That’s right… a location confirmation! And, unlike the location picker I took issue with several postings ago, this confirmation:

• Tells the user why the site wants to know the user’s location
• Uses common UI conventions
• Has appropriate white space
• Does not prevent the user from using the website
• Appears in an unobtrusive location (top right)
• Intelligently guesses the user’s country

Last night, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to, at 10pm, put together a child theme for the father-in-law’s professional site. He recently installed WordPress on the site. What he asked me to do was to secure WordPress. What I did was secure it,  migrate his old professional site content to the new site, and make a twenty-eleven child theme and site banner. So uhm… he could hate it. Or lament not getting to do the initial setup himself. We’ll see.

Anyway… so this is a super simple site. And around 2:30AM it’s good enough. Really. Someone could visit tomorrow, and unless they’re a web designer/developer, a graphic designer, or someone who really cares about whitespace… it’s a totally fine site. And it’s 2:30am. The rest can be done tomorrow, right? Assuming the father-in-law doesn’t hate it so much he wants it gone right now (which would be counter to his very chill demeanor). And then it’s 2:45am and I’m still staring at the not-rightness. I made myself document what was annoying me about the design and go to bed. So here it is. Why I’m up at 3am on a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.

Why I’m Still Awake

Today according to the training plan, I was to run 4 miles. I refuse to run outside in this heat, and I’m not a big fan of night running (not that I would, because, 80 degrees). The best weather for running around here is 40 degrees and sunny, which starts happening around November.

At our local rec center the treadmills look over the pool area. I spent an hour facing a window with the view of the top of a water slide and parents and children getting on the slides. They were having fun. I felt weird. Alternatively, the TVs were showing Golf and Fox News (which was giving constant coverage to The Dark Knight Rises theatre massacre). I ended up focusing on a sign informing patrons of appropriate tv remote sharing behavior.

When the weather is less extreme and there’s no snow on the ground, I normally run on open space paths near where I live. I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful the mountains are always.

After the half marathon in January, I had terrible tendonitis.  It lingered for a good month, and I fell out of the habit of running. My knees have always been a little prone to this, and between walking in slush and flying a bunch before the race, they just threw down and said, and I quote, “Hell no. We won’t go.”

Fast forward to July. I have a race coming up in November, it’s time to start regularly training. My goal for this race is pain free (which means no tendonitis). I’m doing leg lift exercises which supposedly help strengthen the muscles which support the knee and reduce the onset of the pain. Hoping that’s going to make a difference. Also, steady, regular training and cross training. I would like the Tuesday/Thursday runs to be the week’s easy exercises and do cardio on Monday and Wednesday. Saturday is the long run. Sunday is blob-on-the-couch day.

Tonight, I did the first run of training. Did I say oh boy above? Let me restate that as oh crap. I journeyed to ye olde rec center and hopped on the treadmill (hate treadmills, but they provide a good steady running surface).

Before: When I ran the half in January I was doing run/walk intervals of 8min/2min with a peak heart rate of maybe 155 (160 on hills). Running was targeted at 11min/mile. I could do 11 miles no problem, the last two were always iffy and how much I ran of them depended on how my knees felt.

Now: Tonight, I did a 30 minute session. I was able to to do run/walk intervals of 2min/4min. My peak heart rate was 180, which I consider to be my max heart rate. I’ve never seen it higher than that and it’s that lung-burning heart pounding state.  I probably could have done 3min/3min intervals, but I’m really focused on the no pain thing, and 2 min was about the time I started being aware of my joints.

At least I know I can train up to the half marathon distance (have the car magnet to prove it). I know what to expect.

Facilitating design is hard. I think the hardest part is keeping to the scope of design goals in questions. Design based on user goals is much different than design based on technical requirements. In the early stages of design, it’s important to have as many stakeholders present as possible in order to understand their perspectives as well as any constraints they may provide, and constraints are good. Constraints help to narrow down from all design possibilities into a few or even one design possibility. Unfortunately, with many perspectives comes added difficulty to facilitating design.

In some projects, the only stakeholders who are consulted on design are the clients. In my world, clients are stakeholders as well as the IT organization who designs the solutions. This means in one high level design meetings, people are present who passionately care about user goals, user activities, user efficiency, etc as well as people who passionately care about the work flow management platform and the input and output it can give to order management systems.

It’s very useful to have the technical stakeholders present, because no one wants to provide requirements that require more resources than are available. We all have the same goal to make the company successful, even if our individual goals are more nuanced. My goal is that users can use systems in successful and happy ways. My data counterpart’s goal is that the application delivers data in an allotted amount of time. Both of our goals are important to the success of the project. Or, as another example, one client may prioritize one aspect of user behavior, and another client may prioritize another.

Stephen Anderson put together an amazing User Experience Hierarchy of Needs (links directly to PDF) which he talks about briefly inSeductive Interaction Design (also a recommended read). In the hierarchy, the base level is Functional and the top level is Meaningful. Different people approach design from those two extremes and the result for the end user is drastically different depending from which point (function or meaning) design was driven.

