Evolvingwe

The usage of user personas as they are built today has to stop.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept that was developed in the mid-90’s….

“Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behaviour set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. Personas are a tool or method of market segmentation.”

Meet Mort.  He’s 50 years old and he is a rocket scientist.  He’s been married twice with 4 children.  One of the things he does as part of his job is develop applications that connect to embedded devices used to test missile guidance system.  He doesn’t have the time to learn the ins and outs of programming languages so he relies heavily on visual tools and code completion services in the editor to help him write.

It’s too bad I don’t read fiction or I’d probably be better at writing it. Mort doesn’t exist, but to a couple thousand people building software at Microsoft he did.  He was a compelling character that helped drive the features and focus of several teams.  The genius was in the illusion of agreement about Morts character traits. This was a guy everyone wanted to get behind and help succeed at his job.  User personas, as a tool, are used to drive thousands of projects every year in the software industry, but it’s time for a change.

We are now in an era where customer connection is so painfully simple Mort can be replaced with real users.  User personas are not people and you are building something for real people.  Here are some of the issues with the use of this abstraction technique.

1. You can’t ever ask Mort any questions. Once the persona has been made you can only consult the character sheet… Which only has information you have already collected about this perception of your customers.
2. Personas are generally built with very little validation. It’s a tool that requires significant resources and dedication to use properly.  It’s rare that someone goes back to customers after interviews were conducted (that assumes there were interviews) to state, reflectively,  “this is who we are building our products for… Does this character speak for you?  My bet is that most people would say no and probably laugh at what they saw written on the character sheet.
3. Personas allow you to be one step removed from anything real about the product or service you are offering. You get to have lots of meetings, visits, etc designed to facilitate building a persona instead of using those resources to offer a updated product or service based on what you heard… Why do you need the level of separation? Why not speak directly to people about the problems they want you to solve.  This practice is like playing the telephone game with the feedback that could be used to make your offering better. If you have people working for you that aren’t smart enough to draw the right conclusions from real information…. Why do they work at your company?
4. Timelines. If you have to ship a product in less than a year… you don’t have time to do this properly.  By the time you’ve created agreement about the character traits they are probably outdated.
5. The Fiction. Everyone loves to participate in creating neat fiction.  It’s fun and it makes it easy to create the illusion of agreement.  By the time the persona gets to an engineer, in an effort to make sure facts don’t get in the way of a good story details may have been omitted and some disparate customers may have been lumped together… Meaning the Frankenstein you created probably doesn’t exist. The people good at solving problems are now doing so with static variables that were set incorrectly.

So now what???

So what’s to be done instead? How should customer traits be aggregated into something that can do some good?

1. Get real. If you must use personas do yourself a favor and find 5 real people that map directly to a persona.  Make the story about these five people and the challenges they face. Use only real quotes from these customers to rebuild the persona so it’s has a clear foundation in reality. Videos or audio are even more powerful.  Create a library of real data that everyone can read and a way to contact the real people behind the information.
2. Trust Osmosis. Have a question, transcription, or some feedback delivered to your team every single day. This is only for reading unless there is something that can be done in 15 minutes to reply to the customer.  No big changes need to happen as a result of this feedback.  The big changes will happen over time thanks to the osmosis.   Everyone at your company should be spending 15-30 minutes today at least reading something from a real customer that is using your service.  This creates a personal connection that just can’t be delivered from a fictional character.  People want to know they are building something for other real people and they need to hear, from those people, the kind of positive and negative impact their work is having. Over time the realities will sink in and if larger changes are needed they will feel natural and no one will question these changes since they’ve been reading why they need to be made everyday.
3. Leverage customer support. These people spend most of their days working with real customers that like your product enough that they didn’t give up at the first sign of problems… They let you know about the issues!!!  Of course you should make sure you solve their problem first, but then you should encourage a real conversation be had.  Rotate a set of 10 questions that you can ask people that contact support about how the software is working well for them.  Record the answers and share it with everyone.  I’m not talking about some canned survey, but open ended questions that would lead to a real 5-10 minute dialog.  This information will add up and you might find that, once you have the customer thinking about the positives they will come back to buy more of what you are selling later on.. If not on the same call.
4. Make sure customer support is everyones job. Everyone can answer one question a week from a customer.  They don’t have to do it directly, but if you have people employed that can’t answer one customer question a week on their own… Why do they work for you?  When they do it, they get to ask their question and ideally engage in a real conversation with the customer.
5. Use real data whenever possible. Does the data validate what the customers are telling you? Eye witnesses are the least reliable source of information on a crime seen… If you have real data on the behavior it needs to be put right next to the eye witness report.   If you don’t have numerical data to validate an observation it must be treated as an isolated observation until proven otherwise.

