Soluble problems

We are limited by the time and attention available to perform tasks. As the old saying goes, you can have X that is good, fast and cheap, but you can only choose two out of the three.

In the real world, you don’t even get the choice of fast very often. Some things just take the time they take. If they can be delivered quickly it’s because you have a lot of skilled people giving it their full attention for a short space of time. If they’re not skilled, it doesn’t matter how many people you put on the job, they will a. waste their own time and b. waste each other’s time.

In fact, I started this post last week, but I have been giving it neither time nor attention, so it’s sitting exactly where it was. I’ve been removing dandelions from the back garden now that the sun is out.

You will now claim that there is a third point to the triangle, which consists of rsources. I’d agree with that. Good tools can make an enormous amount of difference, but they do this – no, I wanted to say, either by reducing time or by focussing attention, but actually I can’t quite do that. Of course, they make the job easier, or sometimes you just can’t do the job without them, you can’t make bricks without straw (well, you can now – I assume that saying goes back to the days when the bricks would fall apart if they were only made of mud – can I be bothered to look it up? No, there’s google out there, I’m not that interested. It’s not a vital reference. I’ll just not bother, and, as it were, leave it as an exercise for the reader).

Anyway when designing interfaces, the two things that you need to think about most are time and attention. Do you have the user’s attention? More important, do you need to have the user’s attention? The user is going to be sparing with those two resources, she doesn’t want to waste them, you only have a limited amount of either, and somebody else’s crap interface that wastes your time and makes unnecessary demands on your concentration is the last thing you need.

So in appreciation of you having got down to the bottom of this post, I’ll give you a free joke.

Where does a general keep his armies?
Up his sleevies.

I never said it would be a good joke.

Let’s tick off the Easter rituals carried out:
1. Member of the household in bed with flu? Check.
2. Feeling sick after eating too much chocolate? Check.
3. Brisk walk in icy wind while strange dog inspects your groin? Check
4. Loud and entirely justified row in which I am totally, completely and utterly in the right at all times (apart from an occasional fact)? Check.
5. Bottle of champagne chilling for celebration that does not, in fact, occur? Check.
6. Search of internet for exciting event to take part in over bank holiday weekend which ends up as a serious gogglefest of 1960’s St Trinians films? Check

OK, I admit the last one isn’t quite traditional. They were actually quite entertaining. I could possibly have gone for the Carry On… series to drop down a notch in the non-blockbuster black and white left-field arthouse option. Or the relentless replay of incredibly bad Hollywood blockbusters aimed at five year olds. Or climbed up through the arthouse credibility stakes by claiming to have watched the entire Studio Ghibli season. Mock not, I lost the family copy of Spirited Away before my daughter hit her teen years and may never be forgiven. As far as I am concerned, a video/DVD/bitstream shelf that does not include Some Like It Hot, Casablanca, Die Welle, M, The Battleship Potemkin and the original Wicker Man is the mark of a family that is not giving enough cultural attention to its children. Before you know it they’ll be skipping the Suzuki violin practice, forgetting whether Pride and Prejudice was written before or after Northanger Abbey, and omitting hashtags on twitter.

Anyway, I am proud to feel that I have done my duty. Easter baking took place – with the traditional drop of the cinnamon jar lid into the mixture, thus enabling all products to have a deeply intense cinnamon flavour. Easter egg trails took place. Suffice it to say that I wish they could have more unexpected anagram solutions than either “Happy Easter” or “Easter Egg”. We spent some time trying to convince the children that there was a small but real possibility it might be Faster Dog, but they didn’t believe us.

Next year I plan a complete set of clues leading to a small soft-boiled egg lurking in a handwoven nest. Disappointment should be rife.

Obviously feelings matter to people, there is at least one case study that shows that if you cannot feel emotions, you cannot make decisions, because you have no way of deciding what matters. But why do feelings matter to computers? Or rather, to how computers communicate with people or people communicate with computers?