The individuals whose priorities are anchored at these two different extremes are the individuals who will clash most during initial stages of design. Depending on the agreed upon priority, either meaningful user experience or functionality, initial design stages will need to fascinated such that the design reflects those priorities. Which is then the really hard part. Helping the people who prioritize other aspects have their perspectives translated into design strategies that are relevant to the project at hand.

About a month ago something amazing happened to my husband: he had a good experience with the phone robot from Macy’s. When he completed his call in under five minutes, I was sure he hadn’t succeeded in his objective. But he had. This amazing feat has been circling in my mind ever since.

Here’s what happened. (Story time!) Several months ago, we bought a piece of furniture, and in order to save a bit more money, we applied for and paid with it using a store charge card. The husband immediately paid off the purchase and all was well, or so we thought. A month ago, he got a statement saying there was a credit on the card of over one hundred dollars. Since he never intends to use the card, he wanted that money back. This meant calling someone and inevitably wading through the phone robot maze. But it was over $100. Totally worth it.

He called. I was sitting on the couch listening to him enunciate very clearly his account information to the robot. Already I felt more stressed simply being in the periphery of this phone robot encounter. The husband said something like “Question about my account” and then “Yes” and then he hung up. I looked at him and asked what happened, expecting complete failure. To my surprise, he succeeded. When he told the robot he had a question about his account, the first thing it told him was that he had a credit on his account and would he like a check for the balance mailed to him.

!

The User Experience girl in me just swooned at the awesome and efficient customer-centric approach someone designed into the phone robot.

To Macy’s I say: Good job. Your phone robot is well-designed. And amazing. And makes me happy that someone put that much thought into the motivations and desires of customers.

I forget what book this was in and what website I first saw doing this… But here’s the idea. If your website is down, you present the visitor with a page that explains the website is down and tell the visitor they can go to twitter to stay up-to-date on the site status.

This is a great suggestion. Not only does it let a website communicate its unavailability in both verbal and non-verbal cues that reassure the visitor that the issue is being addressed but it also directs them to twitter where humans behind the website can further reassure the issue is being looked at. This is not normally something tiny little websites will need, but big websites, like twitter, flickr, google would be wise to embrace (and I think they do?).

Another website which embraces this tactic is goodreads. Recently goodreads redesigned their “Site is Down” page. The redesign is quite pleasing in terms of layout and aesthetics. This is good, because goodreads is a very unstable website–often in the middle of the day.

In the Site Down (or “maintenance”) communication, they follow the good advice and link to their twitter feed, implying that by viewing their latest tweets, the visitor can get more information about the site maintenance. Unfortunately, that is not the case. They set up the expectation of information about site downtime, but there has never been any information that they have shared on twitter when the site is down that I have seen. Today when this page came up, yet again, for me, I clicked the link to twitter, and this is the information that I received:

Nothing indicates there is a problem with the website. As a result, my trust in goodreads is diminished. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that trust in a website’s brand and stability is one of the most important feelings to foster in an audience. And that’s a topic for a different post.

Random things really get me when I run across them. Such as a pop-up which asks a visitor for information about their location. I don’t know why, but calling Puerto Rico a country grabbed my ux-senses and shook ‘em. Which inevitably leads to a closer scrutiny.

• Puerto Rico is not a country.
• Backgrounds with patterns behind text reduce readability.
• <x is not a universally understood UI convention (it’s not a convention at all).
• White space is sub-optimal.

In a perfect Erin-designed world, these issues would be addressed. Further, the directive to the visitor would be tweaked to be more human, e.g. “Where are you?”. Or, even better, guess their location based on their IP. This isn’t a sure-bet, but I believe it works often enough that 80% of the time, the correct location of the visitor can be chosen.

Anyway.

Like setting up compost bins, I’m not sure I want to commit to such a thing in our current rental house. I think we’ll stay in this house, at most, another year. Once Rob has found a job, we’ll probably start looking for someplace to really settle. Start a real garden. Have a bit of curb appeal. Have some compost heaps, or, even better, move to a location with community compost services. Set up beehive, perhaps?

Tangent: Denver Botanic Gardens are absolutely amazing. In Seattle, I loved the Pacific Science Center. We had a membership there. It was awesome. Here, it’s the Botanic Gardens. They’re large, interesting, have a range of education programs. If you visit Denver, the Botanic Gardens are a must. Same if you live here. If Mom visits this year, that is the number one place to take her.

The trip was a celebration trip for Rob getting past that final PhD hurdle and for me to run a half marathon. And I did! The trip was a success. We did the Disneyland thing. Ran. Saw family. Relaxed. Got a bit of sun and warmth.

The half marathon was great fun. One reason I chose to do a Disney run was because they look so fun. People dress up, you run through a Disney park, and it looked like a nice atmosphere for a run. The run itself didn’t go as well running-wise as I had hoped or expected, but I finished. And barring injury, there’s no way I won’t beat my time in May.

In summary: yay success! And one out of four half marathons accomplished for the year.

I had not been back to Seattle since Labor Day 2010. Bumbershoot. Decemberists. Hey Marseilles. Oh yeah. Then, in October 2010, Rob moved our Seattle house down to Denver, and that was that for Seattle. Returning to Pacific Northwest was odd in that it felt like I had never been gone. It was still home. Just like Denver is home. We also visited the in-laws in Portland. It rained, but that’s to be expected. Overall, it was a successful trip.

