Ben Skelton's Blog

Last night in Vegas — MIX 08

Tonight is my last night in Vegas before I fly to Orlando. Unfortunately I made a mistake and booked a flight that has a stop in Washington, DC. It is a Ted / United flight, which means it is 99% likely that I won’t have power at my seat. Looks like I will only be able to work for half the flight... I guess the non-removable battery in the MacBook Air is an issue after all :(

Anyway, back to why I was in Vegas — Microsoft’s MIX conference. MIX was really good this year and was a lot of fun as always.

A few thoughts about the past week:

• I came down a day early as Microsoft was hosting an event for influencers, which unfortunately turned out to be a little weak. It focused too much on the Expression tools and the presenters didn't answer a number of questions as they didn’t want to steal any of the thunder from the main keynote. Everyone received an 8GB Zune which was cool. I have already gifted mine to Steven at work as it won’t work on my Mac, too bad as I find the UI on it slick.
• The session on adaptive user interfaces was interesting. I am working on an intranet project right now and we might be able to make use of some of these techniques.
• There were too many panels! I hate panels! Down with panels!
• The Ballmer and Kawasaki keynote was the highlight of the conference for me. Before the conference I was somewhat lukewarm on Ballmer, but he really impressed me. I recommend checking the keynote out online!
• It was awesome to spend some time with both the Microsoft Canada team and Habañero’s Canadian peers. Microsoft Canada always puts on a good event and this year’s was no exception.
• There was very little mention of SharePoint at the conference. Unfortunately Microsoft scheduled the two events during the same week, which was a bit of a bummer. I would have liked to see more sessions around creating exceptional user interfaces in SharePoint.
• The Internet Explorer team had an awesome after party at the Kingpin Suite at the Palms. The suite had a bowling alley in it which allowed me to discover that I am not a very good bowler.
• I got to see the chicken – thanks Bryce! :)

Anyway, I think that's it. Looking forward to MIX 09!

MacBook Air Impressions

I’ve had my MacBook Air for a couple of weeks and thought I would jot down a few thoughts about the new machine…

• Pictures don’t do the machine justice. It is so incredibly light and thin that I sometimes forget that it is in my bag. As an added bonus the power adapter is a hell of a lot lighter then the gigantic MacBook Pro one, which significantly cuts down on the weight I have to lug around.
• The machine is really comfortable to use on your lap as it is light and it doesn’t get very warm. The MacBook Pro got ridiculously hot.
• The display is gorgeous. Although I probably would have chosen a matte screen the glossy display is growing on me.
• The keyboard is really comfortable. Although I like the new mapping of the function keys for play / pause, Expose and Dashboard I miss having a function key mapped to toggle display mirroring / extended desktop.
• I was surprised how well the USB Ethernet dongle works. All you need to do is plug it into the USB port on the laptop and the network is available. As someone who has used Windows in the past this is probably the most impressive part of OS X — no dialogs, no warnings, no alerts — just a working network!
• The lack of ports doesn’t bug me until the Ethernet dongle is connected to the computer. Apple should have made it a splitter with both Ethernet and USB. The USB port has enough power to drive an external SuperDrive, so perhaps it could drive both Ethernet and a USB port at once.
• Everything seems as fast and responsive as my first generation MacBook Pro. I spend most of my day in Entourage, Word, Safari, NetNewsWire and Keynote and this computer has no problem handling any of ‘em.
• I have 31GB left on the hard drive, but haven’t installed the Adobe Creative Suite yet. I think I will be a little more selective this time around and only install Fireworks. It is the only part of the suite I use somewhat regularly.

This laptop is by far the best laptop I have ever owned (high praise) and I have no qualms about it being my only computer. In fact I couldn’t imagine going back to lugging around the MacBook Pro.

iTunes Customer Service

The iTunes Music Store has the best online customer service I have seen in a long time. A couple of days ago I purchased a DJ compilation and it didn’t seem to want to play. I tried purchasing it again to see if the second download would work, no dice. I filled out the online form and within a day I had the following email in my inbox:

Dear Ben,

I hope this email finds you well. Your issue has been escalated to me and I will be happy to help you from now on until I am sure everything is resolved.

