Archives for February 2013

I know several Yahoo!’s who work remotely, so I was disappointed for them when I read the internal memo decrying a need for being “physically together”.

Once again, having a corporate wide mandate like this goes against my core “people over process” belief.

In an ideal world, a holistic team would all be co-located. No doubt. I love working with teams that are all in the same room focused on solving a problem.Many have discussed this benefit, including the likes of Lean UX.

However, life isn’t this simple. In a world short of supply of truly great talent, I go where the talent goes. Thus, we have a mix of teams @ Walmart Labs. My Android crew is together in San Bruno, whereas my mWeb engineers are all remote. We have built our processes to handle a distributed work force and I have found that:

a) Having a great team in the same building is the ideal

b) Having 99% of a team co-located with a couple of remotes is hard for those remotes, since it is hard for them not to lose out on the water cooler conversation

c) Having a great team with distributed members still far out perform a co-located average team!

I could also go into the advantages of remote teams. One of the best engineers I have ever worked with works remotely. One major benefit is that we can keep him focused on engineering. It is much harder to not get called into meetings and have distractions when they are all around.

Marisa, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. You have some gems. Find them and keep them.

I have been involved and overhead many process discussions in the last few days. It is always easy to get a chortle at some business folks speaking the dogma.

I started to day dream when hearing one conversation in particular, and super imposed on my ear drums was the conversation of actors speaking of the method.

This got me thinking. It is so interesting that we often look to process as a holy grail, as The One True Path.

Much has been made of Daniel Day Lewis’ process in Lincoln. It took me 30 minutes to take in his performance. He was brilliant. But that’s the thing… he is brilliant. His process is a tool that helps him, but it is his genius that is the key. If I went through the same dogma as he, I wouldn’t be able to put in that performance.

Therein lies the rub. It is fantastic to understand the various tools and processes, but casting is so much more the key.

People over process.

Focus on the people. On the troop. I would choose a great team forced to use waterfall vs. an average team using agile. The make up of the team, and how they work together is also key (vs. looking at the individuals).

There is no perfect process that works for all. Method acting may work for some, but the Meisner method may work for others. Diversity is good. Don’t get stuck in the dogma!

I love watching our customers use our products. The mobile group has a strong UX team (lead by the awesome James Keller) and one of my favorite activities is stopping in on usability testing.

Users always surprise me. Every time. Without fail. I always leave a session wondering how we missed something so obvious, as well as thinking “wow, that person REALLY thought like that?”

There were some gems in the mWeb usability tests this week, and some of the learnings fell in the camp of:

Don’t force your users to slowly read and comprehend text

A customer was looking for “black socks”, so after typing that into the search box, our search suggestions system kicked in and alerted the user that no search suggestions were found.

Now, a lot of us know the difference between search suggestions vs. search results. Engineers on the project itself know the difference in detail (how the search suggestion cache is built etc). Our customers though are thinking in terms of:

Input: what I am searching for

Output: products that match the search

I think that many see in the UI:

No xxxxxxxxx xxx “black socks”

Thus, they conclude that we don’t have any products that match. We shouldn’t ask them to slowly read the entire sentence and comprehend the details.

We shouldn’t show that messaging at all, and we can be much smarter by offering actual products as well as smart linking into categories.