But that’s neither here nor there. Despite the university being closed due to slush (terrible, terrible slush, closure completely warranted), Rob was able to give his thesis defense. With success! I’m so very proud of him. So with a few more i’s dotted and t’s crossed he will be completely done with UW and graduate education forever. Now he embarks on finding the perfect job. Fingers crossed there!

This weekend: Disneyland!

In four days we return to Seattle-land so that Rob can defend his PhD thesis. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family. AND for Rob to defend! Yay! For the past 6 years our lives have been driven by his graduate education. We moved to Seattle for it. And we moved to Boulder/Denver because of it. It’s all worked out, we’re happy where we are, and I doubt I would have found UX as a career quite so efficiently had we not been in Seattle.

The following week we take a quick trip out to CA for a bit of Disneyland, a bit of family, and the Tinkerbell half marathon. My first half marathon. I will finish. And I’m pretty excited. We’re splurging a little bit on account of celebrating the PhD thing. I’m really looking forward to experience the service industry that is Disneyland.

In March, maybe February, Rob and I are taking bee keeping classes at the Denver Botanical Gardens. In February, maybe March, Rob will be in Berkley for a month. The first weekend in May, it’s back to Ohio for the Flying Pig Half Marathon (and family), the following weekend we have a wedding in Toronto, and then two weddings in June.

Due to running in the dark, I’m no longer running on openspace trails. I think that the even surface of the sidewalk is helping a lot with pain prevention. Which is a bummer (except for that whole part about less pain). I really enjoy running on the openspace trails. Sidewalk/road running is monotonous and boring and there are cars and blah blah blah. Better than a treadmill, though.

Last weekend I ran 8 miles over 2 hours. Technically, I alternated running 8 minutes and walking two minutes. I was good for the first 6 miles. The last two were difficult, but doable. I think 8 miles was definitely the limit last weekend. I had a lot of knee pain afterward and ended up hobbling all over the place the rest of the evening. I have always had problems with tendinitis in my knees, so I was resigned to a week of pain, icing, and pain killer. But, amazingly enough, Sunday the knees felt fine. I was not that sore nor exhausted. It was surprising and a little empowering. So, based on that, on one hand, I feel very strongly that the half marathon is totally doable. I have 6 more weeks, and 5 miles to tack on. But on the other hand, I was in so much pain after the 8 miles that I think adding on 5 more miles is going to be impossible!

I won’t be able to do a long run this weekend. The husband’s work holiday party is Saturday, and I won’t be able to tolerate it if Ido the long run. Too much pain. Too tired. Too grumpy. Not appropriate spousal holiday party behavior. I also don’t feel comfortable doing my long runs on Sunday knowing I have to sit on a bus and go to work the next day. So, this Sunday the goal is an easy 6 miles. I’d like to work my weekday runs up to 6 miles. Not sure that’s going to happen anytime soon, though.

What else… I think the best thing for running at this point, aside from just doing it, would be to drop 20 lbs. Again, not comfortable doing that in time for the January race. After the half marathon, I’m going to concentrate on that and speeding up.

According to the countdown widget on the hobby blog, there are 44 days until the half marathon. I think I’m okay for it. As long as I don’t have any significant injury or recurrence of the foot thing, I’ll be okay. I’ll finish. And then I’ll decide on a goal time for the Flying Pig Half in May.

Have an average email response time of 24 hours (unless on vacation)

Use cash whenever possible. Why: CC monetary exchanges cost companies money. By paying cash, I hope to help their bottom line.

Run 4 half marathons. First two are already scheduled.

Continue the no diet coke thing. This will be my third year diet coke free.

I’m toying with the idea of reading all books that make a top 10 books list for scifi/fantasy… But I don’t know.

So, of course, Mr. Walsh attempted to get his domain back. And he is still attempting to get his domain back. From what I can tell, from @1and1_4U, 1and1 has their hands tied because ICANN has a policy prohibiting the transfer of a domain within 60 days of the domain’s new registration or transfer. That takes quite distressing to terribly distressing. For reasons completely outside of a domain owner’s control, his domain was taken away from him and he can’t get the domain back from the new registrar.

Okay. So that sucks. But the fact that David Walsh is still trying to get satisfactory resolution is shameful on 1and1′s part.

How could this be made right:

From GoDaddy: A sincere apology. Refund of all expenses related to davidwalsh.name for the period of the current contract.

From 1and1: I really don’t know. Figure out how to fix it?

Lesson learned from this fiasco: GoDaddy is not a dependable registrar. Do not give them business.

Unfortunately, even if you reflect and blink like a Christmas tree, cars still will come too close for comfort (as I was reminded, yet again, while running last night). Be aware. Be able to hear the traffic. Do not assume the drivers understand the whole “pedestrians have the right of way” thing.

The short of it: The first play experience was not optimal for novice computer RPG players. At least this novice computer RPG player. I wouldn’t actually consider myself “novice”, I’ve played my fair share of computer RPGs before, but this one gave me so many difficulties, I’m just going to call myself a novice. I need a lot more hand holding to get me into this game.