I'm sorry to hear that "Kitsuné BoomBox (Mixed By Jerry Bouthier) - Single" doesn't seem to sound correct. I have posted the missing item to your account. Please follow these steps to download the item:

From the pull-down Store menu at the top, select Check for Purchases (if you're unable to upgrade and are using iTunes 6 or earlier, you'll find this option in the Advanced menu). If you can't find this option, you can also click this link to Check for Purchases:
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/checkForPurchases

Enter your account name and password, then click the Check button.

The missing item should begin downloading and appear in your Purchased playlist. If you receive an error message while downloading, try again after turning off any firewall or web-accelerator software that you may have installed. If the download process is interrupted for any reason, it should resume once you reopen iTunes.

Please let me know if your third download has the same problems. I will be happy to refund you for your duplicate purchase as soon as the transaction clears. I would, however, like to know if the third download works for you before I refund you for the duplicate purchase. I may need to refund you for both purchases if the content is still not up to par.

I appreciate your patience Ben and truly wish you nothing but the very best. If you have further questions concerning this issue please reply to this email and I will be happy to assist you.

Fascinating... Not only was the email actually helpful, but it was also written in a way that didn’t make me feel like the customer service representative was selecting a canned response from a list. The third download worked great and I emailed the representative back to let her know that it worked. Within a day I had the following email in my inbox:

I'm pleased to hear that "Kitsuné BoomBox" downloaded properly.  I hope you enjoy your purchase.

I have also reversed the charge for the duplicate purchase. You will see a credit of $5.99, plus any applicable taxes, in three to five business days. If store credit was used for this purchase, you should see the credit after you sign out of the iTunes Store and sign back in.

In the unlikely event that you receive a download error in the future, please remember that it is not necessary to repurchase items when downloads are interrupted, because the items should still be in your account, waiting to be downloaded. To learn more, follow the steps in this article:

How to resume interrupted iTunes Store downloads
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93015

I hope you continue to enjoy using the iTunes Store.

This level of customer service is really impressive, especially when compared to organizations like CIBC and Air Canada. I have sent CIBC a number of emails within their online banking system and generally I receive crappy responses that do not have anything to do with the issue I contacted them about in the first place. Air Canada often tends to solve that problem by not responding to your email.

On a related note the album I downloaded from iTunes wasn’t very good… It would be great if iTunes allowed you to preview more of a song, especially for long club mixes or DJ compilations… Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all!

Upcoming conferences

Clients often ask what conferences we are going to and/or are excited about. Here are some of the conferences that are on my radar in the next little while:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference 2008
March 2-6: Seattle, WA
We have eight people attending the SharePoint Conference this year from Habañero! I attended the SharePoint Conference in 2006 and it was excellent — an insane amount of information was provided by the SharePoint development team. From the Microsoft site: "The SharePoint conference is primarily intended for those in IT who use, deploy, and configure SharePoint. If you are focused on SharePoint deployment, or want to expand your skills in this area, you should attend..."

Microsoft MIX 08
March 5-7: Las Vegas, NV
I went to MIX 07 and had a blast! MIX is awesome if you want to understand Microsoft's Web / UX strategy, talk to folks on the various product teams and drink some of the Microsoft KOOL-AID (along with other stronger drinks). Both myself and Mark (User Experience Developer) are going this year.

Microsoft Convergence 2008
March 11-14: Orlando, FL
Convergence is focused on Microsoft's Dynamics product offerings including Dynamics NAV and Dynamics AX. Habañero will have a booth at the Expo and there will be seven of us going (including myself). If you are interested in Microsoft's ERP strategy or product offerings it should be a good conference. If you attending make sure you drop by our booth and say hello :)

Adaptive Path: MX San Francisco
March 11-14: San Francisco, CA
I attended Adaptive Path's UX Week conference for a couple of years in a row, but as my job shifted the conference became less relevant to me (it is very practitioner focused). MX is much more multi-disciplinary and is awesome for creative and / or experience managers. I can't wait to attend this year with Caterina (Director, User Experience) and Mallory (Senior Information Architect).

If there are any other conferences you think people should know about please feel free to put 'em in the comments!

EUCI Conference

I'm traveling to Tampa on Tuesday to attend the EUCI: 3rd Annual Web Self-Service for Utilities conference. Donna Gratton (from Terasen Gas) and myself will be doing a 45-minute presentation Wednesday afternoon to discuss the tools and techniques we used to redesign the Terasen Gas website. On Friday I will be doing a 3 1/2 hour workshop that focuses on information architecture and usability testing.

