Posts Tagged ‘environment’

Stop arranging developers like the typing pool

A couple weeks into the project, and despite my access to the issue tracking system, the project wiki, and the code repository, I still felt uneasy–there was something I was missing, but since I didn’t know what that was, I couldn’t ask for it. Coffee? Water? Multiple monitors? Appealing snacks? Had all those. I stood above my workspace, and then figured it out:

We were seated all wrong.

All of us on the development team were placed into cubicles arranged into a herringbone pattern pointing to one side of the room. Our faces turned about 25° towards one other person. I became familiar with the backs of many of my co-workers’ heads, since that’s much of what I saw of them all day. It was a bizarre arrangement for the kind of work we expected to do, since it discouraged interaction: you didn’t want to walk up behind someone and tap him or her on the shoulder for just any old thing.

Of course, interruptions are ruinous to developer productivity, but so is
isolation. There was a lot of context missing for me on this project, because it wasn’t available through the commit comments, and asking for it on chat would’ve required my knowing who to ask for what. I was slower to contribute because I couldn’t overhear relevant chitchat and couldn’t catch the eye of the project lead when I had a question, the most urgent one being: why were our workspaces arranged so stupidly?

I envisioned some workmen arriving one morning with a bare sketch of a floor plan in hand, and a general work order: “Build X number of cubicles from this pile of parts.” They weren’t told who’d work in the cubes, nor what was important to us. They acted from assumptions that seemed reasonable, but were still flat-out wrong.

One was that we all needed to have visual contact with one certain thing at one end of the room. Most of us have experience with this kind of arrangement, since it’s how we sat when we attended school. It’s also how clerical workers’ desks were often placed in early open plan offices. Management enjoyed this arrangement, since it permitted easy surveillance of those notorious insubordinates, schoolchildren and women. Placed side-by-side, we have less interaction with our peers, and more with the authority figure at the end of the room. But here in a twenty-first-century cube farm, there was no teacher on a dais to please. Why were we all facing the same way?

To watch a movie? Or perhaps a more sinister activity?

We have always been at war with SVN

The project never required the Two Minutes Hate–well, as far I could tell. Who would’ve tapped me on the shoulder to let me know?

“Gazelles” eat hay, not grass

On Good.is the popular posts today include “15 Percent of Americans Are Now on Food Stamps”. I’ve visited the site twice this Monday, once just after the New York Stock Exchange started trading this morning, and now after the market close, as the story of our dismal economy’s enduring lifelessness makes headlines everywhere. In today’s more optimistic forenoon, I read Tim Fernholz’s “Hunting Gazelles: Figuring Out What Makes Companies—and Jobs—Grow”. Some of the points in that article bugged me then. They really irritate me now.

The post is an interview with scholar Tim Kane, who proposes that new jobs in the U.S. economy come from “gazelles,” quick-moving, fast-growing, young businesses. I don’t quibble with this entirely; I’ve seen how many Bay Area tech businesses seem desperate to hire enough people to support their rapid expansion (though–ahem–not desperate enough to modernize their hiring practices). Yet just after sharing convincing data about the remarkable contribution “gazelles” make to the employment rate, Kane veers into territory more familiar to subscribers to Reason than to Good.is:

Photo by Swamibu

There are real structural impediments to starting a firm…Labor regulations can make it difficult for entrepreneurs to even leave, and difficult for firms to hire more people.

The [Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law] is particularly galling because it seems like its[sic] killing off our IPO industry. Without an IPO or the promise of an IPO on the horizon, why start a tech company?

Alright, where to begin?

Let’s start here: one man’s regulation is another’s unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and minimum wage law. Your “structural impediment” is my workplace safety standard, whistleblower protection, and equal opportunity legislation. Think Sarbanes-Oxley is galling? Try having your retirement savings wiped out overnight by corporate fraud.

There’s a stubborn belief in the startup world that it’s 100% self-made, boot-strapped, that the “gazelles” broke away from the encumbrances of the herd and now thrive on the nourishing wild grasses of the entrepreneurial savannah. If this were so, why are there so few, if any, gazelles in places with fewer regulations? Why do tech bubbles form again and again here in the Bay Area?

You could re-read Richard Florida, or you could remember this:

“Gazelles” eat hay, not grass.

Meaning: “gazelles” rely on the infrastructure all of us provide. This isn’t just WiFi, Blue Bottle Coffee, and a spot on the CalTrain bike car. It’s also those “structural impediments” like environmental regulation (can you drink the water out of the tap?), public health initiatives (when’s the last time you worried about polio?), and anti-corruption laws (do you have to bribe someone to launch your product?).

Yes, it’s admirable to watch gazelles leap gracefully to such heights. But let’s not forget the haystacks we shore up to feed them.

What not driving for 25 years taught me about UX

One drizzly morning in 1988 I arrived at the infamous San Francisco DMV office.