The long of it: I normally don’t attempt these grand computer RPGs. For one, I just can’t get into the epic nature of the story. Even sci-fi/fantasy reading, I’m careful to select small epics, or very contained stories–I just don’t have the attention span or time to commit to epic stories. Another issue I often run into in computer games is that the 3D engine makes me nauseous, and if tolerated I will get an almost migraine (all the symptoms, but the pain just stops on the good side of debilitating). If I’m interested in one of these RPGs, I’ll usually just ask the husband what’s going on in his game, and he’ll give me a full report. I play a lot of games vicariously through him. It’s a good arrangement.

So, despite the reasons I don’t play computer RPGs, Skyrim has been getting such amazing reviews that I took the plunge. If I can’t play it, Rob will. And the reviews! *_* The art is so pretty. I’m such a sucker for awesome art. And I do like grand stories. And magic. And other races. So after buying it and waiting the 3 hours for the steam download to complete, I started up the game.

Now, it’s been a while since we’ve upgraded the video card. And the computer tends to crash at very inopportune times after long game play. So, the video settings are on Low and I’m monitoring the CPU and GPU temps closely. On Low graphics, the game looks like every computer RPG the husband has played in the past two years (okay, okay, it looks better than the original Neverwinter Nights). So, while it looks good enough, I’m not impressed, but I’m fairly sure when we upgrade the graphics card it’ll look prettier and more impressive. Did I mention I love pretty? I love pretty.

The first thing I do when I start any new game is tweak the settings. The only settings on the opening screen were video settings. So I didn’t tweak those, because the game informed me it did that itself based on my hardware. What I was really looking for were audio settings. But alas, those were not present. So I start a new game.

The game starts with you in a prisoner cart bumping its way down a hill. The other prisoners give you some heavy-handed back story (that I could barely hear over the case fans) and the game teaches you how to look around.  I had to close my eyes a couple times. But hey, maybe if I really were in the cart the effect of all the bumping downhill would be nauseating, as well. Anyway, so the prisoners give you some back story and apparently I’m in the same cart as a rebel leader? Maybe? Again, I can barely hear.

When we get to the city (town? village? hamlet?), I get to create my character. So many options! It’s overwhelming. I can imagine the strategy behind getting the user to create the character after a few minutes of game “play”, but I don’t like it. I was in game playing mode at that point, not wade through 500-kajillion options to create a character mode. And I have no idea what the ramifications of my race are, just that they are magic resistant. So I create a character. I’m happy with her. “Play” resumes–I’m not in control of my character at this point. One of my fellow prisoners gets his head cut off at the head chopping block.

Lovely.

I’m actually a little curious whether this is gorier and more gruesome in high graphics mode. Anyway. Then, it’s my turn to get my head cut off. I am apparently voluntarily walked (by the game) to the block, kneel down, put my head in the head shaped depression, stare (in what I assume is a baleful manner) at the executioner. He raises the axe. I’m wondering if this is going to be one of those games where I get killed then come back from the dead or reincarnate to play the real story. But no, I’m saved by ominous and mysterious noises–a dragon! Then all hell breaks loose.

I fall and stare at some rock texture for a minute. Then I get up, and I have control over my character again. I think a guard tells me to run into the fortress, so I do. Then he says something I can’t hear cause the case fans are just too loud and I start running around. The game tells me how to jump. I have no idea what to do. I’m falling all over the place. There’s a red bar at the bottom of the screen, and who knows what the hell that’s for.  I’m getting really annoyed at the camera control. It doesn’t automatically adjust as I turn while I’m running, so I have to manually adjust the view as I’m running. Is that really necessary? Am I about to puke? Maybe.

So I hit escape (after a couple function keys), and yay, a menu! I can save, and adjust settings. Finally, I’ve found the audio controls. I would adjust them, but I’m just done. For the night, at least. I save the game, but I’m not even sure I want to save at this point because I have no idea what the hell is going on. I exit, and I tell it to exit to desktop. It exits to the start screen, and from there I tell it, once more, to exit to desktop.

I’m hoping with a full night’s sleep and the in the light of day, and with volume settings that will allow me to understand what the other characters are saying, I’ll have more luck. If not, I believe Rob plans to start playing in January.

I have several WordPress blogs running, right now, and here are the plugins I cannot do without:

• Akismet – THE comment spam blocker
• Better WP Security – A plugin that analyzes and tweaks your WP security settings. I’ve already seen a relatively obscure blog block a brute force attack.

That’s it. Those are my mandatory plugins. But here are some others I like:

• Google Analytics Dashboard
• Google XML Sitemaps
• WP Mobile Detector (beware: this plugin can have funky results with really elaborate themes that use WordPress post types in unexpected ways. Funky is the exception, normally it’s great.)
• WP Google Fonts (great plugin to globally tweak font styles)

I thought his comments on why were very articulate, and it seems to me that if Klout did just a wee bit more user research and audience analysis, this could have been avoided. They would have learned that they do not benefit the majority of their users, their privacy policy is upsetting, and over time they don’t make people feel happy.