Hopefully my new MacBook Air will be waiting for me when I get back :) I ended up getting the base model, but opted for the external SuperDrive and the USB Ethernet Adapter.

My love/hate relationship with SharePoint

Mark Pawson alerted to me to an interesting thread on the IxDA.org site regarding SharePoint. The platform is not universally loved by interaction designers (a bit of an understatement). I thought I would post my response to the thread discussion below as a few of you might find it interesting.

... I have had a love/hate relationship with SharePoint for quite some time. At Habanero we have been working with the product since version 1 and have over 100 successful implementations under our belt. The product really started to gain some serious traction in the marketplace with SharePoint 2003 as a lot of companies already owned the product (via enterprise licensing agreements) and as such their IT departments wanted to use it.

As someone who has a background in information architecture, user interface design and usability engineering I despised SharePoint 2003. Website content management was a huge weakness of the product as it was primarily a document-centric (Word, Excel, etc) extension to Microsoft Office. You needed to hack the product and use a number of workarounds to create a classic HTML-based intranet, which never really worked that well or was that usable (not to mention the quality of the HTML produced) . As such, I preferred building intranets on Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) as it allowed us to create really great-looking, usable corporate portals that reflected the identity of the organization. The problem with using MCMS (other than the fact that it was obvious that MS was going to get rid of it) is that you couldn't create collaborative team sites on the platform to work together on documents -- something SharePoint has always been traditionally strong at.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 changed the landscape as Microsoft took MCMS and integrated the content management functionality into MOSS (along with a number of other features like document and records management, blogs and wikis) . This was a turning point for myself and the rest of our user experience team in the acceptance of SharePoint as MOSS allowed us to design a traditional corporate portal (that has an awesome IA and UI) , while also allowing our clients to create and use team sites, where the branding and design requirements are a lot lighter. I have been pretty blown away with the intranets (and even a couple of external websites) we have been able to create in MOSS.

I think MOSS is a huge improvement from SharePoint 2003 and is a really compelling product. There are a few gotchas though (and other miscellaneous things that drive me crazy):

• The HTML the product produces (when using team sites and out of the box Web Parts) is ugly. There are tables everywhere and the HTML is really inconsistent from one area of the product to another. You can tell that a large team worked on the product and the teams didn't collaborate as well as they should have on the code they produced. This is less of a concern when you are using the content management functionality in the product as you can customize the HTML heavily
• Microsoft really has to stop designing for Windows/IE first and treating other browsers and operating systems as an afterthought. Safari, Firefox and IE should provide end-users with the exact same experience! This is really important for education or any organization that has a lot of Macs. In addition it would be nice if Mac Office provided some integration with MOSS like Office 2007 does
• MOSS is often sold as an intranet in a box. IT departments often install the tool, lightly customize it, and expect users to love their new intranet. Companies that have successful implementations spend a lot of time and money investing in information architecture and user experience design
• Sometimes it is better to modify your IA or UI to be a little more SharePoint-centric. If you do things in a way that SharePoint really wasn't architected for you can run into all sorts of issues. You want to bend it to do what you want, but not break it!
• The blog and wiki functionality isn't as strong as it could be (these are both features that our clients have been very interested in)

The last thing that is probably worth mentioning is that MOSS is an enterprise-class product, and as such the learning curve is steep. The product can be difficult to customize, infrastructure requirements can be a challenge and developing on the platform is a lot harder than just developing a traditional .NET solution. That said, if you spend time doing it right you can create a pretty compelling experience for your users!

I cleaned up a few grammatical issues in this version

Getting settled in ...

