As I mentioned in my last post I am not going to the MIX conference this year.  I am a little bummed about missing the big show.  To prepare myself for not attending the conference, I decided to put together a list of things that you can do if you (like me) are not going to the conference.

Watch the Keynotes live - The MIX team has confirmed that the keynote address will be streamed live over the Internet, so you don't actually have to go to Vegas to see it in real time.  The Monday keynote is from 9:30 AM - 12:00 noon Pacific time (so 11:30 AM - 2:00 PM for those of us in the Central Time Zone).   Tuesday's keynote is 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Pacific time (so 3:00 - 5:00 PM Central).

Prepare a VPC for all the new bits - If the last MIX conference and ScottGu's blog post about what the keynote will include are any indication, then we can expect to get access to lots of new bits to play with during MIX.  I always recommend that you install Beta and CTP software in a VPC (unless you have an extra machine or hard drive laying around).  So while you are watching the keynote, spend some time getting a new VPC ready (don't forget to run Windows Update on the VPC).

Take a Class at MIX University - Mix University is your online connection to some great hands on learning for the products that are showcased at MIX.  One of the best parts about this is that many of the classes are online right now.  You can watch videos, play with demos and take hands on labs on Expression, Silverlight, WPF, Virtual Earth and more!

Attend your favorite MIX sessions - Most sessions at MIX will be available online about 24 hours (give or take) after the session is delivered.  Go to http://sessions.visitmix.com/ and you will be able to search for the sessions and check them out.  Guess what?  Sessions for MIX06 and MIX07 are also out there, so you can check out great sessions from the past already.  Maybe you should check out the keynote from last year to get pumped up for this year's keynote.

Subscribe to the MIX RSS Feed to follow all the side conversations - When I was at MIX last year, I learned as much hanging out in the lounge and talking to people in the hallways as I did in any session.  You can follow along with some of these conversations by subscribing to the MIX RSS Feed.  Last year they had lots of great interviews with participants and this year we will get a glimpse into the Open Spaces happening at MIX as well.

Balance by Cherice used under Creative Commons

This is a highly personal blog post that is beyond what I would normally put on this blog.  I am sharing this because I think there might be some of the readers who have faced some of the things I am going to talk about, or might face it at some time in the future.  Also many of the people who read this blog are my friends and close co-workers and honestly this is the easiest way to tell some of them what I have to say.  I will return to my usual blog post style very soon.

Last week I got to attend Microsoft's Techready conference, which our twice a year our internal version of TechEd.  You go to Seattle for a week and get access to many of the product teams and the Technical Evangelists for training.  There are also a lot of side parties and events like Game Night and an attendee party.  You also get to hang out with your co-workers both local to you and those across the globe, many that you may have never met face to face before.  It is a great event, expect for the 5-7 days that you spend away from your family.  This last week was especially hard because Thursday was Valentines Day and it was also Jodie and I's 8th wedding anniversary.  It was a tough week and on Friday I was glad to be headed home.

I had a lay over in Minneapolis / St Paul on Friday for a couple hours and I called to say goodnight to the family.  During the conversation Jodie told me that my 7 year old son, Hunter, had been talking with his grandparents (my mom and dad) and told them:

Dad picked work over me, that is why he is in Seattle

So you can imagine how I felt: kicked in the gut to say the least.  I know that I did not pick work over him and that travel is a necessary part of of my job (and many people's jobs).  But that is very hard to explain to a seven year old and I guess to a child of any age until they are closer to being an adult.  Jodie had talked to him about it and tried to explain it to him.  I spent most of the day on Saturday with him, and it was nice.  But I honestly think that I need to make some changes in my priorities.  I am going to have to "dial back" how much time I spend on the road and more than that, I have to switch from "tuning out the family" to work (picture me on the couch with the laptop while the family is watching a move) to just flat out turning off work during family time.

I am still very committed to visiting customers and community groups in the district that I cover (Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana).  I just need to be smarter about when I take on a trip that will have me away from the family for long stretches of time and when I am home I need to unplug from work (I am very bad about that).  I am taking the first step by not going to MIX in March.  It is going to be a cool conference, but I can get a lot of the information on the web (I am putting a blog post together telling you how to get the most out of MIX without actually going to Vegas).

I recently attended a session on on User Experience where they talked about the need for good UX, showed some good and bad examples of UX and shared some best practices.  I liked the session a lot (and not just because I won a copy of Don't Make me Think a book that I have wanted for quite some time).  One of the techniques for improving UX that they described got me thinking a lot and that is the process of Card Sort.

What is Card Sort?

Card Sort is where you put individual items that make up the system on a 3" x 5" index card and you have someone who is going to use the system in question organize them logically.  You do this several times with different stake holders and record the results.  Depending on the users the results can vary wildly, so you usually have to go through a process of reconciling the differences.  There is an alternate mechanism where you create a "straw man" card sort and see how your users go about finding something to see how the hierarchy needs to be adjusted.  Card sorts are not a new technique and the deliverable of the sort is usually a site map if the system in question is a web application.  It can also be used in the development of breadcrumbs and a lot of other ways to describe the "hierarchy" of the application.

Does Hierarchy Matter?