I doubt Klout, or similar, will go away. Americans seem concerned with their place in heirarchy and who wins in the competition (e.g. with the exception of soccer, our sporting events cannot end in ties). Competition is a strong motivator, but the problem with competition where there is one winner and an unknown number of losers is that at best (in the case of one vs one) 50% of the participants lose.

And I have a meeting in 1 minute. I had other thoughts about high context and low context cultures and the tolerance of design choices of each… but alas, short lunch.

But here’s the thing. We fail at comic book stores.

On one hand, we want to support our LCBS because if we don’t, where are we going to get Ultimate Spider Man? But on the other hand, ordering online is so convenient. There are two LCBSs within very reasonable driving distance from us. Normally we go to the one that is open until 9pm on Fridays. Sometimes we go to the other one (but it’s dark and kind of claustrophobic).

Our recent comic book store failings:

• Both of them sold out of the comic Rob wanted and he had to order an issue. Understandable, but wasted gas. Lesson: Call ahead for non-current-week issues.
• Last week we attempted to go to preferred LCBS, and we got there at 9:05 (no thanks to the local Indian Restaurant that took forever). They were closed. ugh. Friday nights are exhausted enough without driving over yonder and getting there too late. We called them the next day, the issue we wanted didn’t come out til the following week. Okay. Good to know. Lesson: Go to LCBS before dinner.
• Yesterday, we went to pick up desired issue: Ultimate Spider Man 4. We went before dinner. They were open. We grabbed what we thought was Ultimate Spider Man 4. It was Ultimate Fallout 4. omg. Now, I would consider this a companion issue to Ultimate Spiderman 4, so it’s good to have, but still. Lesson: Comic series naming and branding really sucks (future blog post). Pay veeeeery close attention.

Rob pointed out that the Ultimate Fallout mistake would not have been made if the LCBS had a rack of this week’s current issues. Can’t argue with that logic (since Ultimate Fallout 4 is from like… August/September).

Okay. So we’ve had some failure, right? Today we went up to Boulder on a completely unrelated errand, and google maps helpfully told us that the Boulder LCBS, Time Warp Comics, was a mere two blocks north of where we were headed. Rob still needed Ultimate Spiderman 4, and he’s leaving town tomorrow, so why not?

Well, we have a new favorite LCBS. This one is especially convenient because Rob can go there on his way home from work. But in addition to convenient, they have a This Week’s Issues rack! And a Current Issues rack! And we were helped by a very very helpful gentleman. We were so pleased with the experience I bought Fables Deluxe Vol 2 and Rob bought the Walking Dead novel to support our new favorite LCBS.

And then we left and continued on with other errands, and if only that had gone so well. I am rather amused with our ineptness with comic books. We try, we do.

Let’s jump to another hobby of mine–this is related, I swear–quilting. I order a lot of fabric online (as opposed to driving to the local quilt store) for various reasons that I don’t feel like justifying to blogland. I occasionally order from the Fat Quarter Shop (FQS). I love getting fabric from the FQS, because they package my order so very nicely. It’s almost like a gift. They clearly understand their audience and the value their audience will find in good presentation.

Thank you!

The first thing I love is the envelope. They put the shipping receipt (printed on high quality paper with a high quality printer) in an envelope with ribbon and gift boxes imagery printed on it.

This is so smart. Let me say it again, so smart.

By printing this imagery on the receipt envelope, it creates a strong association with the gift concept in the recipient’s mind. Now what’s better? A receipt for $40 worth of fabric that you’ll give away and will probably end up at goodwill in fifty years or a gift of fabric that you received in exchange for $40? (To Erin the design geek, the real gift is their packaging and attention to detail.) So, kudos to the Fat Quarter Shop for associating purchases from their shop with gifts.

Nice Fabric Packaging

The fabric is packaged very nicely in ziplocked plastic. This is not uncommon. Normally when I receive fabric it’s wrapped in plastic in the most efficient way possible, and the fabric is just placed in there as it was folded when cut. What is different about the Fat Quarter Shop’s packaging is how they fold the fabric with intent for display. They fold the fabric flat and so that none of the cut raw edges show through the plastic. Also, they fold the fabric to be different sizes so that each fabric is displayed through the plastic sheath. That means there is a clean, clear appearance of your entire order. Since I choose to order pretty fabrics–who doesn’t?–the whole thing is just beautiful.

The overall effect of FQS packaging is of clean lines, attention to detail, and the message that they value their customer’s experience.

Okay! Way forward clear, I scrapped everything I’d done and started over. I created a custom post type for “projects” as well a taxonomy to go with it. The absolutely wonderful thing about custom post types is that wordpress took care of creating the View All and Add New admin pages. All I have to do is tweak. And the tweaks were a little unintuitive.

I created several custom fields to go with the project post type and then a custom meta box to display the custom fields in a user friendly manner. For the progress tracker plugin, the most important elements are the current word count, goal, units, and dates. Not the description. That’s important, but it’s not first-thing-on-the-screen important, and it’s optional.

Because of the relative importance of the custom fields, I wanted the custom meta box holding the custom field to appear before the post text area. Turns out this is not possible. So, I removed support for the text area entirely. This resulted in the content box going away entirely. With the content box gone, I have complete control over where meta boxes appear.

