My manager recently asked me to develop a five-year career plan. He suspects that my career challenges are going to hit me hard, heavy, and soon. If I’m not prepared I’ll end up doing something I’m not any good at, or passionate about – and I’ll be a victim of the Peter Principle. I don’t even know what I want for Christmas, let alone how I want to make a living in five years.

But being a computer scientician, I’m taking a structured approach to this problem. Break it down to a series of questions I can actually answer: what am I doing now that I’m good at/enjoy, what do I want to develop, and who does something I’d like to be doing (someone who is about 5+ years my senior).

Doing Now

I’ve been with Desire2Learn for 2.5 years now, working as a Product Designer- super challenging design position at a fast-growing company, so I feel lucky.

"Work." Kinda.

• People on my Team. I love my development/design/QA team(s). If I can get marketing, PSO, and others in the sphere of influence, even better. Mentor a co-op? Sign me up.  While I’m not a great coder/hacker, I know how to get my team to build stuff to believe in.
• Projects. I like micro-project-management aspects: planning, building roadmaps, getting requirements, market analysis, identifying opportunities, etc.
• Direct Contact. Speaking directly to the people who are having the problems (users, clients, buyers etc.) is great. I do well in those situations, problem solve, come back passionate.  I like chatting with support, product managers, and other people on the front lines.  Scaring a competitor or two is nice sometimes :-)
• Punching Through. If it’s the manager, director, or CEO who needs convincing – I’m not discouraged, and often have success getting them on board.  I do it with information, passion, and demonstrable progress - not with proposals and “thought leadership”, as alas I’m not senior enough.

Things that I do now that I’m not particularly good at:

• UI design.  I thought I was good … until I actually met some talented user experience designer superstars.
• Managing People. I’m in awe of good managers who have the open personality, tact, and patience required to lead a large program, stay positive, nudge.

Get Good At

These are things that I’d love to get good at:

• Read More, Write.  Consuming, analysing, and putting out relevant information is something that gets me excited.  I wish I was better at it, and had more opportunities in social media.
• Creative Expression.  I’m losing the creative aspects of my personal life – I draw less, go to less shows, take less risks creatively.  I’d love to break that habit via the work I do.
• Product Management. Who knew that working with marketing rocks my socks?  That Practical Product Managementcourse I took this summer was totally worth the money and time invested. More please.

This is the future.

People Power

I’ve either met or heard a couple of people in recent years whose work I’ve been inspired by:

• Steven Woods – Engineering/Site Director at Google Waterloo.   Entrepreneur,  builder of teams, active voice for his community. Important part of mobile work at Google.
• Graham Whiting – Architect (like, real, non-software). Architected Princess Twin, DNA Clothing, King St. Trio.  Keeps it real, witty, and effective.
• Ken Chapman – Senior Director at D2L.  Full disclosure: Ken is my bosses boss, but also someone I knew in undergrad.  Pretty rockstar path by a fellow U of G (non-uWaterloo) grad.

Wow, so that list is almost exclusively “Director of Doing Stuff” roles. Guess I have my answer. Hopefully my competencies and interests make sense en route.

Let me know what you think!

kgrabka.wordpress.com

This is notable because a) he doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter …. awkward b) he is a very eloquent writer. He’s in Poland with dad right now, so feel free to check out his adventure.

Learning Repository?!

Yeah, it’s not an awesome name for a web app, but it’s accurate. Learning Repository is a catalogue system for learning objects.  Learning objects can be simple files, collections of files, things grouped together into a unit or module, or even complete courses. Most people in the industry refer to catalogues like this as LORs.  In our implementation, the search is super powerful, the integration with Learning Environment is seamless, the structure is ridiculously flexible, and the metadata management is … well, complicated and insane, but that’s where some of the best stuff is.