There you have it.  Leave the fictional reading for your vacations and get real with your teams.  If you like writing these stories… Take a class at your local community college, but don’t force fiction on people.  Take it from someone that’s been reformed.  There is no such thing as the ideal customer.  I used to be part of these definitions and seen them used well… But never as well as non-fiction.  Its so easy to engage in real conversations with people today it’s a sin to abstract that information behind fictional characters.

Design, Software

I posted previously about undergoing a review of your true product strengths. But what if you realize there isn’t as much overlap between customer usage/demand and your product?  You have to start over and try to redefine what your product strengths are going to be.  What’s happened to Microsoft, with Windows Mobile, provides an excellent case study for such a re-invention. 

Windows Mobile used to be awesome.  If you wanted a geeky phone it was the cat’s meow.  Then the iPhone came and made customers demand strengths in phones (as a product) that Windows Mobile simply didn’t have.  So they had to reinvent themselves.  There is art in reinvention and it’s captured very transparently in Charlie Kindles blog post “Looking into the future – last year”.

…Then we said to the team

“Pretend you writing a product review for your friends and family. Also pretend it is late 2010 and the new phones with Windows Phone 7 Series are in consumers hands and developers have been building & selling apps & games for a while. Write a fictional review critiquing what we built.”

We actually did this at an “offsite meeting” and had groups of 3-4 people go off for about an hour and report back to the group.  We really wanted to get people thinking about this product the way connected busy people outside of Microsoft would perceive it.

He then goes on to share some of the new product strength definitions that they goaled themselves with. 

• It’s easy to build beautiful applications users just love

  • The platform makes it easy to ensure performance, reliability, security, and battery life.
  • The platform encourages high-quality and rejects low.
  • Deployment, upgrades, updates and safe removal are handled by the platform
  • An application that works on one device form-factor works on all others

The combination of this planning exercise… getting the team involved and then clearly stating simple strength definitions resulted in the creation of art.  I don’t have one yet, but I love what I’ve seen about the new Windows Phone experience and developer platform. 

Now if they could just get Words with Friends written for one by the time it comes out. 

Software art, encouragement, planning, windows-phone

Because it is.  If you write sloppy work items and specifications why would your developers write good code?  Bad bug reports… these are fixes with regressions that are just waiting to be found.  Poor requirements… these are just bad implementations waiting to be done.  Code with too many bugs… poor QA pass…

As social creatures humans mirror behavior.  What we see is what we do.  If an employee sees low quality work all around them passed off as acceptable then what do they have to shoot for?

If you want to increase the quality of your companies deliverables you might consider looking at your own results first.  There is no point in changing process, plans, or resources unless you can change your own behavior… because that’s the key to changing culture in general… seeding your world with great examples of what the ideal is.

Another way to look at this is to imaging if everything you wrote at work was going to be sent directly to your best customers.  Would they still buy from you if they could look inside the sausage factory? 

Would you rather buy something that was made here:

Or here?

The power of change is not in the plan or the process, but in the execution. 

Software development, process, quality

Someone recently asked me how I created the Telligent Community 5.0 demo video that you can watch here.  The thing that made this the easiest was TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio product.  Using their fine software as a base I was able to use the following process…

1. Created the rough outline “on paper” of the scenes I wanted… like white boarding a real movie.
2. Used the Camtasia Recording tool to capture clips with audio notes… not final audio.  The key point is that I didn’t have time to try and do it all at once in one smooth 10 minute demo. 
3. Then I laid the clips out in the camtasia project, trimmed, and inserted the transitions/zooms, etc.  I had a time limit in mind that I didn’t want to go over and had filed too much.
4. I did the transitions because I didn’t want to try and fake like it was one smooth demo.   It’s a series of stories that are cohesive.
5. I recorded the audio.  Camtasia lets you do this one snippet of video at a time and has a great tool with keyboard shortcuts to pause the video on certain frames for callouts if you need to add more content. 
1. Each section was tightly scripted audio content so I didn’t stumble much.
6. Finally Camtasia lets you output in any number of formats depending on the need. 

Other Important Tips

• Find a good Mic.  I went through 5 before I found one with minimal static and background noise.  Camtasia has filters for this, but they can only do so much.
• Send dogs, kids, spouses, etc away or give them fair warning you’ll be grumpy if they ruin an awesome take.

