Girls in Tech E3 Highschool

The E3 high school in San Diego, California, reached out and wanted to work with Jack Henry. The school has a "girls in tech" program and wanted to show the students some real-life experience at a tech company. We welcomed the school into our offices for a day, and it was a great experience for all.

The day started with the students chatting one on one with experts in the field that they wanted to explore. This gave them a better insight into what the jobs consist of. This gave the students a more expansive vision of the vast number of roles inside the doors of a technology company.

In the second half of the day, I led a group presentation where I asked the students to break up into small groups with one leader from Jack Henry. The students had 30 minutes to develop an idea for a new device that allows them to communicate with other people more easily. The result was to be sketched out on a paper tablet and shared with the group. The results were terrific. It's extraordinary what new minds can create in a short amount of time. It's fascinating to see what they can bring into a tech company. Very excited to see how the careers of these young adults progress.

A projector that connects to your phone to visually see the person you want to chat with.

A communication ring that would produce a hologram of the person you are chatting with.

Smart glasses that allow you to have information such as text and social media but also take calls and video chats.

glasses that allow deaf people to hear what people are saying to them and have better communication. Visual queues are inside the glasses and audio assistance devices are built into the glasses.

Small Medium and Large Learning

Working full time with large companies is a beautiful experience. Compensation and benefits aside often we look past the skills and nuance learnings that we can take away from each job. Here are a few things I've taken away from each of my roles.

Large corporations
These are the guys that have big names that your friends and family have probably have heard of. There are lots of smart people that work at these companies and they have a deep understanding of their industry knowledge. The processes at these companies are baked in and usually run like well oiled machines. Large companies are full of super smart people that are great to learn from. Polishing your skills, becoming an expert in design, and improve the pace. These are great building blocks to take with you forever. 

Startups
Working for a startup is fun and scary at the same time.  The idea is awesome, but will the doors stay open long enough to pay my mortgage? Small companies have energy like no other. The excitement alone is contagious. The founders and early employees have stumbled upon a problem to be solved and work night and day to solve it. The company antics are fast and quick. Often process is too cumbersome and gets in the way. The teams mesh well and are able to crank small chunks of new software at a rapid pace. It is an experience like no other, people value your work and your input. 

Founding a company
You have industry knowledge and know how to build software. You have an idea and you think it's the best thing ever. There is a little money in the bank and you are ready to take that risk. Diving straight into this is a challenge like no other. The startup is your life and all consuming. When you start you think you have all of the answers, but you gladly take input from friends and mentors. Your faith is in your employees and you do anything you can to make for sure they are taken care of first.  This really is your baby, and the reality is chances of it living are small. When you find out things aren't working fail fast and learn from it. Realizing that pivoting your thoughts and ideas or closing the doors isn't a bad thing. You gave it your best shot. 

Where am I now?
Now I am working as a consultant of design and user experience. All of the above takeaways I cherish and re-use frequently. This has been a 500 foot view of the progression of my career. Keeping in touch with prior contacts at previous roles has been a great asset. I look forward to new experiences and projects that will come my way such as the Toptal User Experience Network. Being a consultant allows a great mix of startup as well as large company projects. The best of both worlds. 

Designing in Agile can be Much Like Training for a Marathon.

I have to start by saying I'm not a professional runner.  While I do enjoy the outdoors, I am not an expert in most anything athletic.  This year, however, I accepted the challenge of running a 5k and a 10k with decent success!  After the 10k my friends and I decided that it would be a great challenge to attempt the half marathon. So the training began.

While I do my best at getting into a stride and getting my breathing right while running, I find myself with lots of time to think. In this thinking time I've found many similarities between running and agile development.  I will share with you now a few of my thoughts.

Start off slow.
In running training you start off in your first weeks by running maybe 2-3 miles per day for a week or two. This seems like the best way to ease yourself into a new training process.

Designing user experience for agile you also start off slower. This means starting off with smaller amounts of complexity your first few development sprints. Your feature velocity will be slower but you are learning how the process works with your teammates.

Fail soon and learn what works.
In running I started off by running as fast as I could at the start, but this caused me to tire out before two miles were up. I call this an initial failure, which I learned from. I now start out slow and have a gentle pace which allows me to run further distances.