Fusion 2011

I’ll be doing four presentations at Fusion this year (see the schedule), and I invite anyone who is interested in learning objects, repositories, Open Educational Resources (OERs), harvesting metadata, federated searches, and any related topics to come by, or catch me in the comments.

Licensing and Rights Management for Learning Objects: What Next?

Monday @ 2:20pm in Plaza Court 1
Now that you can find and share more teaching materials online, navigating the complexities of licensing, copyrights and digital rights becomes a great challenge. Join in this focus group to discuss sharing and searching of learning objects, with all rights and privileges reserved, in Desire2Learn Learning Repository.

Administering Desire2Learn Learning Repository

Tuesday @ 8:00am in Plaza Court 3
Federated searches? Trust permissions? Harvesting other indexes? Managing Learning Repository can overwhelm even the most seasoned administrators. This session will provide hands-on experience with managing Learning Repositories, discuss options for indexing third party resources, share some best practices, and demonstrate the power of Learning Repository. (Full as of Thursday before Fusion … yikes)

Desire2Learn Learning Repository: See What’s New

Tuesday @ 3:30pm in Plaza Court 8
The Learning Repository team has been hard at work. This session will introduce the new functionality recently released for RSS notifications, options for publishing, version management, CourseBuilder integration, and more.

Being Ready for the World (World Readiness)

Wednesday @ 10:50am in Plaza Court 8
Technology has made it easier to reach global audiences, but with it comes language and cultural differences that need to be overcome. Desire2Learn technology offers opportunities from both an organizational and course design perspective to reach out to that larger audience effectively.  Co-presenter for Jeff Geurts from Learning Platform.

Short story: the hype stands up – the user experience of this phone is excellent.  There are small issues that I’ll go into in detail including frustrations with the hardware design, but ultimately the overall package is slick, functional, and at times even beautiful.

The Hardware

The physical hardware of the phone is a generally great.  The phone has a large, bright, and easy to read screen, a single recessed button, very few creases and edges that collect dirt or grime.  No MicroSD card slot, but lots of RAM.  Normal (3.5mm) headphone jack that took my iPhone mic’ed headphones just fine.  The light vibration you get when you touch the dedicated “back” and “search” areas reminds you that this device is very touch sensitive.  VERY touch sensitive.  In my first day or two of usage I pocket-dialed, Facebook’ed, mapped about half of my contact list – until I learned to lock the device every time I wasn’t explicitly performing an action (with the dedicated “lock” button).

The lack of physical keyboard made my transition from a Blackberry Bold difficult for typing-heavy tasks like email, though the live spelling correction works great.  The orientation sensing works well (smooth and predictable), so I learned to type my emails with the phone laying horizontally, with just a few lines of my reply visible outside the on-screen keyboard.

Compared to my Bold, the reception was weak.  I dropped out of 3G far more often than I’m used to.  The point here is that Blackberry devices have great reception, more so than the Samsung having poor reception.   Same goes with the battery life.  On a full-night charge I got 8-10 hours of normal usage including WiFi internet and calling at a business-user level.  Apparently that’s endemic for these large touchscreen devices.  Definitely not a showstopper, but news to me.

Search Button :(

Lastly, the dedicated search button got in the way far more often than I found it useful. For example when I was holding the phone with two hands when taking pictures with the Samsung’s excellent camera, I would accidentally press the search button and jump out of the Camera app into Bing Search.  Oh man, that happened about four times before I started digging through Settings to try to re-map (or at least disable) the search button.  No luck.  This is my least favourite feature of this phone, and I would gladly do away with it (or at least have it recessed so the click has to be more deliberate).

The Software

This is my first look at the Windows Phone operating system, and a it’s stunning piece of software.  The lack of fake 3D buttons was jolting and refreshing.  The home-screen Tile view is far more useful, customizable, and interactive than any other phone home-screen I’ve used.  Little features about the tiles were really nice: when you drag the screen the drag arrow gracefully rotates, the numbers for email counts flip rather than just changing, the text messaging tile gives me a wink ;-) with one message, and an Oh No! face :-O when I have four unread text messages. All of it seems refined, friendly, and inviting.