Finally, show it to other people and watch it frequently yourself until you are convinced the points you whiteboarded come across.  You’ll find that some stuff just doesn’t work well.  What’s your process? Do you have any tips?

Software camtasia, recording, tips, video

You all should know by now that yesterday was Festivus. One of my favorite festivus traditions is the “airing of grievances”. In that spirit I present this post. I’ve got a lot of problems with you people…

MSFT – I have a few beefs with you, but the biggest is probably the stock price. From 36 to 19 over the last year.  Really?  Hire Jerry to compete with the Apple messages and then drop something that had good potential. Really?!  Vista! Really?  And our own Ledgard Live search cashback FAIL after waiting 4 weeks to hear back from support? Really?!?  Letting us hire away some of your best people over the last year and watching other talented LV 64+ folks leave in disgust… wait, I kind of benefit from that one.    I’m hoping for Windows 7 to help turn this ship around.  Really… I am.

Safeway.com - I kept hoping you’d invest in the online shopping experience… which has slowly deteriorated to the point where it is, again, faster to drive to one of your stores and shop. You had so much potential if you just borrowed some simple concepts from other online retailers like favorite lists, meal combos to order everything at once, recommendations, product ratings, etc.  Instead you just let the site rust and suffer severe performance and search failures.  Amazon Fresh FTW with delivery windows down to an hour (not 4 hour windows with late drivers as seen on safeway.com) and a store that leans on Amazons premiere online shopping experience. 

Online Project Management Tools – You are all on notice. Someone is going to come into this space and eat your lunch in the next year as companies continue to look for online tools to streamline workflows and reduce costs.  If you are going to charge upwards of $10 per seat for this stuff I shouldn’t be teaching everyone on my team to middle click your links during triage sessions because opening items takes forever.  You need to let people remove the fields, reports, and parts of your applications that are not needed. SCRUM should be simple. There’s a set of stories & associated tasks & bugs… it shouldn’t be this hard.

  Twitter – Between the outages and the lack of forward progress on the platform & features you made my grievances list.  Conversation tracking anyone?  How about grouping users?  It’s one thing to say it’s a platform and let all the Air developers hack away, but it’s another to outright ignore the needs of your users by not providing useful features… that maybe people would pay for and give you some revenue.  Make the ultimate client in 2009 and charge for it for starters. 

Facebook – Is it my fault that I’ve used your service to connect with over 100 people?  Now my news feed is useless and I expect you to help me do something about it.  Why do I have to “install” an application (and give them access to my PII) to see a Christmas card?  Didn’t we figure out E-cards via e-mail 10 years ago?  There are multiple steps backward here for the social networking step forward. It reminds me when I saw an IPTV demo once and they said “Look, you can change channels in less than a second!” Great, you haven’t caught up with TV from the 50′s yet!

Ebay – I’m not sure what happened to you.  Your service ushered in the democratization of online commerce.  It used to look like this.  Step 1: Find junk. Step 2: Take picture, enter title, description, & price. Step three 3: Profit.  Have any of your employees actually tried to sell something recently?  It’s like an 8 page form that doesn’t remember any of your settings.  Here is a free idea… Make your iPhone app a 1 step listing tool.  I take a picture of something, you use a service like Amazon has to recognize items for categorization. I give you a price, title, and description… matched up with the data you bring back on the item and similar items… and my item is for sale.  I’ll volunteer to pay an express listing fee.  Start saving me time again and not costing it with your crazy listing process.

Online Television – I’m hoping that you’ll figure out a model soon. Remember that we got DVRs to skip commercials.  Now the industry thinks they can backdoor commercials into our lives by injecting them over and into online shows.   I won’t stop using Hulu (yet), but you are coming close to crossing a line with me and the ad space. May I suggest a radical new model to throw cable companies for a loop… I can watch as much free
TV as I want online with the ads injected… hell, put more in, but once I decide to subscribe to a show take the ads out for me.  TV ala-cart with a sampling model.  Then, for the shows I’m subscribed to let me play them on my devices. 

Honorable mentions:

Comcast – You charge me too much for all this stuff I don’t use and your traditional support/servicing model sucks. Please put @comcastcares in charge with a big promotion in 2009… those guys made my Holiday Cheers list coming soon.

Local Telcos like Verizon – You also charge too much for too little and tried to scare me when I canceled my service to go cell/skype only.  “You know that if there is an emergency in your house your family could be in danger because the authorities won’t have your exact address…”  how much for this piece of mind… $16 a month… no thanks.

