ShallowRed | Radical Blogger

Attack the Block | Vayas donde vayas, hay planchas

2012-01-27T20:34:00.002-02:00

No es justo reducirla a cine classe B porque esto puede muy bien llegar a ser una pelicula d eculto. Esto por la seriedad del trabajo del director, de los actores y de los pibes de los efectos.

Todo eclactico sabe que si algo esta bien hecho entonces vale la pena. Esta peli sobre planchitas britanicos, faso, alienigenas, faso, musica rap, faso y Nick Frost fumando faso, es una big little fucking movie.

Mi puntuacion: ****

Trabajar en equipo.

2012-01-19T03:33:00.001-02:00

Por ahora pongo este video nomas, pero si alguien te dice que tocar en una banda es teamwork.

Minga,

Esto es teamwork.

Gracias GuGa por el videito.

Paranoia Nocturna

2012-01-12T00:05:00.000-02:00

Voy a tratar de redactar esto en tiempo real no sea cosa que nos vayan a asesinar mientras hacemos la sobremesa y sin poder documentar el exabrupto sin poder "publicar" y que quede así un asunto más sin aclarar.

Un crimen mas sin aclarar en la costa de oro.

Todo se fue haciendo cada vez mas tenebroso dado a la conducta del canino que habita con nosotros. Darling Gasolina. El perrito, que extrañamente cada vez que se escapaba de la casa (confirmada por el veterinario su tendencia escapista) lo hacía hacia lo del vecino de la izquierda. No hacia los del RockAndSamba que dale que dale con los Batichurros todo el día sino hacia lo del vecino laburador, buena gente pero inquilino de una casa que a primera vista parecía terreno okupa y que luego dado a su amabilidad cedimos a la hipótesis de que fuera simplemente un tipo muy poco preocupado con el estado de la casa.

Su bata blanca y su sonrisa no eran indicios claros de violencia, pero matchean siempre bien en una peli de terror onda ¨el loco de la motosierra¨. Porque el perro sigue ladrando hacia ese lado? No se, no me animo a mirar por arriba del muro no sea que vea zanjas de 2 metros en el jardín de al lado.

Que nos quiere decir Gasolina? Que secreto esconde esa casa. Siempre cerca de la medianoche llega la camioneta...y hasta que no lo zarandeo un poco no para de ladrar el master.

Ahora mi suegra saca al perro. Espero que para cuando vuelva esto no sea una escena sangrienta.

Yo, entre mi acidez y mi poco aprecio por la movida caribeña tropical aprovecho para apagar la paranoia con la narración y así poder dejar un indicio por si pasa algo, una pista, algo que apunte hacia la casa de al lado y deje descansar mi fantasma.

Lo de los cadáveres en el jardín lo pensé la tercera vez que el perro se mandó para ese lado. Pero no me dio para mirar ya que solo me dediqué a llevar a base de improperios y zancadas apresuradas al perro. Pero ahora que no paraba de ladrar...

Ahora que vuelva de ladrar espero que vuelva más tranquilo. Yo ya metí el auto porque esto no es lo mismo que antes.Si estará jodida la cosa que esta casa tenía escondidos en la cocina los implementos de la parrilla y yo me la pasé una semana entera haciendo asado a lo bestia con un palo de escoba recortado como única herramienta.

¨No me rompas las pelotas pelotudo, que me tengo que dormir¨ fue lo primero que me dijo mi esposa, pero ahora que leyó esto ya la tengo más preocupada, y ya me confesó que pensó lo de los cadáveres en el jardín la primera vez que Gasolina se fue para ese lado.

Ahora el rope dejó de ladrar pero es porque se fue.Práctica habitual de nuestro vecino que parece usar la casa como base de operaciones.

Ampliaremos más tarde.

--

Hoy es domingo 15, sobrevivimos. Al final no nos animamos a ir hasta el jardín del vecino pero dado que se terminaba nuestra estadía, aprovechamos la suerte de ser los vecinos esos que nunca son asesinados solo para no levantar sospechas y nos vinimos calladitos.

Abrazo. Y a la del Puestito ese en Pinares que vende el Zolben a 46 pe, 28 te lo cobran en una Farmacia cualquiera en Montevideo. Chorra.

