merely cross-referenced to Robert Hughes “The Culture of Complaint” and then to C.P. Snow’s two cultures and then culture vultures and then the culture of herbaceous borders and so it goes on.

Culture appears very much of a buzzword at the moment. There’s a little bit that we covered in the MSc about it, about designing for different cultures, which covered how university websites present different aspects in Greece, China and the US, depending on what is seen as important to students and/or their parents.

That in itself is an amazing question. Is it the student or the parent who chooses the university? Behind that lie a whole set of assumptions and values that are tagged with the word “culture”. Then there is the idea of someone being “cultured” which has a faintly superior air to it. we don’t talk about people being cultured if they talk about Jay-Zee and the chip shop, but if it’s Liszt and Chez Panisse, then that is cultured. But it isn’t culture as in cultured pearls – though in both senses there is an implication of it being created rather than emerging naturally.

Our culture can be summarised as the totality of the external experience which we have internalised and trigger our emotions and inform our values. Some of it will be common – for example, western music conventions are widely recognised across the world, and some will be more particular to our own experience (such as breakfast choice).

When you create an interface, it is informed by your culture. What matters is whether understanding it requires an understanding of the culture or merely of the interface. A famous example of this, is the different meaning of a red light, which can mean a live socket or a problem (or an invitation, or a veto). Just because you know what you mean by it doesn’t mean the user will. But luckily, most of the time they don’t have to.

Oh, and the Dekker book? That basically says, that if you get punished for making for mistakes or discovering errors, you’re going to hide the fact you make them, and this will lead to some very big problems

Gossip, gossip, gossip

Yes, there has been a major excitement at work, and every office is buzzing. Nick has shaved off his beard. It took a little while to percolate, but once people realised, there was a continual stream of people coming to check this, that and the other, and make sure to get a good look at the previously-concealed jawline. Needless to say, it was Jeanette who stepped right out there and asked why he’d done it. And lo and behold, our unremarkable coder has managed to bag himself a starring role in his local village production of The Wizard of Oz.

He explained that some years ago someone had heard him sing, and suggested that he would be an asset. So he had joined the chorus, and stood in the back row whenever possible. Being painfully shy, he had never admitted to anyone he was there, but apparently there is photographic evidence that he dressed as a cowboy in Oklahoma. This year, flu and children and university had struck at the available menfolk. He had boldly stepped into the breach and auditioned. (I would have paid good money – or money with no moral qualities whatsoever – to have seen that) and either due to his assets or the company’s liabilities, he had been given the role of the Tin Man. This is a part that demands a certain absence in the facial hair department, so he had ventured into the local Boots and bought one of those cut your own hair devices to remove all the long hair, and a razor with seventeen blades at different angles (I may be exaggerating slightly for effect here) to create the required metallic smoothness.

I think that it probably, all in all, lost the company half a day’s work as the news was passed from room to room and cubicle to cubicle. Dates were put in diaries for people to go and see the show.

Even better than that, of course, was what the company gained. Enthusiasm, interest, and a better understanding of developers. They were cheered by people coming in to see them. They were happy that people wanted to know what they did. Even better, the people who dropped by to see the amazing, never-before-displayed chin also dropped by to see what was going to be happening and signed up on the “I’m willing to test” sheet.

I think that the person who made a comment about whether Nick really was “a friend of Dorothy” was being a little unfair. After all, a liking for musicals is perfectly possible to combine with a liking of lego. It’s just a little unusual.

Anyway, I’m definitely going to be buying my ticket for the team night-out to watch him saunter down the yellow brick road, singing “If I only had a heart”. I’ll even offer to give other people lifts.

Sorry, I seem rather to have omitted any user interface information at all, but this is seriously exciting news. I’ll be back on the Doctors V Accountants front real soon now though.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

I live at the top of a steep hill. The main road up the hill has been gritted, and after the first few hours, was perfectly passable. The side roads have not. The pavements have not, and a series of adults dragging their tots and toddlers up and down the hill on toboggans have compressed them into a sheet of ice. (I need to point out, smugly, that I, of course, have taken a spade to the ice so the pavement outside my house is walkable.)

I became incensed when listening to the radio, when there was the normal interview with a Canadian, or a Swede, or someone from some other northerly environment, saying “We have X metres of snow a year and we cope, so why is Britain brought to a standstill every year”.

OK, all you UX people out here, why does it happen?

Firstly, it doesn’t happen reliably, so it is not worth investing an enormous amount in machinery that may lie idle three years out of four. Secondly, it doesn’t happen reliably, so there isn’t a culture of dealing with it co-operatively. Our local council appointed snow wardens this year, so now the bend that I got stuck on last time it froze like this has been gritted by a public-spirited chap who was willing to take the responsibility, but most people don’t understand the need to contribute. Thirdly, it doesn’t happen reliably, so people don’t know how to drive in it. Fourthly, it doesn’t happen reliably, so the road infrastructure is designed for rain, not snow.