The Little Things :)

I started customizing my home-screen immediately – added all of my frequently-called friends to the home page, local weather, Twitter, Facebook, work Outlook (seamless), personal email (less than seamless).  After the second day, I rarely ventured past my home screen other than to browse Facebook and play with phone settings.

The ability to bundle contacts from your phone with ones from Outlook, together with their Facebook profiles was amazing.  My friend Mike has three different identities on my Blackberry (unless I go through contact-synch hell to combine them), while he has only one on my Windows Phone, which is hugely convenient.

One thing that is often not well executed on phones is a good range of alerts, alarms, and audio stuff.  It’s obvious that great care went into the audio landscape of the phone. The clicks, pings, boops sound downright beautiful.  The alarms are gentle but effective, rather than being grating and amateurish like some Linux sounds (*cough*).  The external speaker could be louder in phone-call-at-the-train-station situations.

Considering this phone and platform is new to the market, I was impressed by the availability of applications (as I read that is one of the fatal flaws of this platform).  I know that Microsoft has been shitting bricks about the app experience as it compares to the Apple App Store, but Facebook, Twitter, Score Mobile, Yelp, and many of my favourite heavyweights were there, and were executed pretty well.  There is no Google Maps application available, and the Marketplace in general has some obvious holes – Foursquare, for example, but apparently that’s coming soon and it’s hawt as hell. Bing Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps, as the location based searching for stuff sucks in Canada and elsewhere outside of the US.

The Facebook app doesn’t react as well as it does on the iPhone, as everything is clickable … while nothing is a button. There’s a theme of explicit “this will do this” actions being ambiguous in these apps, so I ended up changing screens and navigating away by accident – a side product of the really fluid and draggable design of the operating system.

While this may not be a highlight for a lot of people, the integration of Office viewers for Powerpoint, Word documents, and other documents was welcome.  The experience with attachments from within the email client was the best I’ve ever dealt with, and made both the Blackberry and Apple offerings seem Web 1.5.  This isn’t game-changing behaviour, but certainly helped me get over previously discouraging experiences with document-handling on my phone.

Overall Thoughts

The combination of the hardware and new Windows Phone 7 software is immediately slick and usable. Little touches such as the smooth transitions, crisp fonting, and contact linking are a pleasure.  The hardware such as the case and camera are first rate. The touch sensitivity of the device has forced me to pick up habits that I don’t love (locking the device constantly, being careful about interactions in Facebook, etc.) and the “search” touch button is infuriating when I’m in a hurry trying to take a photo. This being my first introduction to Windows Phone / Mobile 7, I am excited about its future.  If anyone is listening, bring on Google Maps and Skype, please :-)

Little Bugs

This is a list of bugs I came across that didn’t warrant being in the main review, but hopefully will get addressed as the platform matures:

• Something is off about the audio system.  Occasional jitters, noticeable when you’re playing games or are doing web browsing that involves sound, were a nuisance.
• You have to click “all” photos before being able to see the ones you took with your camera (“Camera Roll”), rather than having them show up on the front page of the Photos app.
• After the phone is unplugged from its charger, the little charge indicator stays on, sometimes until the phone is turned off.
• Making corrections to settings when setting up an email account requires you to retype everything on every retry.  Super annoying when you’re trying to debug your email connection.
• Can’t change which Windows Live account is associated with your phone unless you do a software reset?! A bit ridiculous.

The focus will be practical advice for designers and developers about building accessible web applications. Ali and I will have lots of examples of specific things that need to be considered in the design, development, and testing stages, as well as make a case for building with open standards. In general, the hope will be to provide attendees with a rich overview of the challenges, make A11Y less scary by sharing specific anecdotes.  It’ll be a design oriented presentation, but both Ali and I are versed pretty well in the technology if you care to Q&A!