Como instalar Chromium OS en tu viejo notebook

2012-01-09T11:23:00.000-02:00

Debido a la popularidad que se viene de las aplicaciones web que corren en esta nueva experiencia de la web que se llama Chrome (no confundirse, chrome es mucho mas que un navegador), y la facilidad que provee para la vida web. Aqui reposteamos un manualcito de como meterle el sistema de Google a un Notebook. Cosa de ir probando la web en un entorno diseñado para ella.

Install ChromiumOS On Your (Old) Laptop | Ido's Blog:

'via Blog this'

Traducido Bajar de Chromium.org

¿Qué es ChromeOS / ChromiumOS?

Chromium OS es un proyecto de código abierto que tiene como objetivo construir un sistema operativo que proporciona una experiencia informática más rápida, sencilla y más segura para las personas que pasan la mayor parte de su tiempo en la web. Que le da el entorno familiar de Chrome con soporte HTML5 y Flash. -Si ya usas Chrome, ya lo sabes, si seguis en Firefox, bueno, preparate para lo que se viene.

Instale ChromiumOS en Linux

Extraiga el archivo de IMG el archivo descargado. En la shell (Terminal), ejecute el siguiente comando (donde sdX es tu memoria USB y ChromeOS-Lime.img es la ruta al archivo de IMG ha extraído): dd if = ChromeOS-Lime.img of = / dev / sdX bs = 4M
Arrancar desde el recién creado Chromium OS USB stick!

Instale ChromiumOS en Mac
Al igual que casi cualquier cosa en Mac es muy fácil, con tan sólo un paso. Usted tendrá que descargar este ChromeOS mac constructor y correrlo. Listo.

Instale ChromiumOS En Windows
Empezar a descargar la imagen de Chrome Descargue y extraiga el escritor de imágenes de Windows. Copia de la imagen de Windows en la escritura del directorio raíz del disco C:. (No copia de este directorio y el archivo img para Chrome a la raíz de la unidad C:. Puede provocar el temido y molesto "Error 8:")

Haga clic derecho en el archivo de imagen tar.gz, y el uso de 7-zip para "extraer aquí". Después de que termina, de nuevo, haga clic en el archivo tar. Imagen y el uso de 7-zip para "extraer aquí".

Esto debe dejar un archivo .img en algun lado, buscalo.. Copia este archivo a la raíz de la unidad C:. (La falta de copiar este archivo, y el directorio para el escritor de la imagen de Windows, en la raíz de la unidad C: puede provocar el temido y molesto "Error 8:") (Googlear, yo no pienso ni gastar tiempo en esto.)

Inserte su unidad flash USB o tarjeta SD. Introduzca el directorio de imágenes de Windows escritor y ejecutar el programa Win32DiskImageer.exe.

Seleccione el archivo. Img en el "Archivo de imagen" de la ventana, y asegurarse de que la letra de unidad apropiada es seleccionada en el "dispositivo" de la ventana. Haga clic en "Write".

Una vez terminado, eliminar su unidad flash o una tarjeta SD, y los inserta en su ordenador portátil de apagado. Encienda el ordenador portátil y pulse la tecla ESC para seleccionar el orden de arranque.

No trate de cambiar el orden de arranque en la configuración de CMOS / BIOS - no parece ser capaz de detectar un buen arranque USB desde allí.

Arrancar desde el dispositivo USB, en lugar de los SSD interno. Enter "Facepunch", como su nombre de usuario y "Facepunch" como su contraseña.

Una vez que Chrome OS se inicia y aparece, pulse Ctrl-Alt-T para ir a la terminal. Escriba "sudo dd if = / dev / sdb of = / dev / sda bs = 4m". No se moleste con el comando "/ usr / bin / ChromeOS-install" el consejo que usted ve en los lugares - no va a funcionar en un disco SSD de 2 GB.

Retirar el dispositivo USB, y reiniciar el sistema. En caso de que desee "probar el agua" sin todo esto, también puede probar este poderoso sistema operativo en VirtualBox. Busquenlon.

Aviso que no revise mucho el instructivo de Windows porque como siempre es mas complicado prefiero ni tratar y solo meterlo en la Mac.