I would eventually like to support the fully functionally content input area, and I will be looking into that in the future. The admin area isn’t perfect, but the New/Edit post page is now adequate in terms of collecting data. There are bugs, but I can move on to other functionality for a little bit.

The next step I want to tackle is display. I want to create two displays–progress bar widget which can filter which projects are shown based on a category, and a new way to view all projects. I would like to add views that are tabular, chunked, or gallery like. This would be much easier to communicate with screen shots. I also envision adding a lot of shortcode support.

Onwards!

The plugin is one to keep track of works in progress for an author, specifically, but it would be general enough to be applicable to anyone who works on projects that require completion tracking. So, I guess I could throw it up on my quilt blog. Crazy Quilt I cannot believe I committed to: 25 out of 2,000 pieces cut should be just as easy as My Great American Novel: 30 out of 30,000 words to write. (I have zero intention of ever writing a Great American novel, so please don’t ask how my Great American novel is going. It’s not.)

But actually, this plugin exists! It’s call progpress, and it will display a progress bar anywhere in in WordPress and fill it appropriately. A user can override the CSS for the progress bar, but there is very little documentation on how to do anything but insert a progress bar. I am comfortable enough with CSS that I don’t mind prettying it up, but I’m sure many people are stuck with the default black progress bar, that’s just a little too tall to be elegant, and can only say, “well, it’s better than nothing”.

The biggest con to progpress I see is that information is not centrally stored. If an author (or quilter) wants to place the same progress bar in two places, a widget and a page, for example, the code for the progress bar is placed in each instance and the numbers are given there too. It would be much easier to store work in progress information in the database and tell wordpress to “intert top X works in progress” or “insert X work in progress”. Also, it would be great to be able to change the format of the information.

Work in Progress information and presentation appropriate for a sidebar widget is vastly different the appropriate information and presentation on a page. On a sidebar, progpress has the right idea–a progress bar with current progress and goal progress. On a page, the addition of a description, a goal date, a start date, an excerpt, and formatting to show any number of works in progress next to each other and have the information easy to consume would be better.

So, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. And I really, really don’t want to take on any more personal projects. But this one calls to me. How hard can it be, really? (Aren’t those famous last words?) I did a quick search for a project management plugin that would accomplish the same functionality… but I really don’t see one that screams I’m the plugin you’re looking for!

For now I’m starting small–what information should be stored in the database. Off the top of my head:

• Project ID
• Title of Project
• Project Category (I’m waffling on this, but I can definitely see use for it)
• Project Start Date
• Project Complete Date
• Link to Project Page
• Project Description
• Current (moved to new table)
• Goal
• Units (e.g. words, pieces, scenes, chapters)

Pie in the sky, the plugin would also keep a bit of historical information so that most recent progress could be visualized. Or just progress over time. So add a table:

• Progress ID
• Project ID (link to project ID in project table)
• Date
• Count

It occurs to me that maybe it would be useful for a project to have sub-project. Not only do authors write a book, but the revise it numerous times. But then again, categories could be used for that. Now I’m rambling.

The purpose of this plugin is to display progress to site visitor, not to manage tasks or projects. The audience for this plugin runs the user savviness spectrum from complete novice to expert. Documentation and screens will have to be designed with the more novice user in mind. I don’t think this will result in a dumbed-down administrative interface, it’s just something to keep in mind. Most users of this plugin will probably have no idea what a short code is or how to adjust CSS. They will probably not know what the heck to do with custom fields, and probably will wish they could get that box off their new post screen.

Tonight I will set up the tables in my test WP system. This weekend I’ll set up a rudimentary admin interface to populate the tables. Baby steps.

Tuesday. 3.08 miles @ 1mi run 12 min/mi  and .25mi walk. Failed to correctly set up my work out, so it got recorded in two chunks. Blah. I’m liking the longer running intervals, though.

Thursday: 4.01 miles @ 1 mi run at 12min per mile /.25 min walk. 

Saturday: 6.1 miles @ .75 mi run at 12min per mile /.25 min walk. This was a hard run. I never felt like I had the energy to do what I was doing. The last 3 intervals were more in the 13-14 min/mile range. I still don’t think iSmoothRun is accurately tracking the distance.

The sun is definitely setting earlier and earlier. Monday I’m going to take this running thing to the treadmill.

Monday: No run. Too much lower leg pain that wasn’t the type I’m comfortable running through.

Thursday. 3.62 miles @ .75mi run/.25mi walk. Runkeeper didn’t start for whatever reason, and I had an extra .5mi unaccounted for from that number.

Sunday: 6.2 miles or 5.8miles @ .5 mi run at 12min per mile /.25 min walk. Not sure about the distance. I switched tracking apps and the exact path that runkeeper believes in 6.19 miles iSmoothRun believes is 5.79miles. Someone in the blogosphere mentioned accuracy is not quite there for some miles, so we’ll see what happens. Hills kill me.

Saturday it rained all day, which is why I did my long run on Sunday. After Monday’s lack of run, I decided to get a low-impact cross training in on Monday instead. So on Tueseday the husband and I will blearily make our way to a 6am spinning class.