Those are all UX problems. How do you design for something that people only deal with occasionally (possibly never)?

The other problem is also a type of UX problem. Snow in England and Wales is normally at a temperature where the weather switches between freezing and thawing, so we have to deal with ice as much as snow. Many of the solutions used in other countries rely on there being a nice consistent layer of cold snow, rather than one which melts and then freezes. Importing a solution wholesale that is a perfect fit for a different situation is not always the right way to go.

So, who sets the priorities as to whether this problem needs to be solved?

Question one.
Who bears the cost of preparing to solve this occasional problem? In this country, it’s the local councils (funded by grants from central government and the rates).
Question two.
Who gets the benefits of solving this problem? We all do, but especially businesses, because people can travel freely.
Question three.
Who educates people as to how to behave in snow? Teaching them how to drive? Well, you’re not going to put that on the test, because it won’t happen. You can’t even put motorway driving on the test because some test centres are in towns that are too far from a motorway. ||Maybe there should be a special, “Hey, it’s going to snow next week, everyone in the UK sign on for your one-day ‘how to drive in snow’ course.” Somehow, that doesn’t quite work.

Clear your pavements? Well, how to change the culture of a country so that clearing pavements becomes the norm? Do those snow wardens need to go round knocking on people’s doors saying “I see that your pavement is not in a walkable condition”. Hey, I could go for that. Lets make all pavements walkable. No parking on them. No heaps of rubbish blocking them. No enormous bins and signs and…. I’m ranting. Calm down. After all, one of the fabulous and wonderful things about snow is that people get out of their cars and walk. They greet each other and smile and walk in the road because the pavements are slippery but the roads have been gritted. They co-operate.

Maybe it’s worth having a day like that, just occasionally, where people are forced to drop out of normal life. Maybe UX designers should consider, just occasionally, putting a glitch in the UX that says “This isn’t working today, why not go and enjoy yourself instead, talk to someone who you don’t usually say hello to, bake bread, spend time with your children, see if you can stop the leak round the windows.”

Oh, they exist. It’s called a bug (or possibly a feature). And everyone gets very cross when they find them. Next time you meet a bug, email the guys so they know about it (otherwise it won’t get fixed) and enjoy your brief minute of snow day.

And I’ve just looked out the window and seen someone taken their cello down hill on a sledge. How lovely is that? Happy snow day, everyone.

The joys of communicating the wrong idea

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I got an interface totally wrong. Let’s say that there was a complicated VAT procedure that surgeries only needed to use if they had a pharmacy attached that sold old-style bottles of kaolin and the moon was pink. So it’s not done very often, and you need to know about adding the kaolin and the moon to the references.

I looked at the dialogs and went, why do you have pharmacy on this page and clay on that page and gibbous on that page? It’s just totally ridiculous. And I hacked up a new version of the dialog and scrawled red bits all over it and said it would make much more sense if it was like THIS!

And because I am the user interface designer and everyone thinks I’m lovely, they re-designed the interfaces to match what I thought it would be.

I’m going to digress for a bit (partly because I adore digressions). The most important thing you can do with any idea is record it. Keep a sketchbook handy, or an ipad or whatever you find a quick and easy method. Your phone will do. I like paper best because you never need to switch it on, the response time is minimal, and you have the best haptics. Yes, I could go on for quite some time about the tactile experience of pencil meeting paper. It’s also utterly flexible, you can sketch, write, explore. And then take photos of it to record it electronically. And when you’re recording a visual idea, record it visually. The big problem I find with people commenting on designs is that they write out their comments in an email, without pictures, and it is not obvious what they mean. When they say, put the checkbox together with the associated field, there is no clarity as to how you put them together, where they’re laid out and so on. Sketch it in front of them. At the low end of the scale scribble over a screen grab in Paint or draw boxes on a bit of paper. At the high end mock-up the work flow in a wire-framing tool. Just make sure that you have agreement what the idea is, before you decide whether or not it’s a good idea.

That leads me back to where I started. I’d communicated my idea on the mock-up. They’d implemented it. And the next time I worked through, I still didn’t understand it. You know why? It was the wrong idea.

I had totally misunderstood the functionality. I thought that they were developing an add-on contraceptive planner requiring the use of the moon and kaolin that was VAT-free, rather than a VAT calculator for kaolin sold during a gibbous moon. So obviously I’d put the wrong bits together in the wrong order.

And I’d made things much worse.

So today’s top tip is remember the difference between efficiency, effectiveness, and efficacy. Sometimes you can go through all the right steps, exhibiting enormous skill, but you’re still going in the wrong direction.