The reason I was so intrigued by this technique is that I can remember participating in these exercises and the painstaking detail that you can go through to create the content architecture and hierarchy of a system.  This is often a consensus building exercise, as there is no real correct answer to the hierarchy.  The other reason that I was thinking about it was I can't remember the last time that I actually followed a hierarchy in an web application and I even use hierarchies less in less in desktop applications as well.  When I want to find something that is not obvious I search for it.  Search is not perfect (I don't care what web search engine or desktop search engine  you are using), but it seems to get me there much faster than navigating most hierarchies.

Is it is hierarchy or the Interface?

We are sorely in need of a better way to navigate hierarchies.  I will pick on an internal site within Microsoft that I use frequently, but this problem seems to be pervasive to many applications.  The site in question follows this hierarch to get to most of the content that I need on the site:

Site > International > Regions > North America > United States > Central Region

That is just the beginning, there a several layers below that (but below that level is content that I am interested in).  The part that frustrates me is not the hierarchy itself (when I think globally I understand the need for it), but it is the JavaScript fly out menus that I have to navigate in order to get to a level that I am interested in.  It is usually quicker for me to use a search engine than it is to navigate the complexity of the hierarchy interfaces.

Is it just me?

I raised the question of hierarchy versus search during the UX presentation.  The presenter said that different users will search things in different ways.  He considered someone who uses the search instead of navigating the hierarchy is probably the sign of a power user of the system (as an aside I don't consider myself a power user).  So I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this.  Are hierarchies still important?  Do you navigate or search?  What are your thoughts on the the state of interfaces?  Leave a comment or contact me.

If someone were to ask you the question "Does technology make you more productive?"  How would you answer?  If you are like most people you would say "Yes, technology makes me much more productive!".  There are, of course, some people who argue that technology does not make you more productive, but it is actually a drain on productivity.  These are the folks that say "technology is evil" or "computers are the tool of the devil".  I have to admit that I have had these thoughts on occasion, most recently when I made a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles and was told that I could not renew my license because the computer was down.  They said that they could make me a license, because the physical machine to make the license was on a different system, but they could not record the fact that I paid for the license.  But this blog post is not about those people and those situations.  I have always felt that:

Technology should not make you more productive, but it should totally change the way that you work

Simple Example

If you are old enough you will remember that when you got a letter or a memo you would see something like this at the bottom of a letter LDC/jmc.  The second set of initials are  of the person who actually typed it up.  Does anyone call in a stenographer and dictate a letter to them and send it to the steno pool to be typed up and then review a draft of the letter and send corrections?  With very few exceptions, no.  We rarely send letters out any more at all and when we do we can type them up our selves and spell check them and distribute them.  When was the last time that you actually saw a memo sent out?

The elevator / turbolift example

On Tuesday I went to the Flex pre-release tour in Chicago, hosted by the Chicago Adobe User Group.  Special thanks to Adobe and Michael Schaffner of CAUG for putting on a great event.  Dave Bost and I ran into James Ward, the Adobe Flex Evangelist who was presenting the event at the front door of the building and we had quite an adventure getting to the fourth floor.  The event was held in the offices of Ascend Training and they are in the Fine Arts Building which is a historic building that dates from 1885.  We were kind of perplexed on how to get up to the offices as the stairs were blocked by a door that had no handle.  The elevators seemed to be out of commission, because we could see the cables hanging down in the elevator shaft.  Imagine our surprise when the cables started moving and the elevator doors opened.  We walked into the tiny elevator with some hesitation.  By the way, I am sure there is a great punch line to the joke that starts "Three Evangelist get on an elevator...", but I just can't think of one right now.

When we got on the elevator, there was a man sitting on a chair in the elevator who spoke Russian (not 100% sure, but that is what is sounded like).  He moved the lever to close the door and then proceeded to operate the elevator by moving a second lever.  As we started to move we all noticed that the elevator did not have an inner and an outer door like you see with modern elevators.  So you could literally see the floors passing you by and you would not want to lean too far forward.  This had to have been the oldest elevator I had ever ridden on (at least that I can remember).  It was quite an experience and made me think about how elevator technology has changed.

So let's leap forward to the 23rd century to the original Star Trek show (the one with Captain Kirk).  This was a show filmed in the middle and late 1960's, but supposedly set hundreds of years in the future.  For those of you who have never seen the show they had replaced elevators with turbolifts, which could not only go up and down, but side to side (to accommodate the shape of the ship).  Technology had only made little progress when compared to the elevator in the Fine Arts Building.  Even though they got rid of the Russian speaking elevator operator (and made him the ship's navigator), they had not gotten rid of the need to control the turbolift with a lever.  Sure the lever was a lot cooler looking, but it was still something the rider had to control.  Technology had made them more productive, but it did not change how they did things.

If we leap forward to the 24th century (to Picard's Enterprise), then we have some concrete examples of how technology is applied properly.  They still had turbolifts, but they no longer had to be operated manually.  When you got onto the turbolift you said the name of the place that you wanted to go to: "Engineering" for example (so there is hope that we will finally nail speech recognition).  You did not have to know the relative location of where you were going, it just took you there (very handy for new crewmen).  Even more useful was the fact that you could say "Take me to Commander Riker" and the turbolift, which was tied into the comm system (via web services, I am sure) would detect the location of the person you wanted to see and take you there.  They changed the way they worked.

What should you do?

Next time you are asked to work on something that has the stated goal of "making our call center more productive", challenge that objective.  Reducing the time that it takes for me to reach my customer support person is nice, but how about a self service application that eliminates the need for me to call customer service?  BTW - did I mention that I had to call the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV 3 times this week to get a receipt?