There were two lines for service, one noticeably shorter than the other, and since I was already running late for work, I stepped into that shorter line. At my turn at the counter, I completed the paperwork for a state identification card instead of a driver's license, which didn't seem that important to me at the time, since it'd been already two years since I last drove a car, and now I lived in SF, which had passable public transit. It wasn't this grand activist moment for me, this kind of Damascus Road flash of insight--no, it was just my deciding that driving wasn't very important to me.

And I was right. Not driving proved more important.

Try getting around the United States without a motor vehicle.

Asphalt Nation, by Jane Holtz Kay

Asphalt Nation, by Jane Holtz Kay

Try it for a while. Try it while also attempting to sustain a career, relationships, household, your sanity. You will learn, as I did, very important lessons about how user experience can be structured to assist or thwart your journey.


Here are some of my discoveries:

Places with more than one way to access them have greater vitality.

As Jane Jacobs pointed out, small city blocks encourage walking and transit use. Places which permit access only by motor vehicle are dead-feeling and often moribund, which is why a high WalkScore is becoming so attractive to potential buyers.

In Web terms, how many of us enjoy visits to sites which permit access only through needless Flash intros or mandatory registration? These pages act like those guard kiosks in suburban gated communities. Or how about the sites with no provision for usage by mobile devices?

No, I am not going to watch your pointless branding animation, nor wait for your bloated JavaScript form validation script to load: I'm going to shop at your competitor's site.

You can't "set it and forget it."

All over the United States, roads and transit systems are crumbling into unusability because of deferred maintenance. The jagged potholes in my neighborhood act as the speed bumps the City of Oakland can't commit to installing in this dire period for municipal budgets. A couple blocks away, the once-handy AC Transit bus system runs fewer and fewer buses, thanks to neverending budget cuts. Being stranded for 45 minutes waiting for the next bus after missing one by just seconds is a pretty common experience for us commuters.

Out there on the Web are so many undermaintained, tatty sites that I really don't need to link to them. Outdated copyright date on the footer? "Best viewed in Netscape" graphic? Visual design so old it's on the cusp of being retro-cool? Those are easy to remedy--if you commit time and money to fixing them.

Accessibility is pricey to build in...and exorbitant to bolt on later.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, there was the usual unappealing backlash of nay-sayers claiming that the Act's provisions were merely nice-to-have and too expensive to require. Despite that, the built environment of the United States changed rapidly to include curb cuts, ramps, and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. Building owners whimpered about the expense of retrofitting for ADA-compliance; new construction posed the advantage of having these features built in from the start.

The question of Web accessibility arose pretty early in the medium's history, but remains incompletely answered. Too many site owners consider accessibility a "nice-to-have, but...", or something at which you can toss a few inadequate "alt tags" and be done with it, whereas true accessibility requires assessing how your application or site is used in different situations: can this site be used without a keyboard? Without a monitor? Without color contrast?

Making something accessible also makes it relevant to use cases we can't anticipate. When I injured my knee in 1992, I sure appreciated those buildings with elevators and ramps. When I started browsing the Web on my Palm Treo in 2005, I admired those sites with text-heavy, low-graphics means of interacting with them.

You're free to think you don't need to accommodate a diversity of users, of course, just as you're free to require a motor vehicle to access your physical location. And you're free to destroy your own brand with slipshod UX. It's a free world.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

Posted on: by mejarc 2 Comments

Yesterday I opened the fridge at home, and was astonished to find these:

1.5 Liters of Bottled Water

Fifteen, even ten, years ago, these items would be unremarkable in my kitchen. I might’ve even remembered purchasing them, rather than regarding them as puzzling stowaways. But thanks to the Web, I’m now enlightened to these harmless-looking bottles’ sinister nature. Each is a crystalline vessel of needless expense, inefficient resource usage, and toxic compounds . So how did they end up in my house?

Each bottle is an artifact from a conference. Each is the result of a conference organizer’s good intentions and relatively enlightened self interest. The original notion seemed to be concern for conference attendees’ physical comfort (“Keep hydrated through those long days of sitting in chilly, darkened meeting rooms! Here, take a bottle of water…”), combined with greater awareness of the ruinous health consequences of drinking soda, and the practices of corporate branding, to create the now ordinary half-liter water bottle such as you see here, and such as you probably have lurking in your own refrigerator.

How is this a problem? We got something for free, right?

Uh, no.  We’re paying for it,  whether we drink this water or not.

We’re paying for:

  • The delivery of so many single-serving bottles full of what is often just tap water
  • The janitors necessary to remove these used-only-once water bottles from conference rooms and wastebaskets
  • The energy inputs required to recycle these bottles, if that’s even available.  (To that conference’s credit, one of these party favors used 100% recycled plastic for its bottle)
  • The landfill space required to bury these bottles when recycling isn’t supported

And we’re missing a great opportunity for tech conferences to be as innovative as they claim to be in their publicity. Want to be truly “disruptive, or “2.0,” or “the future”? Hand conference attendees collapsible steel cups with the conference logo printed on them, and point the way to the drinking fountains.

I doubt we will notice anything missing from our fridges.