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!

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.

I (heart) Keynote!

I downloaded the 30 day trial of iWork yesterday which includes Keynote, Pages and a new spreadsheet application called Numbers. I haven't spent any time in Pages or Numbers yet, but fired up Keynote right away to see what was new. I am obsessed with Keynote — it is one of those pieces of software that make using a Mac so compelling and something I use for work all the time.

Apple has really cleaned up the UI in Keynote! All of the iWork applications now feature a Format Bar that appears right below the toolbar. The Format Bar provides contextual formatting controls, depending on what type of object you have selected. Sound familiar? It should as it looks like it was inspired by the ribbon in Microsoft Office. This is an awesome addition as I have always hated all of the different palettes for text, color, etc that littered your screen (and would get lost behind windows). Microsoft should probably get the credit for this one and not Apple though!

There are a few new transitions and effects that I am likely going to overuse in the next little while. Color Planes and Swap are pretty sweet and Sparkle is a nice way to call attention to text. When Keynote first came out the Cube transition looked pretty hot, but now seems really dated.

Something I didn't expect but am very happy with is that all of the iWork applications can open documents saved in their respective Microsoft Office 2007 file formats. Awesome!! This will make looking at documents sent in the new formats much easier until the MacBU actually manages to ship Office 2008. Only six months or so to go :(

MiX07 Roundup

I have finally caught up from my week away in Vegas and thought I would do a quick MIX07 recap. Vegas was a blast and the conference was great — Microsoft put on a good show. Here are some random thoughts from last week:

The fun:

• The Hard Rock Hotel is awesome! The next time I go to Vegas it will be my first choice. The staff were wonderful, the pool was amazing (although the drinks were a little steep) and the restaurants were good (Mr. Lucky's, Nobu and Pink Taco)
• I am not a great gambler — I ended up loosing about $100 (although it was probably more like $50 when you factor in all the free drinks I had) at the Hard Rock Casino
• The Facebook party at the Playboy club was definitely THE party of the week
• The MIX party at PURE paled in comparison to the Facebook party and I (along with most others) were a little disappointed that we didn't get to see the "real" Pussycat Dolls. That said, the upper deck that looked over the Strip was gorgeous
• It was great to reconnect with the Canadian UX folks that I met at the UX roundtable in Redmond

The free stuff:

• I couldn't figure out what the MySpace gift was in the attendee bag. I broke it open (to try to figure it out) and noticed that it had a razor blade inside. I met a few folks who cut themselves on the blade. Turns out that it was a little device for opening CDs. What a weird gift — I can't think of the last time I had to open a shrink-wrapped CD jewel case
• Each attendee received a special edition of Expression Studio that had really amazing packaging. It is a shame that Microsoft does not use this packaging on the actual product as it is MUCH better than the current Expression Studio packaging / branding
• The conference lanyard was the coolest I have ever seen — it was a zipper... Very cool!
• We received a copy of Vista Ultimate for attending... Once the new MacBook Pros come out I will pick one up and install Vista on it (the hard drive on my current Mac is almost full)

The technology (and the reason I actually went to Vegas):

• I think the RIA space is REALLY going to heat up in the next little while. It will be interesting to see how Flex and Silverlight compete. They are both compelling (for different reasons), but Microsoft has created a strong RIA development environment that leverages the strength and maturity of the .Net framework — a powerful combination
• With all the talk in the Keynotes about how well Silverlight will work on Safari and Firefox it would have been nice to have these browsers installed on the various demo PCs throughout the conference. In typical Microsoft fashion the only browser available was IE 7! This attitude has to change (throughout the organization) if Microsoft wants to be seen as credible when advocating cross-browser/platform solutions like Silverlight
• WPF is incredibly compelling for Line of Business (LoB) applications. I can only imagine what something like this would have looked like if we had built it using WPF! There were a few sessions that really illustrated the power of WPF including "XBD05 - Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE." I can't wait until we build our next large LoB application using WPF :)
• The BBC demo during Robbie Bach's keynote was amazing, but I have never seen a room clear out so quickly (in a non-emergency situation) than during the panel afterwards. This wasn't a marketing friendly crowd

Overall the conference was excellent and well worth the trip. I wish I got to see more sessions, but they are all available online.

Yikes! Starwood launches a new website for W Hotels

I've decided that I'm going to take a mini-vacation in May and go to New York for nine days. Things have been über-busy at work, and I'd like to get to New York before it gets too hot.

I love W Hotels (have stayed at the San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago properties) and decided to check out their rates for New York in May. It appears that Starwood has recently launched a new website for the W brand and it is a total and utter gong show. It is likely the worst hotel site I have ever encountered for a brand of this size. I've only spent about ten minutes with the site, but I don't think I will be coming back...

A few things I noticed right away:

[1] The information architecture
The first time I tried to use the site I selected "W Destinations" and then "New York". If you select a destination you land on a "Where's Here" page. Huh? It isn't like W has hotels in obscure cities all over the world. Site visitors will likely know where New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seoul and Seattle are. After looking at the site in more detail it became obvious that I should have selected "W Hotels" as that would have produced a list of the actual properties...

In my experience people primarily visit a hotel site for three things — rates, deals and detailed hotel information (including large photographs). It might have been better for destination information to be integrated into the various hotel pages.

[2] Putting core information in pop-up windows
When you view the hotel details they appear in a tiny pop-up window. Huh? Why would you put your most important content in a little tiny window? Why wouldn't you take advantage of the fact that my laptop has a 15-inch screen? When you actually want to see more information you use a pull-down menu entitled "Explore More" which allows you to select a normal hotel page to view.