I’m worried about the early morning exercises. With the darkening of days and winter immenent, we finally bit the bullet and joined the county rec center. I anticipate a lot of early morning trips there. But here’s the thing, I am not a morning person. At all. Just like I’m not sure I can actually run a half marathon, I’m not sure I can get up at 5am on a regular basis. This is where that whole committment thing becomes difficult. I hope to report an early morning spin session or two next weekend.

First, over a week ago, I was emailed a form to fill out to obtain registration to an event. The email stated that I would not receive confirmation from the event for “a while” because the person handling registration needed time to process the order. He gave an order deadline of, well, today actually (October 7). I emailed the filled out pdf form two weeks ago. He emailed me back saying it was blank and to fax the form. I did. I received no feedback from him. And in his original email he indicated that confirmation would be very slow. So I thought, okay, be patient, he said it would be slow. I received an email from him yesterday that he had not received my registration. How was I to know that I did not have success earlier? I was frustrated. I also had no faith in fax or pdf. Technology had failed me thus far. So I emailed another pdf and send the answers in the text of an email, asking for confirmation of success. I got it. But I was frustrated. I am still not convinced all registration ducks are in a row. I don’t trust the company (customer insecurity). I am never using them for registration again (future economic loss). There was no appropriate feedback mechanism to tell me whether or not I had success.

Compare that to a recent online transaction. I placed an order, I received no confirmation email. That’s one nice thing about online systems–people need reassurance that transactions occur, so systems generally send a lot of confirmation emails to make users feel more secure. I received none, so I re-ordered, thinking a SNAFU had occured. I immediately received a confirmation that I had a successful order, and went to bed happy. Then I woke up. I had two emails telling me my first order needed help–the payment couldn’t be processed. I had another email telling me they canceled my second order. Here, I had almost sufficient feedback–except for the first critical piece letting me know in a timely manner the status of my initial order. I’m currently listenign to muzak, on hold, trying to resolve the situation. It’s not a positive experience. My husband thinks I should cancel the order and shop elsewhere. But I’m writing a blog post, eating yogurt, I’m content enough to deal.

So what’s the point? The point is that when people are not working with other people in real time, face to face, that accurate, timely feedback is critical. Not only to a person’s peace of mind regarding whatever they were trying to do, but to ensuring the successful outcome. By accurately managing user expectations, the company behind the process gains or retains user trust and a user that trusts you will interact with you again.

1. Call Center reps are not the enemy. And they didn’t decide to make a process or product difficult.
2. Telecomms have myriad systems, and as a result, optimal customer experiences cannot be facilitated due to the complexity behind the front end interface.

Several months ago, I had the opportunity to observe a call center. Having a chance to objectively observe a conversation between someone who needed something and someone providing something (help, in this case) was an eye opener.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the phone with people, but objectivity really puts things in perspective. What I observed were customers, who were justifiably miffed, blame the rep for whatever offended. I understand why, the rep is their point of contact with the company. Looking at the conversation objectively, this wasn’t really fair. Business leaders make decisions as best they can, and customers feel those effects. Then the call center reps hear about it.

Observing this objectively has changed my behavior towards call center reps. When I seek help on the phone, I know that the call center rep had absolutely nothing to do with the experience I have had until I got them on the phone. After that? Well that’s on them. But I intentionally decouple my feelings about the business processes up to that point from my interaction with the call center rep. Normally, I have very pleasant experiences with reps. They are typically very good at their job and can be quite pleasant to talk with. As long as I give them that chance by not being impatient. Also, when we’re all in good moods, we might even fix the situation faster (future blog post).

On the flip side of things, I spend a lot of time talking with our business clients about user experience. Requirements for systems and interfaces. There are trade offs to be decided upon every day.  Better system integration or 20 million dollars? Better system integration means better performance, as well as the ability to facilitate interactions that are more in line with users’ mental models. But 20 million dollars? That means other projects. And jobs.

Today, I pre-ordered an iPhone from AT&T. Then, I received an email that told me I could not remedy a broken order online. I had to talk to a person. And oh, they canceled an order that had successfully gone through but kept an order that was unsuccessful. Also, I couldn’t see my order online until 24 hours passed. This was annoying, but I understood. Telecomm systems? Ancient. There are a kajillion of them all working together to bring me that online ordering experience. And for now, that online ordering experience has limits. Those limits have to do with order follow-up.

I can imagine some UX person over at AT&T sitting in a meeting, saying “users want to be able to see their orders immediately.” The response was probably, “But that costs too much money and system resources.” And then that UX person, who only wants the company’s customers to have happy online experiences says, “Users want to have control. In this case to be able to control and fix their order online, not call a help desk. People really hate sitting listening to muzak and fighting phone trees.” To which the business  or requirements people said, “We simply can’t facilitate that with our equipment right now. It would cost 100 million dollars.” And the UX person sighs, because this battle is not going to be won that day.