Ideas

2012-01-04T13:24:00.000-02:00

Las ideas por si solas no valen mucho. Iba a escribir nada pero en realidad algo valen. Lo importante, es lo que hacemos con esas ideas. Idear es el ejercicio natural de la gente con carácter científico y es lo que hace que existan cosas como ¨Procesos de Mejora Continua¨ en las empresas de hoy. Por mas que suene a Bullshit, en realidad tales procesos, cuando son gerenciados por gente competente, y con la jerarquía necesaria pasa poder implementar cambios, pueden llevar a la reformulación de procesos, conceptos, procedimientos y métodos que optimicen o simplemente hagan posible la prevalencia de la lógica y la inteligencia en todo el actuar institucional y corporativo. Para ser un ideador no hay que ser gerente. No se necesita más que una actitud positiva y proactiva hacia lo que hacemos. Sea esto mandar un tweet a una empresa para que ofrezca algo nuevo, o el análisis cuidadoso de los futuros escenarios que podemos enfrentar en cualquier negocio o actividad. Aqui hay un video de la comunidad de ideadores mas relevante en el mundo.

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

El mundo se puede cambiar y raramente los cambios los promueven las mayorías. El conformismo es a veces grave en ciertos lugares como las empresas públicas y las instituciones donde la cultura organizacional funciona para mantener el status quo y no para la mejora continua. El cambio es lo más resistido en el mundo. Por eso no es fácil ser un agente de cambio. Pero hay que tener la entereza moral para identificar las cosas que HAY que mejorar, olvidarse de las ideologías y aplicar la lógica, la inteligencia y la creatividad en la búsqueda del bien mayor. Todo lo demás son excusas, y nunca escuché alguien decir que le gusta escuchar excusas. Aquí voy de nuevo con el link de IDEO, http://www.ideo.com/ y lo recomiendo porque les creo. También creo que un futuro mejor es posible. Aún en Uruguay, donde se bromea que hay que ir a vivir cuando uno está terminal ya que aquí todo llega 10 años más tarde.

El oso Joggin.

2011-12-20T20:54:00.001-02:00

Asi es como se siente uno que siempre ha parecido un ewok si no se afeita por una semana.

Aunque los ewoks no son osos.

Una vez mis compañeros de trabajo me hicieron un ecuaclon con Jack Sparrow y un ewok.

Sparrow a su vez es un mix de Pepe L'amour y Keith Richards, el gran amor de mi dulce abuelita. La misma que estafaron con los championes (ver post anterior).

Ahora el oso Joggin averiguó cuales son los mejores championes para salir a correr cuando pesas mas de 80 y tenes mas cuerpo de poeta que de atleta.

El veredicto cae en los Vomero 6. Mas resistente que el pegasus pero sin el talon alto de los AirMax. La serie Lunar es muy buena para los jogginettas que quieren un calzado liviano, pero la resistencia de los Vomero se hace notar luego de 6 meses de uso.

Nike tiene muchas lineas de zapatos y cambios sutiles de un modelo a otro. Los pegasus no duraron mas de 4 meses a este oso. Los Vomero siguen incólumnes.

Vomero 6. Nike.

Los championes de la abuela

2011-12-20T20:52:00.000-02:00

¿Como vender un par de championes que mi abuela compró por confiar en Catherine Fulop?

Es que circula por montevideo un aviso en el que la venezolana, conocida por sus interpretaciones en novelas de su mismo nivel artístico y por querer evangelizar con sus cuadriceps y otras partes de su anatomía a sus seguidores de tele-gimnasia y en esta ocasión para promover una marca Norteamericana de zapatillas, diría un porteño, Sketchers Shape Ups.

A mi gusto un nombre pasado de gringo y con implicaciones sobre efectos sobre la figura al usarlos.

Al parecer hay efectos, y se sienten bien. Por lo menos mi abuela decía que se mareaba.

El mareo, evidentemente no figuraba en ninguna etiqueta de la caja.

La forma del zapato, eso si, daba lugar a dudas ya que era claramente carente de apoyo natural. De suela plana.