[3] The welcome agents are annoying
I thought the W experience was supposed to be wired, witty, welcoming and warm — not annoying and cheesy.

[4] The music is a neat idea but is executed poorly
Music is such a core part of the W experience that I think its use is justified on the site. That said, the player only plays thirty-seconds of each song and then jumps to the next one. I'm not previewing music in iTunes! If I was sitting in the living room of a W property and they were only playing thirty seconds of each song I would leave pretty quickly.

[5] Uhhhhh! Pulldowns over Flash are Bad
The pull down menus seem to conflict with the Flash movie on the homepage in Safari making them almost impossible to use. The help info says the site supports Safari, so I would assume that they would have done a decent job of QA'ing the site before launch.

[6] The date picker defaults to the end of 2008
Not sure why, but the date picker always goes to 12/31/2008 when you are using Safari. This doesn't happen across all Starwood properties (just some), so there must be an error in the way the picker is trying to capture the date from the browser.

[7] The comments box on the website
It is not large enough to document all the problems the site has :(

It surprises me that Starwood would get the Web experience so wrong, because they get the in-hotel experience so right. Both W and Westin are Wonderful (no pun intended), perhaps one day their online experience will be as well!

Back from MX — It rocked!

Well deserved props to the Adaptive Path folks — the MX SF 2007 conference was excellent! They managed to take the themes and topics most relevant to creative / experience managers and spend an entire conference focusing on them. This isn't easy to do... The DMI event I went to in London a couple of years ago tried to do the exact same thing and didn't succeed at all (in fact it pissed me off). I told Peter Merholz that they did an excellent job just by not pissing me off :)

The conference was nice and small, which allowed us to mingle and meet a lot of different people. Everyone was friendly and there were a lot of interesting people in attendance.  It was also nice to hook up with old friends from past UX Week events. I also really enjoyed San Francisco. We had good weather and it was nice to spend some time in the city.

A few thoughts from the conference.

Day One:

• Both Jesse James Garrett and Lou Carbone had wonderful, entertaining talks on creating experiences (not just user experiences, but the experiences people have with organizations and the emotional impact of these experiences);
• Adam Richardson's presentation from Frog fell flat. There were some interesting concepts and he is obviously super bright, but he just didn't manage to deliver a strong presentation;
• The interview with Caterina Fake was interesting... Must be strange to go from working at small companies and startups to an organization the size of Yahoo;
• Dell's Brooks Protzmann has an enormous amount of work ahead of him improving the visual identity and brand experience at Dell. They seem to be making good progress and they have an interesting way of looking at the customer life cycle. I thought the new "super configurator" on the website was well done, I just wish Dell wouldn't put their logo in a big-ass cheezy silver circle on each machine; and
• I'd seen Brandon Schauer's presentation before at UX Week so I decided to get caught up on the day's email.

Day Two:

• Tim Brown from IDEO was great. He had a really interesting talk and he presented some new ways of thinking of innovation, design and research;
• Jennie Winhall's talk about developing pilot programs for the National Health Service in the UK was the most inspirational session of the conference and illustrated how design can positively impact lives. Check out RED for more information;
• I enjoyed Todd Wilken's talk (and loved the slide deck — simple and elegant);
• The interview with Irene Au (Director of User Experience at Google) was ok. I thought it was kind of weird having Jeffrey Veen (one of her reports) interview her, as he didn't really ask any tough questions. I still find Google a little strange. People who work at Habañero are pretty  happy, but the folks at Google seem a little Tom Cruise crazy;
• I really dug Sara Ulius-Sabel's talk from Whirlpool. Although she seemed a little nervous she gave a great presentation and I always love it when we look outside the technology industry for ideas; and
• Scott Berkun ended the day with a bang. His talk on innovation was arguably the best of 'em all and he was definitely the right speaker to close the conference. He touched on some creative management ideas and concepts that really resonated with me and that I have to give further thought to. If you have a chance to see him speak I highly recommend it.

The conference has really got me thinking about the experiences we create for our clients. We have been spending a lot of time over the last little while at Habañero focusing on a Client Experience Management program to address larger things we can improve, but the new program doesn't really focus on the small day-to-day experiences clients have when they interact with us.

For example: our Project Charter Document which we use to kick-off an engagement currently has a “sponsor’s initials” box beside key scope areas in the document. I don’t think it is necessary legally and conveys to the client that we don’t trust them to read the document, and thus they have to initial that they have read everything.

The last time I can think of a situation where I had to sign a document like this was a car rental agreement. I wouldn't say that a car rental company provides an experience we would like to replicate for our clients. If we want to ensure that our clients read these important sections we should go through the document together with our clients and discuss these important areas. 

It will be interesting to see what other small things we can change to make the experience of working with Habañero better for our clients!

Microsoft UX Executive Roundtable

I received an invitation from Microsoft to join a Canadian UX executive roundtable in the middle of February in Redmond. There are a few familiar names on the invite list and the agenda looks interesting... I am particularly excited about the MS Research session, as it is always cool to see what the R&D folks are dreaming up :)

Jensen Harris at VanUE

If you are interested in software UI development VanUE has a treat for you! We have Jensen Harris coming up from Redmond. Jensen is a Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office User Experience team and is one of the key designers behind the new user interface being introduced in Microsoft Office.

It should be a really interesting talk. We still have a few seats left, so if you are interested please visit the VanUE site for more information.