Designing UX for agile there are many things to learn in the first few sprints.  How detailed do your wireframes need to be? Does everyone have a good understanding of the problem the design is trying to solve?  Is the designed feature too large for the allotted time in the sprint? These are all great questions to learn from and revise the design process around so it fits well with your team.

Get into a rhythm. 
In running I can get into a good rhythm. I find a time that works well for me everyday and stick to it. I find a pace and a route I am comfortable with and stick to that as well. This has allowed me to increase my distance and speed over time.

While you are designing for agile you will also get to a point where things start to become more natural. The flow of each sprint is more comfortable.  As a designer this is a good time to expand your concepts, increase communication with your developers, and start introducing user testing into your sprints.   

The race does not have to end.
In running a marathon you work up to a goal of crossing the finish line, and sometimes the training stops there.  Working with agile teams you are now just getting started. Don't stop now. Use everything learned about designing in an agile development process and continue to improve. Ask your teammates for design feedback and integrate that feedback into your design process.

Agile is a fun process to design in. A development sprint really can be like a marathon. 
 

More Features are not Always What the User Needs

Just because we have a beautiful white space does not mean that it's vital we completely fill it with as many features as possible. This is the perfect example of how we can over complicate our designs. Think about what the user is actually trying to do and answer those questions first.  Don't play a silly game of assumption by just applying more buttons. There is true beauty in a simplified user experience.

Nordstrom creates an app inside the flagship store

The Nordstrom innovation lab is known for creating great ideas. Recently they took an experiment to the floor of their flagship retail store.  The team created an iPad app onsite to improve the shoppers experience in the sunglass department. The team designed and coded the entire application with an awesome ability to have immediate user feedback. This video shows an amazing snapshot of how they used an agile like process right in the middle of a retail department store.

How User Experience Design Can Help Eliminate Training for Hospitality

Creating new software is fun and exciting.  Creating software that users love is simply amazing.

Property management systems have traditionally been very robust systems. From the complex nature of the PMS systems comes complex user interactions. This makes the software more difficult to learn and use, requiring a substantial investment in systems training. With ATRIO we have built the application from the ground up with the user experience in mind. So what is user experience? In the simplest terms it is the overall experience that a person has when they use a product.

With ATRIO we know that user experience is imperative to software that can provide the complex functions needed in hospitality yet is simple to use. Our well designed software leads to reduced training, much happier users, and a great looking product.

Here are a few ways that we incorporate user experience into our software.

We keep our end users in mind. When designing a feature for ATRIO, before a single line of code is written, we take a great deal of time to learn and evaluate exactly how a feature will be used.  At the same time, we create personas that paint a virtual portrait of various users and how they would expect the system to work. These efforts assist us in designing software that puts the user first.

We create user interfaces that are familiar to the end users. Any user that has used a website or mobile application should immediately feel comfortable with ATRIO. By creating user interface elements that are already familiar to the user, the user more quickly senses how to use ATRIO. When a user sees ATRIO for the first time they are able to quickly move around the application and easily can learn where to find information and how to complete the tasks they need to perform their role in the hotel.  

ATRIO has an intuitive design. We take time to think through the end to end process that our user will go through to complete a task. We then try to streamline that process and reduce the number of clicks, and amount of time, it takes for a user to complete a task. Using design elements which are comfortable to the user we have created a design paradigm that people easily grasp and can quickly understand the flow of ATRIO. This method of design eliminates the need for hours of training and spending time thumbing through user manuals, which is particularly important in the high turnover hospitality industry. 

ATRIO has flexibility designed in as well. We have designed in options which don't allow the user to diverge from the normal order of tasks to better serve guests. Our create reservation section is an excellent example of this. The user can quickly and easily jump between different areas of this section to get their job done quickly. This improves the users speed, provides for better guest service and makes ATRIO a very powerful and flexible tool.

We love to see and hear how our end users are interacting with ATRIO. We take design feedback from our customers very serious. We gather our customers feedback from a variety of channels such as support, installation teams, and customer interviews. We continually listen to this feedback so that we can quickly iterate on areas we find which may need improvement.  With this information, we as user experience designers, are able to see and listen to how our customers are using ATRIO. Our iterative development cycles allow us to rapidly make those changes and re-release those updates back to our users. 

ATRIO’s sleek modern user experience attracts users visually. However, more than the visual appeal of the PMS application, the satisfaction of ATRIO’s users and properties lies in simplicity and ease of use resulting from our focus on user experience design.