Ahora deb deshacerme de ellos y tratar de que mi abuela no pierda del todo los $4k que le estafaron. Pero como hacerlo sin sentirse culpable de estar pasándole a alguien del peso de una maldición como un aire acondicionado portátil (eso mismo). Esas cosas son una maldición porque uno sabe que son una mierda (porque nuestras esposas ya nos avisaron). Pero uno solo exorciza una elíptica o esas mierdas en MercadoLibre.

A quien le encajo estos zapatos? Porque una cosa es un cinturón con electródos, de esos tipo abflex vendí un montón.

Shape up while you walk, promete la caja. Get in Shape Without Setting Foot in a Gym meten al costado. Eso también decía el AbFlex, y el AbTronic, o el FlexTronic. Y no paran ahi los gringos. Como si hiciera falta encima dicen DESIGNED to HELP: Burn more calories - tone muscles - improve posture.

Es cierto que Nike o Reebok también muestran gente con cuerpos cool con sus zapatos, pero siempre en la órbita del deporte como actividad esencial, necesaria y todo el enfoque del diseño de sus productos. La idea es potenciar la actividad física y el placer derivado de ello.

Sketchers va mas allá. Te dice que por el bajo costo de poder partirte la cara en cualquier curva de la casa o lesionarte la rodilla por caminar como Bambi al nacer uno puede a fuerza de evitar los porrazos volverse mas firme. O algo así.

Viene con DVD, posta. Si ven la caja se mueren.

Abuela, como caíste en esta?

Para los que se preguntan por mi abuela los dejo aqui con una foto que ella aprobaría.

Como le pueden hacer esto a la dulce abuelita? Vieron los ojos preciosos que tiene mi abuela?

Estas cosas pasan por falta de criterio.

Mi abuela que dice "Si sáles te abrígas" y lo dice con esos tíldes. Como se les ocurre que necesita unos championes en los que mantener el equilibrio sea el deporte que le haga necesitar un Shape Up?

No tenés perdón Catherine Fulop. Seguro que vos venderías igual los lentes de Johnny Tolengo a un ciego. Pero no dá. Como no hay una manifestación de señoras estafadas y esguinzadas reclamando frente a Sketchers que les devuelvan la dignidad. Porque una vez que el zapato tiene marca de uso, ajo y agua.

Talle 36.

Ella me pidió que los pusiera a la venta pero veo la pareja interracial de la caja poniendole la mejor onda a los championes esos y me muero de la vergüenza.

Así que si sos de los pocos humanos que leen esto, tenés una pequeña enemiga que calce 36, te doy una mano, te regalo los championes y le decís que son un envío equivocado sin remitente y se los regalás.

Lo único que exijo es que después nos cuentes en donde empezaron a aparecer los moretones, solo eso, por pura lúdica narrativa. Porque lo que está comprobado es que aprender a caminar de nuevo te llena a porrazos. Sino pregúntenle a Bambi.

Aprovechen que solo hay un par y por obvias razones se van juntos.

"Antes de insultar a una persona, camina un kilómetro en sus zapatos, así para cuando lo insultes él estará a un kilómetro, y sin zapatos" -ShallowRed

Semana Española

2011-12-19T00:43:00.003-02:00

No la de Tienda Inglesa.

Sino la que he pasado leyendo a Hernan Casciari y su libro "España, decí alpiste." en donde el autor le hace a uno sentirse rioplatense y medio, cuando compara lo que es vivir en un país desarrollado en contraposición de hacerlo en Argentina. Y uno que es Uruguayo, se puede reír más alto aún sin tener que pasar por la sonrojante autocrítica pero identificándose fácilmente en el acento, en la palabras del exiliado típico de hoy.

"Uno debería, todos lo días oír una canción, leer un buen párrafo, ver un buen cuadro, y si es posible, decir unas pocas palabras razonables." o algo así decía Goethe. Y a mi que no entiendo nada en alemán ni tampoco soy de decir muchas palabras razonables (es un problema, no se rían), me suena razonable lo que dice el germano.

El tema es el information overload, la incapacidad de ver realmente todo, el numero en negritas alarmantemente alto de items no leídos en Google Reader. Te mata.