Now, understanding doesn’t mean acceptance. I’m not amused by my inability to fix or view my order online until a large amount of time has passed. I wish it were different. I wish if my order failed that I could fix it rather than call a call center. I hope to see AT&T improve that in the future. In fact, I expect them to make it happen. (Experience tells me this could take a while, though)

However, I had a lovely chat with a woman in an AT&T call center today, she was a having a pretty crazy day because several thousand other people had the same problem I did (yikes!). I appreciate that we were both in good moods and dealt with my issue in a timely and acceptable manner. Her attitude and my attitude made what could have been a truly frustrating experience into a positive customer interaction with my point of contact with AT&T.

I believe that if text is placed on a medium with the intent that the words be read, like in a slide deck or blog for example, that it is more important for text to be readable rather than to look pretty within the whole of the design. Don’t get me wrong, I want the text to look good, but even more, I want people to be able to read content.

So, what does that have to do with WordPress? Excellent question. For my tastes, 85% of the default text size in blog themes is too small. Way too small. And sans-serif. Sans-serif is nice and professional, but serifs help peoples’ eyes move from word to word and make reading easier. As this is a blog, and I want people to want to read my content and be willing to read my content, I always change the font-family to Georgia, serif with a font size of at least 16px. This particular font size is 1.3em, or 21px. It’s much easier to read than size 11 Arial. This is size 11 Arial.

In many WordPress themes, there is a place to add style overrides. The style override I have in place currently is: p,li { font-family: Georgia,Serif; font-size:1.3em; }

Next up… getting the heading spacing juuuuuust right.

Monday: 3.3 miles @ 4 min run/2 min walk. I had a lot of lower leg pain during this run. A lot. Normally the pain goes away once I warm up, or it’s the run of the mill muscle burn. The pain was foot pain and some pretty awful shin splints. I decided to rest until Thursday.

Thursday. 3.4 miles @ 4 min run/2 min walk. Best run yet! To prepare, and avoid a repeat of Monday, I stretched more than normal, ate cottage cheese beforehand, tied my shoes as tight as safe, and took ibuprofen 4 hours beforehand. Not sure which helped, but it worked. I felt good enough to work on improving stride during last running interval.

Saturday: 6.19 miles @ 3 min run/2 min walk. Felt pretty good most of the time. I’m no longer hitting a wall at 30 minutes and my heart rate is definitely lower. When I started it would be up around 170 whenever I was running, now it’s around 150 unless I’m going up a hill. Hills kill me.

The only thing i am unhappy about for this week is that I didn’t do any upper body strength training.

When I started this, I had hoped to avoid a weight loss diet, but after running for 3 weeks I feel it’s necessary. I hate dieting. 16 y/o and 115lbs I am not. My ankles hate me (and the extra poundage).

At this point pain is holding me back. I plan to change Monday’s workout to spinning for a couple weeks to lighten the impact on my joints. I’m happy with where I am on the timeline I have. 4 weeks until 10k. 4 months to half marathon. This next week I want to increase the run:walk time ratio. Maybe 5min:2min? Or increase the distance to 4 miles w/ 4min:2min. Hmmm.

As I sat in the car, I contemplated how to ask for a recommendation for store that was introvert friendly. But then it occurred to me that all the extraverts that follow me on twitter will have no idea what an introvert friendly store is. So, being of a mind to make sure the question I want to ask will be interpretted in the manner I want it to be, I questioned the question.

ErinOlmon

(Erin Olmon)

If I were to ask for "introvert friendly store" recs does that make sense or do you think "what exactly is an introvert friendly store?"

On 27-9-2011 17:33:20 from Echofon

And the wonderful Elly responded:

surlyinseattle

(esearle)

@ErinOlmon I'd think it means you have technology that helps you browse, make decisions, and pay. Fewer people to talk to. :)

On 27-9-2011 17:52:33 from web in reply to Erin Olmon

And I thought, “Yes! That would be awesome. There could be robot employees and product information tablets and a completely automated checkout. Oh bright future of technology!” But then I thought some more and realized, no. No way could that level of technology be brought into a store and be a good thing. The tablets would give product recommendations, maybe an introductory advertisement by Chase before giving product information. The robots would very kindly ask you to join their loyalty program. It would be exactly the same, except one would be interacting with robots.

But the type of store Elly described basically sounds like Amazon, right? Or say, any good online e-commerce site. This perfect solution to my introvert dilemma already exists online, and without the robots! But then I thought some more. And while most online stores are this wonderful introvert shopping utopia, there are several sites that stand out as not. These sites make me feel the same way I felt in that store when all the helpful employees tried to help me find stuff to buy and ways to give them money.

One of those sites is United.com. After I have built my itinerary on their website, and I’ve decided to purchase, I initiate the checkout process. I’ve given them my payment information. Then the extremely helpful united.com asks me if I want to upgrade to economy, use their Red Carpet club, or give them money to get more frequently flier miles. And they try really hard to “encourage” customers to click the correct button to give them money.

Let’s bring this back home to introvert friendly stores. After a lot of thought about which stores I have good experiences in and which ones I don’t, it’s the local stores that are introvert-friendly. Maybe there’s a franchise or two. The stores are too small to have elaborate loyalty programs. And they are small enough to not have corporate sales training. These stores seem to attract employees that are not overbearing. Take away: Local stores–Good stuff.