The Yankees – CC, Burnet, AND Mark Teixeira?  You would have made the main list if it wasn’t so much fun to hate you as a Red Sox fan and you didn’t gladly pay your luxury tax to the other teams.

Merry Christmas & later peeps!

Software

Last week, at the In.Telligent conference I gave the keynote on our product roadmap.  It’s rare that I have so many customers captive in one room so I used the opportunity to gather some feedback in real time.  I distributed a list of features broken out by theme and told everyone they had $100 virtual dollars to distribute between the features. 

I excluded most of what we have planned for CS 2009 in February to get a little more forward looking.  I promised I would post the results on this blog. Here is the breakout…

It verified a lot of things we’ve assumed. When we looked closer at the breakout it was clear:

• Mobile is hot. Everyone wants visitors to take their communities with them.
• Calendars were seen as a critical tool that enables people to link virtual interactions to the real world.   Group calendars, event management, & calendar synchronization were all in the top 5.
• Conference goers didn’t consider social tools in the intranet as task management applications.
• Everyone I talked to on the subject seemed to validate that social tools need to add content management or Vica Versa if you are a CMS vendor.  Our embeddable comments feature received an ovation during the demo portion of the roadmap and that also seems to validate this.
• There was a surprising lack of passion around social bookmarking tools.

Overall we received votes back from 91 of attendees and I’m looking forward to taking this exercise to a broader audience online in the future.  Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Software community-server, features, in-telligent, telligent

We’re only a couple of weeks away from a beta release of Community server 2008.1. As previously discussed this is the first of a more rapid pace of releases for the Community Server product.  (There is a public roadmap we’ve  produced that I’m hoping to have published next week some time to www.communityserver.com. ) What this means though is that we’re pretty locked on what we are shipping and what we are NOT shipping.  This post will give you a few more details to help get you ready.

Themes

CS 2008.1 will be shipping with Hawaii as the default theme again, but will not include Lean & Green or Calypso in the box.  This was one of the hardest calls to make, but as a team, we realized we could either fix more bugs & ship good wiki OR support 3 themes while cutting a lot of bug fixes & feature work. 

The reality is that a theme is not simply a set of CSS changes.  Fixes & feature work had to be developed & tested in three themes. For the sake of quality, we chose to simplify for this release and focus on making one theme (Hawaii) better.  For those of you that felt Hawaii was a little drab, we have been adding some more stylization to it. 

Question & Answer Details

I previously mentioned that we were working on dramatic improvements for forums aimed at support communities.  Here are some details to get you ready.

• A new forum can be enabled for QnA or General Discussion. If you pick QnA then new threads will be questions without answers by default.  You can ask questions in General Discussion forums, but they aren’t the default thread type.
• The basic workflow has been updated as follows:  User A asks a question, users B & C suggest answers, and user A marks one of both of the suggest answers as the “verified” answer. 
• Once an answer is verified it is always shown at the top of the thread under the question to help people that land there from google.
• Multiple posts can be verified answers.
• We show the user who suggested a post as the answer & who verified the post as the answer to the question.
• The theme icons & visuals have been updated to clearly reflect the three post/thread states (Unanswered, Suggested Answer(s), & Verified Answer(s) )

Wiki Details

This is the biggest addition to Community Server 2008.1.  In terms of a wiki you’ll get support for the following:

• Basics: WYSYWIG editable pages with revision history’s, tags, comments, & ratings.
• Multiple Wikis per site & One Wiki per Group
• Roles for Wiki Administrators & Moderators.  Admins can create & edit wikis while moderators can lock & delete pages. 
• Attachment support
• Activity Message support
• Support for customizable points for contributions if you have points enabled.
• The ability to create a Table of Contents for your wiki to add some structure.  Like I said, our target is collaborative documentation.  See dogfooding below.

Something I didn’t mention before

The Mail Gateway add-on for Community Server is going to be greatly improved because of all the work we are doing for Community Server Evolution.  Details are coming in future posts about Evolution, but all the changes made for Evolution will be included in the release of the add-on for Community Server 2008.1. 

What’s Next?

When we hit the beta there will be no more feature work.  With the possible exception of extremely small change requests to Wiki & QnA forums what you get in the beta will be feature complete.  We then enter what we’ve been calling “baking time” for bug fixes & minor tweaks based on the feedback we get.  We’ll also be looking at the forums to take in bugs from CS 2008 that are still lingering after SP1.  So yes, we’ll be listening and responding in kind during this period.  Expect this “baking period” to last a few weeks before you see a final release.

What About Evolution?