Entonces uno solo encuentra lectura placentera en el papel. Todo bien con las tablet, pero no es lo más lindo estar viendo como se actualizan tus 120 aplicaciones en la barra de estatus mientras tratás de meter sinápsis hedónica leyendo profundamente a Stephenson.

Eso es lo difícil hoy. Leemos muchísimo, pero mucha basura y con un nivel de profundidad que no es que sea malo, pero no es igual de disfrutable.

Nicholas Carr entendió mal el asunto, pero la sugerencia es válida.

Disfrutad.

Haciendo todo con la convicción moral de hacerlo bien es importante. Pero hacerlo es aún más.
Pues solo la acción vale.
Las palabras por si solas no son nada.
Pero he estado leyendo tantas ultimamente que algo provocan.

Aparte de eso metí un Jamón Serrano, este sí de Tienda Inglesa, que estaba genial, y hoy en la radio Serrat, que no me gusta, nada.

Para nivelar las cosas voy a tener que ver Torrente 4 sino terminaré sacando Madrid de mi lista de posibles escenarios de exilio. Santiago Segura siempre hace que te caigan bien los madrileños.

Ole.

Esta semana española también me tocó leer un cuento navideño de Perez Reverte que me mandó mi viejo pero no me gustó. Es que con Perez me pasa lo mismo que con Serrat, que con Sabina, y es que no comparto el feeling ni el interés por el formato y la temática. De gallegos los chistes. O los cuadros.

Pero el lenguaje me mata. Siempre que escucho un doblaje (algo que ya de por sí es hepático) si lo hace un español no puedo dejar de pensar que es una porno.
Y cuando escucho a los de TVE en gallego siento que me toman el pelo y que no se deciden si hablar en portugués o castellano. Que es el epañol mas propagado por el mundo y el que más mortales entienden.

Por eso a latinoamerica la gusta Gestoso, por ese español internacionalizado, como la versión deschilenizada de condorito. Igual cuando le dieron a Leonard Cohen el premio Principe de Asturias, se lo agradeció a españa.

No se si esta, pero cerca sino, españa perdió algo más.

Además de la crisis, de los indignados, de las elecciones y de los papelones con la ley Sinde, Sant Celoni perdió una editorial (Orsai) y la Muzza de Comequechu que están ya instalados en Buenos Aires. y ta.

Lorem Ipsum

2011-12-14T00:48:00.003-02:00

Viste que cuando finalmente vas a empezar a escribir no te acordás de la mitad de las cosas que prometiste acordarte mientras hacías algo normalmente poco inspirador. Así que esa promesa de mantener un blog se va desvaneciendo, porque siempre hay algo urgente, siempre hay algo que requiere que estemos allí. Si?

Bueno, igual en el más verosímil de los lugares se puede encender la verbo-máquina-creativa que es esa voz que te dice que ir poniendo mientras los teclazos se hacen bytes.

El tema es tener de que escribir.

Porque leer a un tipo que escribe sobre como es jodido escribir es un embole.

Sería como leer de nuevo solo las partes aburridas de Bag of Bones (King).

Y es que cualquier prosa que no tenga esas intro/meseta/desenlace que nos enseñan en la primera clase de idioma español nos deja un sabor a coca light, a reader´s digest con contunará...Como un blog sin anécdotas. Como...

Bloguear o repostear?

2011-12-09T01:04:00.001-02:00

Es un poco complicado el tema de elegir publico no? Como hace uno cuando empieza a escribir para saber siquiera en que idioma hacerlo.

Si me guiara por el público tendría que hacerlo en inglés, pero como el blog este es un espacio personal que espero no colisione con mi ámbito profesional, me limitaré a publicar en la lengua de Borges y de Cortázar, a quienes nunca leí pero mantengo en la lista de autores a leer cuando termine con los clásicos.

Por lo pronto la elección del tema debería haber sido algo relacionado a la Atención al cliente, eso es lo que mas visitas ha tenido por acá. Asi que puede que empiece a tratar de guardar por aqui pensamientos y anclajes que me recuerden para que era bueno yo cuando ya no sea tan bueno en nada.