We won’t be focusing a lot on the legal responsibilities surrounding accessibility. I find too many introductory discussions focus on the legal issues first, thereby mentally cheapening the problem to one of WCAG compliance. Accessibility is one of the most interesting user experience problems the web has to offer, so I feel it deserves a more nuanced design discussion.

So yeah, please register on the uxWaterloo site if you’re interested.

There’s also a Facebook event, if you want to share the news.  My lovely employer Desire2Learn will be hosting the event (it won’t be at the Accelerator Centre).  Looking forward to seeing you there!

I did a presentation yesterday about what I think is the single most important piece that was hardest for us to get right initially:  Sprint Planning.  Sprint Planning was initially difficult, as it was challenging for us to come up with Stories and Tasks that actually reflected the work we were going to do over the next two weeks.  The slides perhaps are not for people new to Agile, but if you have any understanding of sprints, stories, and tasks, it’s worthwhile to take a look at.

So as a fun little exercise, a colleague of mine at work (Michael Swart) was wondering how one would explain their job to someone in 1950 – a time before computers.  His explanation inspired this post.

Explaining it in 1950

Grandma and Grandpa Suski in 1953

All of us use some sort of tool to help us with our jobs -  a sewing machine, a reciprocating saw, or a typewriter. When you use that thing, you can tell if it has been well designed. Does it do what it’s supposed to do, and does it in such a way that makes that task easier? Does the spindle move without jerking, does it stop on a dime, do the keys mash or click gracefully?

It’s a little more abstract, but think about reading a book. The form of the book itself makes a big difference in how you you read – are the pages a pleasure to flip, is the print too small to read on the trolley, does it stay open or force itself closed, does it look rich, cheap, well worn, or brand new?  All of those things are part of the design of that book, and that’s what I do – but not for books.

In the future, reading and writing will not be done with printed books and pens, but with a device called a computer. Computers will have  television screens that can show words and pictures (rather than printed paper), and be hooked up to typewriters. This is how schoolchildren will read and write, teachers teach, and most of us send letters and notes to one another.

Computers can do many, many different types of things – each one of these things is called a program. I work for a company that makes computer programs for Universities. My boss tells me “improve this program where people write mathematics equations”, or “make sure that Chinese people can use this as well.”  I work on a design for a program, that runs on a computer.

I work with a small team of people: I figure out how a program is supposed to look and behave. Others work on the nuts, bolts, logic, and engineering. Others make sure it works how it’s supposed to (quality inspectors), others write the manual, and others still deliver it to the client, and help them use it. It takes months, sometimes years, for a program to be “done.”

Believe it or not, someone pays me good money to do this. :-)

Sure enough it had a large set of keys in, some gum, two digital cameras, and some stuff that obviously belongs to a young woman. I’m sure this person is upset about losing their stuff, so I’d like to help!

If you know any of these people (most likely from the Kitchener/Waterloo area), please leave a comment and help me return her stuff.

So yeah, please circulate amongst your friends and social circles.

Not knowing if I was using resigned incorrectly, I had to look it up.  Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com demonstrate the disparity on the front page of Google. Pretty cool – I feel like I just won the word nerd lottery.

The Farmville Bug

No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash applications if they take longer than 10 seconds to start up, thinking that anything that takes longer than that is probably crashing. Reasonable!

But Farmville often takes longer than 10 seconds to start up. Oh shoot. Flash developers that do run-time debugging destroy the 10 second limit. Double shoot!

Use Real Data!

It’s a cut-and-dry example of why you should use real data to make calls on design decisions. It’s a variation of the Lorem Ipsum Sucks argument. The “10 second” decision seems arbitrary, and kudos to Mozilla for doing the right thing and releasing a fix right away. It’s probably not the correct fix, as adding a friendly user prompt would be preferable to a low, fixed timeout. But hey, baby steps.