In pursuit of the next...

How far to go while designing for ease of use (EoU)?

nextiswhat — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:47:16 +0000

The current management push within the company I work for is ease of use (EoU) for our software. Clearly various groups and people with their pet projects are lining up to justify how and why it helps the ease of use. What is absolutely missing in the discussion is what is ease of use for the end customer or more precisely what is the customer’s opinion about ease of use. Few questions any organization should answer regarding EoU before deciding anything:

define what ease of use in the particular context means (usually these will be a list of changes to the current product involving addition or removal of features)
how is one going to categorize various changes (upgrade/downgrade) and how is one going to quantify whether these changes have helped the goal eventually
how far should the organization invest in ease of use to reap a decent return on investment. A more interesting aspect of this question being if you invest so much that the product is so easy to use that the customer doesn’t feel the pain anymore that in fact they question the price they are paying for the same.

In fact, a good goal should be to balance the alleviation of usability challenges just enough to match the abilities of the end user. For this the marketing needs to create a end user profile (or personas) and then the engineering has to go about proposing features to do impedance matching with the target personas. This way, you end up creating a product that will not kill itself soon enough. Eventually every product has to make way for something new but till you figure it out, you want someone to pay your bills.

How to confuse location tag on Twitter…

nextiswhat — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:48:16 +0000

So I logged in to Twitter today after a while and I was prompted to enable the location tag and I obliged. Lo and behold, I was in downtown San Jose. And I sitting in Hyderabad (Kondapur to be precise). So what happened, when I was logged in to my office network via VPN and the VPN server is in San Jose. The geo-locator in Twitter deciphered from my IP address that I was in San Jose. So it brings me to the question why is it so easy to confuse geo-locator; I am sure there should be more better ways to carry out geo-location based not just on my IP address. I bet this would be a good problem to address, I have seen similar issue with Google maps.Oh well till then I will enjoy my stroll through downtown San Jose…

Hiring: Want a perfect driver with no sense of direction OR an okay driver with a perfect sense of direction?

nextiswhat — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:43:01 +0000

I get invited to interview various candidates almost every other week. Yes, we are hiring a lot now a days but mostly for experienced positions (and internships for freshers). Invariably at the end of the day, I tend to have an opinion that is not necessarily what the hiring manager likes to hear. Most managers want a perfect candidate who can take instructions from the manager and then execute (mark the word “execute”). There is not much interest in candidates who can figure out what and how to execute and then execute. In my opinion, the “what and how” part is something that excites good engineers. Execution is something that can be learnt with little bit of help and hard work (aka digging or figuring out). But the “what and how” part really is crucial to motivating the engineer to execute. If (s)he is not part of the “what and how” decision then they don’t have the motivation to execute. It then becomes a monthly pay check issue…

So next time you are hiring, ask yourself you want a driver that is perfect in driving and no sense of direction or a driver that is okay at driving but has perfect sense of direction. No matter how great a manager you are, sense of direction is an art form that is either acquired or in-built but is something that cannot be easily imparted (there are exceptions, as always)…

Appraisals and performance…

nextiswhat — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:34:43 +0000

I thought the following “dil se” cartoons are quite appropriate to celebrate the appraisal season. Mind you the word “celebrate” may not be appropriate for many but what the heck, I thought of taking the whole process lightly since most of the time it is a mere eye wash for large organizations. I am sure each and everyone that has worked for any company with more than few hundred people will vouch that the appraisal system is pretty much a sham and it is part of the management scheme to tame the employees. I for one am also part of that system for now…and hence the intended pun.

As a side plug, dilse cartoons are pretty good time pass, if you are in the mood. Check out http://www.dilsecartoons.com.

Hydcubator…

nextiswhat — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:07:59 +0000

Recently I got a message on a startup incubator in Hyderabad. This particular incubator happens to be in IIIT, Hyderabad. Incubators seem to be mushrooming at various institutes now a days all over India. Here is a good link to the Hydcubator program. It really begs a question as to whether we need so many incubation centers and what purpose should such centers serve. I personally believe that according a rock-star status to entrepreneurship is not the way to encourage young people. Entrepreneurship thrives when schools (colleges and universities) teach genuine problem solving and faculties are engaged in the solution to relevant problems. Either ways I really do hope that Hydcubator does spring some surprises and will help create some interesting companies that Hyderabad (and India) can be proud of.