I have been in Calgary for a couple of weeks now and am finally starting to settle in and get a little more familiar with the city. Some random thoughts / highlights so far:

• It has been cold! I managed to get away with not buying a real winter coat in Vancouver, but it became very clear when I got off the plane here that not having one wouldn't fly. I am now the proud owner of a new coat (figures that the only one I really liked was a Prada one), gloves, a scarf and a toque.
• Calgary's Caffe Artigiano equivalent is called Caffe Beano on 9th Street SW. Great place to do some work and have a cup of really good coffee. I hear that the brownies are amazing as well, but so far I have managed to resist.
• The Calgary office reminds me of Habañero seven or eight years ago when the company was much smaller. There are only four people here (including myself) versus fifty in Vancouver so you get exposed to a lot of different things during the course of a day. What's really impressive is that over 20% of Habañero's revenue this year has come from Alberta! Right now we are driving revenue by keeping people in Vancouver busy, but our long-term vision is to have a strong local team here. If you are interested in working for Habañero in Calgary (or Vancouver for that matter) check out some of our career opportunities!
• I tend not to use my phone much in Vancouver as I like to walk around and chat with people face-to-face. In Calgary a nice comfortable headset is a must as you spend a lot of time talking on the phone with the team. Tracking people down can be a pain, perhaps we should install cameras all over the Vancouver office so you can see where everyone is and track 'em down :)
• If you like Vietnamese food there is a restaurant on 17th Avenue SW called Co Do that is inexpensive and delicious.

I guess that is it for now. We are going to go to a shooting range tomorrow after work which should be kind of fun :)

Why do they still give you headphones?

With all of the cost cutting Air Canada has done in the past few years I find it strange that they still give you a pair of headphones on each flight. I guess it makes sense on planes that have those old-school two-prong plugs, but for planes that have a normal headphone jack at each seat people should just bring their own headphones or pay $2 for a pair.

On my last flight to Calgary the flight attendants didn't turn on the individual TVs because the flight was a bit bumpy and they felt they didn't have time to give out headphones. My laptop battery was dead, so I ended up staring at the "Welcome aboard" screen for an hour :(

Returning home tonight

I've had a awesome vacation in the last two weeks...

My trip started out with me spending the day in Las Vegas, which is a fun place to have an eight-hour layover. McCarran International is not far from the strip and you can waste time waiting for your flight by gambling or seeing a show. I ended up going shopping at Circuit City where I bought a Garmin nuvi 660 GPS (no more renting one each time), grabbed dinner and then played roulette for a couple of hours. I lost $80 at the Venetian but won $215 at the Hard Rock, which was a fun way to spend three hours (not to mention the added bonus of free Ketel vodka sodas).

After Las Vegas I caught an overnight flight to Miami where I met up with a friend who was staying at the Angler's Boutique Resort in South Beach (he was writing a travel piece for a Vancouver-based magazine called The Block). The hotel room was one of the nicest I have stayed in — our suite was two levels with a bathroom and huge plasma TV on each floor. The service at the hotel was awesome and the French restaurant off the lobby had really, really good drinks, not to mention the best dinner we had during the trip. The nightlife in South Beach was fun (as expected) and the restaurants were really good — especially SUSHISAMBA.

I'm now on the last part of the trip (spending a couple of days in LA with my sister). I'm flying back to Vancouver tonight and should be there for a couple of weeks until CanUX in Banff :)

Trying out the Avion card

I just picked up my new RBC Avion card today. The 12,500 bonus points, plus the ability to convert RBC Rewards points to British Airways Executive Club or Cathay Pacific Asia Miles to access business class inventory seemed like a pretty good deal.

I have had a CIBC Aerogold Visa for a number of years (and am a CIBC customer) but I have accumulated a large number of Aeroplan miles and thought it might be good to start collecting points in another program as reward ticket availability on Aeroplan's site is pretty crappy. In addition CIBC seems to be heaping out the Aeroplan miles as of late for opening accounts, etc., which means availability will be even worse.

I also have had an Alaska Airlines MasterCard for a couple of years. The card is pretty good, especially when you factor in the $50 companion ticket they give you and the fact that you can earn and redeem miles on a large number of airlines. I'm flying to Miami in November, and on one Alaska reward ticket I was able to swing a day and evening in Vegas, six days in Miami and then two days in LA. Not bad!

When I called to activate the Avion card the guy on the phone was a bit of an ass. Hopefully this is not the norm with RBC and I was just unlucky. One area where CIBC has always been strong is in the customer service department. Employees seem to have the authority to remove service and interest charges when necessary without going through a number of hoops. Any time I have had an issue with a charge (even when it was clearly my fault) the agents have been nice about it and have removed them. It will be interesting to see how RBC's service compares.