codyhanson.com

I’ve been a T-Mobile (and before that, Voicestream) customer for about 7 years now. In that time, I’ve been quite satisfied. Their rates are reasonable, their data plans generous, and their coverage totally adequate to my needs. I’ve rarely been tempted to change carriers.

Last November, I started a new job that I love. I’ve got an office with a view in a beautifully restored building. All that’s missing is T-mobile reception. The second I walk in to the building, my signal drops to nothing. Zip. From time to time, my phone will eke out the tiniest signal if I have it placed just so on my desk or window sill, but never such that I can replicate the result (much less place or take a call, unless I want to lay my head down on my desk on top of the phone).

Given that the building houses the University’s Digital Technology Center and Supercomputing Institute, as well as something called the Powerwall (I don’t know what it is, I just know I want one), it should come as no surprise that the place is heavily wired, probably in effect acting like a five-story Faraday cage around my poor phone.

I’d resigned myself to living without workday cell coverage, stepping outside a couple of times a day to check for voicemail, and otherwise relying on my office line, email and I’m to keep in touch. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got a beta invite for GrandCentral, the free phone number consolidation service recently purchased by Google.

GrandCentral provides each user with a phone number (in the area code of their choice) and voicemail, as well as a robust set of tools for creating rules for call forwarding. In my case, the killer feature is email delivery of voicemail.

T-mobile (can’t speak for other carriers) provides conditional call forwarding, meaning you can set different destination numbers for your calls depending on whether your line is busy, simply not answered, or is unreachable. By default, calls forward to your T-mobile voicemail in each of these scenarios.

Using conditional call forwarding, I was able to specify that when my phone is unreachable, my calls should forward to my GrandCentral number, where they go directly to voicemail, which is then delivered to my email.

This isn’t a perfect system. I still am unable to actually answer calls (although if I really wanted to, I could forward to my Gizmo Project number), and SMS messages sit in the aether until my cell is back on the T-mobile grid. It should also be noted that T-mobile caps the number of free conditionally forwarded minutes per month, so depending on how popular you are, YMMV.

That said, I’m quite happy with the arrangement. I’ve cut the delay before I’m notified of a call to a matter of minutes, from as much as several hours.

Note: GrandCentral has gotten some bad publicity recently for unilaterally changing some users’ numbers (See GrandCentral’s response here). Should such a thing happen to me, all I’d have to do is change my conditional forwarding number, but it does serve as a timely reminder of just how much confidence it’s appropriate to place in services that loudly pronounce their beta status.

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking on a panel of “next-gen” (young) librarians at the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s annual library conference March 19-20. The CIC is essentially the Big 10 plus, meaning that some of the biggest and best academic libraries in the country were represented in the audience and among the speakers.

Much more information about the conference can be found on the official conference page and on the conference blog. The slides from my presentation are available here.

Update: Jenny Levine has posted her notes from the panel on The Shifted Librarian.

Update 2: Lorcan Dempsey has also posted his reflections on the panel.

A few weeks ago now, I had the pleasure of hearing Larisa Warnke speak to a group of local information architects about her work at Carlson Marketing. She gave a high-level overview of the process used by her user experience group as they go about creating a user interface, and of how they interact with clients and other groups in the organization. The timing of her presentation was opportune, as I’ve been reading about process and research in Rosenfeld and Morville, and in an article by Jakob Nielsen.

In general, the Carlson Marketing user experience group creates user interfaces for two types of products: reusable components referred to internally as “durable assets”, and custom sites and products that are created on a case-by-case basis. These products include web sites such as online catalogs and loyalty systems, email marketing campaigns, and call center operator interfaces.

The software developers at Carlson Marketing base their projects on the Rational Unified Process (RUP), an iterative methodology that in its most common form doesn’t really address usability or user experience. In order to address this deficit, Carlson Marketing contracted with a third party vendor of user experience processes tailored for use in RUP. According to Larisa, this process has been extremely useful. This is not to say that it is applied rigidly and blindly to every project; steps are shuffled or skipped as appropriate, but the process is a solid framework for each member of the team to fall back on. The process doesn’t “talk back, and it doesn’t point fingers.”

Once a business need and goal have been defined, there is a role for an information architect in every step of the user interface creation process, according to Larisa. The particular challenge that the user experience faces at Carlson Marketing is that there’s often a project manager in the IT group concerned with the programming, and perhaps an account manager or operations team member concerned with managing the client relationship, but there isn’t necessarily a dedicated project manager for the UI process. As a result, the user experience group sometimes finds itself left out of crucial steps in the process such as testing or basic planning. This presents an opportunity for the UI team to refer back to the established process to assert its role.

Larisa gave me some useful insight into the practicalities of the research phase of the IA process. In his essay, Jakob Nielsen addresses the common disparity between how users say they use a site and how they actually use it. Nielsen says that it is crucial that usability be genuinely tested rather than simply put through a focus group. Only by observing the way individuals use a site can you really gain insight into what’s going to be useful and intuitive. If users are asked simply to look at a layout, they will gravitate to what seems cool or interesting, rather than what’s useful.

Rosenfeld and Morville’s chapter on research identifies a basic approach to research based on their venn diagram showing Context, Content, and Users. In the context realm, they discuss the importance of researching the client’s business environment in order to understand the goals, business plan, budget, and infrastructure constraints of the project. In this, Rosenfeld and Morville reemphasize the possibility of resistance to the notion of information architecture, and the challenges of explaining the concepts and their value to clients.

Larisa bridged these two challenges with an interesting real-world scenario, in which it is the client, not the user, who has a preconceived notion of how the users will interact with a system or product. This can often be a touchy situation, because the client may feel strongly that they know their customer base intimately, and that an outside party couldn’t possibly know their business better than they do. However, if an IA researcher can get permission from the client to analyze help center call logs, or support request e-mails, or better, actually interview users, a picture of how users actually interact with the system or site quickly emerges.