Till then…

Joe Costello DAC keynote… still sounds good…

nextiswhat — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 06:47:00 +0000

I was going through some old emails and I found a recommendation for a nice keynote at DAC (design automation conference) in 2006 by Joe Costello. Joe used to be CEO at Cadence in 90′s and is credited with growing Cadence to numero uno slot. The talk is absolutely great in Joe’s style and it has lots of interesting advice and insights in to the product planning and product definition aspects. In case the video insertion link doesn’t work with WordPress here is the link. Enjoy…

Chargers are charged!

nextiswhat — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:01:44 +0000

Having almost given up on Deccan Chargers, I feel good (heck, awesome) that they have managed to score five successive wins the last five games. No wonder they are the defending champions of IPL T20. Looking forward to their title defense now. I had to write few words on them given their wonderful come back.

Go Chargers!

Sweat equity for unlisted companies in India…

nextiswhat — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:55:18 +0000

An interesting fall out of the IPL Kochi franchise mess being, some interesting rules and regulations regarding sweat equity for unlisted companies in India. I was grossly unaware of existence of such regulations. So if you need to know the minimum then here it is. For unlisted companies the rules say that:

sweat equity is to be granted to employees and not founders/director or owners; so you better be an employee of that startup (or unlisted company) to receive any form of sweat equity
value of sweat equity cannot be more than 15% of the net worth of the company or Rs. 5 crores (which ever is the least)
equity has to have a lock-in period of 3 years (unlike in the Kochi case, where the lock-in was 2 years)

So that’s an interesting take away for the small players like us (unlike the big league multi-crore wheeler and dealers like the IPL). Oh well atleast there was some learning for others (other than the greed part).

Plagiarism in academics…

nextiswhat — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:37:47 +0000

Plagiarism existed at undergraduate level even when I went to college (back in early 90′s). It generally starts out with copying the appropriate solution to given problems at the class level and it then carries further to copying from multiple sources at the master’s degree level and worst at doctoral levels it manifests in to copying almost everything from many sources. The resultant being, we have engineers, doctors, scientists, professors, and academics with degree’s that really don’t mean much. What I really meant by the earlier statement was that a lot many have got their degrees not for contributing any original thought but copying from various sources. Mind you I am not against copying, if done by giving due recognition to the source (citation, as termed by academics). Finally, for doctoral candidates it is should be absolutely essential that they have original contribution to the field they are studying else it is meaningless for them to have the degree.

The above situation is made worse by Internet, where by the process of copying has been made easier and harder to detect. Also programs at national institutes of repute (eg: IITs) such as QIP (quality improvement program) make situations worse since the candidates most of the time are in the program mostly to get their PhD for promotion. I might sound cynical but the situation is becoming grave and I can see that first hand myself since I do teach BTech and MTech students and interact with PhD students. Finally while interviewing so called PhD’s I had my own moments of disbelief, which will be a post (hilarious one, mind you) by itself someday. So if any of you students are reading this, please either don’t copy (write in your own words) or copy with appropriate citation/reference. This is the minimum one can do for one’s own conscience…

One final comment being that I am well aware of the honest students and I can say with all honesty that the good ones will be very quickly identified in any interview process. So you have nothing to worry about, albeit it might take a little more time but its all worth it.

Organizational history through code reading…

nextiswhat — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:55:14 +0000

Talking to my colleagues and looking at the various code re-factors, re-writes, modifications, and edits, I have come to a conclusion that to learn the history of any software organization, one should read the code that is produced in the particular organization. When looking for changes in leadership of the concerned team, the typical things to look for are the following :

initial architecture of the code (if there is any thing like an architecture initially) and how it has morphed. Typically the architecture changes would say a lot about when a significant leader came in to the group or when such a leader left. Mind you the leader could very well be a purely technical or even a purely managerial. In the latter case, just to demonstrate his/her “impact” on the organization such changes might have been undertaken.
a second aspect to study would be changes interfaces of the particular software. This is again a sign that interaction with components that didn’t exist have been introduced and would have been part of the “impact” agenda…
a third aspect is the sudden increase in statistics collected about the particular software. This clearly suggests a managerial activity since someone “number savvy” has come in to play. Good examples of statistics are LOC (lines of code), number of bugs (CRs), number of test cases, etc.
fourth, any introduction of new productivity enhancing tools in to the development flow is also an indication of the significant changes to leadership
finally, if the VP of the product or group has changed, there is a high likely hood that a significant piece is completely thrown out of window and a component has been either bought or licensed from another company to make way for “ease of use”, “quality of results”, “make the code modular and maintainable”, “extensible”, etc. All of the earlier keywords being used to justify the money spent on the said activity.

So, next time you read your code, please see for these changes and their corresponding time lines. If you see these changes, talk to any of the grey beared engineers around for a while and hear nice stories… till then enjoy cube life…