It’s easy to think of people monitoring your feelings as frightening. For example, there’s one discussion of what would happen if the computer interpreted your voice, so you’d have to say “good morning” to your computer every morning, and your computer would thereby gather a stack of data about your speech and be able to respond to your emotions. Yes, this all does sound a little like the extremely irritating lift in hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. And in fact, one of my favourite bits of research on computers and emotion is that people prefer talking to a grumpy, irritable computer than to a smooth ingratiating one. There’s a possibility that this is due to the person attempting to get the computer to be less grumpy. In other words, “Go Marvin!, we really do love you”.

But where computers responding to emotion is already important is in hospitals. Robots are used to take people around, and they need to recognise from people’s movements and expressions how important it is to get out of their way. We like that. Well, I do anyway. That’s robots avoiding us when we’re in a hurry. That’s the automated check-out at the supermarket noticing when it is being outrageously irritating and shutting up. That is the ATM that argues with you.

I think there is scope for developing a computer version of a teenager. That you could practice being irritated with and when it kept arguing back to it you could “SWITCH IT OFF”. Smugly.

Did I mention that we had the opportunity of a massive contract if we could set up the interfaces between the system that is currently in use by a group of practices and our amazing easy-to-use fabulously intuitive (or not) new system?

Well, what has happened is that justintimeJack has been pulled off his bit of the development work so he can concentrate on working out all the interface code. JustintimeJack is going skiing next week. He’s very excited about it. Every time I pass his computer I see that he is checking the current snowfall in France. Oh I am so so sorry Jack, it’s snowboarding not skiing. You are sliding down an icy and cold slope on one bit of laminated fibreglass, not two (yes, I know it’s not fibreglass, I am merely giving all your cold-weather sports pedants the opportunity for a brief moment of superiority as you get a photo taken of yourself drinking marshmallows soaked in cocoa in your hot tub).

I, with my well-known talent for knowing what the user wants to do, am writing the test plan. I like test plans.

What does this one involve?

This one involves creating a massive number of spreadsheet records, containing every possible combination of hours and rates and holiday and part-timeiness and whether they’re a partner or not, and whether they’re claiming civil partnership adoption allowance and so on and so on and so on.
And running them through Jack’s conversion algorithm to see if they all come out in the right place with the right rates on them.

And then adding the record where it fails to bugzilla along with a description of how I managed to make it break THIS time, and assigning it to jitJack along with one of the highly-amusing states that the developers put on a bug.

These can be summarised as follows:
Not a bug
Can’t be arsed
Can’t recreate
Duplicate of xxxx
Only if they pay us more money
If we have time
Crucial
Deal-breaker

And of course, all the ones that people spend all the time on are the ones they find interesting and the deal-breakers, where smoke is emerging from Ian’s nostrils as yet again Nick explains why he did three of the “if we have time” bugs rather than the dull but crucial one.

And I get re-sent endless copies of can’t recreate – often with a “which version were you running it under” or “where’s the file”

to which my replies nearly always “the latest” and “It’s attached”.

Anyway, my skills at describing exactly what went wrong this time are going up by leaps and bounds. Let us celebrate. We nearly managed to complete a whole import export and re-import data cycle. Doesn’t that sound fun?

So why isn’t life more like the movies?

On film, boring moments are skipped. This period before a release would be covered in a few shots: Ian in earnest confabulation with Mr Grumpy, Justintime Jack throwing a juggling ball up and down, Gareth swigging coffee as he types , Jiri’s head resting on his desk. And that would be it. Perhaps a minute of screen time encapsulating the last desperate push towards the release.

In the perfect world, I would already be on the next project. I’d be out there in the world, researching, discovering, designing, exploring. My 3B pencil would be glancing swiftly over drafts in my sketchbook, which could be converted to mock-ups in balsamiq or Axure or…

But that’s a film fantasy, right up there with happy marriages ever after. Instead I’m testing testing testing. Let’s face it, a usability consultant is a wonderful thing, but even more wonderful is someone who will sit and write a test plan. And then carry it out.

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.

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.

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:

1. Systems: the functions that are carried out
2. Structure: the layers in the hierarchy
3. 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:

1. Power
2. Role
3. Task
4. 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.

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.