Community Server Evolution is an intranet only version of Community Server that includes add-ons like Exchange, AD, & SharePoint Integration.  Because this is being built on top of Community Server the schedule is following the CS schedule, but will need some additional time once Community Server is solid.  It will beta & ship shortly after Community Server 2008.1 release.

Software

I’m sure a bunch of you just got done installing CS 2008 or upgrading to SP1 for CS 2008, but I want to give you the lowdown on what you can expect this fall with the release of CS 2008.1. 

Schedule

The first thing you’ll notice is that I said “fall 08″ and not “spring 09″.  Yes, we’re going to be speeding up the release rate of Community Server.  Expect 3-4 releases per year and also expect that service packs become strictly focused on bug fixes rather than features.  I’m going to label to the target of CS 2008.1 as September.  Expect a beta within 2 months.

Evolution

“Evolution” is the name being given to a new version of Community Server.  This version is being built for use as an intranet solution.  Evolution, although based on core Community Server functionality, will include extras meant for usage behind the firewall like Sharepoint, Active Directory, & Exchange integration. Evolution releases will generally ship after CS releases, but this post isn’t about Evolution.

Wikis

CS 2008.1 will ship with support for Wikis.  No this is NOT the same wiki engine you may have seen on http://wiki.asp.net.  Wikis, in Community Server, will feature pages with revision history, tags, ratings, comments, easy linking/ page stubbing, wysiwyg editing, and a couple of surprises for good measure.

I will say that our target scenario for Wikis is collaborative documentation.  This isn’t to say you can’t use it for anything, but we’re really going to help out people looking to build documentation, tutorials, FAQ, etc out collaboratively. 

Forum Questions & Answers

I know, if you read my blog then you know we support this already… but not well.  We’re improving everything from how you can set up support communities all the way down to the workflow & theme of QnA threads. 

Default Site Avatars

I’ve jokingly called the work we’ve done with Avatars my “No more Rob’s” campaign. In CS 2008.1 site administrators will have the ability to upload a set of “Site Avatars” that users can select from.  This will be an option to enable or disable just like remote or user uploaded avatars.  We’ve also added the ability for admins to pick a new default avatar in the control panel for users that don’t choose/upload their own. Finally I’m really happy with some of the updates we’ve made to the users avatar selection experience.  It’s a small bit of functionality, but something a huge percentage of users will go through.

The Devils in the Details

Similar to cleaning up the user avatar experience there are a lot of small things we are doing to make the administrator and normal user’s life better.  If we do it right then these are the sort of things you don’t notice outside of being less frustrated and discovering “hidden features” that we’ve buried deep within the product. These changes range from something like making the administration UI easier to navigate to letting you add multiple users to groups at one time.

Software

What would my blog look like if content boxes were purple?  You can answer that question by simply setting the color and hitting save… but then all of your site visitors will be subjected to your bright pink sidebar before you come to your senses.  You can avoid all that by taking advantage of preview mode and this post tells you how.

The first thing you’ll want to do is sign into your blog admin or site administration panel.

For blogs click to your blog control panel and then click “Change how your blog looks”.  If you are a site admin click “Site Administration” and then click “site theme”. 

Once you see the theme configuration tabs you can known yourself out with changes… just don’t hit save… at least not yet. Click the preview tab instead!

Once you click the preview tab click “enter(or start) preview mode” and then “open a new preview window”. (If you are using a version of CS before CS 2008.1 then you will have to click back to the preview tab between these clicks. )

You can go back, make more changes… like a taxi-cab yellow background… and update preview mode and test again.  Once you are happy with the changes you’ve made then you can click… wait for it… Save.

Should this be the new default theme?  What’s your favorite ugly CS dynamic configuring?

Software community-server, cs-2007, cs-2008, tellitip

Hey there IndiansFanJoe3456!  Wow, that’s a mouthful.  Chances are that you have one of these accounts on a site that doesn’t let you be you because someone else is already you!  One of these sites may even be a Community Server site.  Well, there isn’t an excuse for this.  As of SP1 for CS 2008 we’ve enabled “friendly display names” by default.  Well, we’ve actually supported this for a LONG time and this post will show site admins how they can control this. 

Open your Community Server control panel and navigate down to Membership Administration > Configuration > Account Settings > Profile Settings. Step by step arrows here:

In the screenshot above you see the master On/Off switch for this feature.  Turning it on will enable the following option on a users profile settings page…

And for some inexplicable reason that we’ll resolve in a future release the user also has the ability to turn his or her display name on or off as shown here:

Long live “Indians Fan 4 Ever!”

Software display-names, identity, reputation, tellitip