Dicen que la curva declinante comienza a los 26. Yo digo que mejor, porque en bajada todo es mas fácil, ahora a los 33 me lo sigo repitiendo como un mantra, confiando en la inercia pero no como guía.

Dicen que la paciencia es una gran virtud, pero solo es cierto si muy seguido tenés que esperar. Yo la considero sobrevalorada y con muy poco que ofrecer frente a alternativas como la acción positiva, lo cual quiere decir ¨cualquier otra cosa que no sea estar rascándose las bolas y lamentándose al mismo tiempo como le pican o le llegan al piso las mismas¨.

La acción positiva es llevar a algo tangible las necesidades y los anhelos de realización. Realizarse puede ser en este sentido como es para mi viejo salir a correr o para mi hija ir a las hamacas, pero es ponerle variedad a dias que en montevideo se pasan fácilmente al tedio si uno no varía su contenido. Por eso los montevideanos nos gusta ir a la costa cuando podemos, para escapar de esos días todos iguales.

Preocuparse es otra acción negativa parecida a la procrastinación (palabra que aún no existe en español). Preocuparse por un problema es el equivalente a tratar de solucionar algo solo con respirar, ocupa nuestro mapa mental y quita energía para las cosas que realmente la necesitan.

Si te da sarna la onda hippie y te quema, no le digas energía, pero es eso.

Bueno, a transformar esa masa informe de contenidos no sublimados y ponerse a escribir. Eso acabo de hacer. Ahora a ponerse a investigar, que es lo que quiere leer la gente? vale la pena? cuanto tiempo uno logra mantener en el texto al visitante y cuanto de uno queda en el lector.

Asi que si vamos a empezar a postear sistemáticamente, o periódicamente, bueno, cuando tenga tiempo; que tenga un mensaje positivo. Que sea algo que sirva, algo como un servicio-a-la-comunidad. Repostear las cosas que me gustaban traía algún que otro lector, pero para eso ahora está G+, para comentarios cortos tengo Twitter, y el blog me quedó tirado como te queda esa carpeta de cuero con una birome super linda la que nunca usas porque sos un pibe paperless (hace años que no imprimo). Porque te acostumbraste a no manchar mas papel que el necesario para limpiarte, pero que te da cosa, entonces te acordás de lo lindo que es sentir la montblanc desplazarse por renglones y rayar, y ser mucho mas libre y creativo de lo que te permite un teclado qwerty.

Yo siempre me dejo esa lapicera y ese block olvidado en algún lado y las mejores ideas, o los recuerdos de las mejores ideas se me han volado por no tenerlos a mano. Ahora no voy a dejar que me siga pasando, recolectaré lo que pueda ahora que Google me lo hace más fácil.

Si algo va a cambiar el mundo ¨mobile¨ es que ahora todo el mundo tiene el block y la lapicera en el teléfono; blogger en el iOS-Android. Probando probando, 1,2,3. Nada interesante para hoy. Rien...

Youtubers Manifesto

2011-11-30T13:21:00.001-02:00

Google saco una presentacion de nuevo sistema de analisis de visitas y con el una guia de como hay que usar youtube para que sirva para algo. Aprovecho para mencionar lo bien que esta Google Docs.

Buscando en Google, leccion numero 2.

2011-11-29T10:12:00.001-02:00

Es una historia interesante la de las cosas que se han ido incluyendo a las búsquedas de Google. Supongo que muy pronto podremos buscar por cadenas desoxi-ribonucleicas. Pero es tambien cierto que a veces no es fácil encontrar cosas en Google. Asi que aqui va una infografía de Mashable que está muy buena y que ayuda. La leccion numero 1 ni siquiera la ponemos aparte porque es simple, abris tu navegador, que por supuesto ya no tiene barra de navegacion separada de la de busqueda porque es muy de los años 2000 eso. Aqui va numero 2:

Y aca un videito; Enjoy.

Google Music Store tendrá una fuerte integración con Google+

2011-10-24T22:09:00.000-02:00

Google Music Store tendrá una fuerte integración con Google+:

Aunque en mayo Google abría uno de los servicios más esperados, no se puede decir que Google Music haya cautivado a la crítica ni a la comunidad. Su lanzamiento fue muy discreto, lanzado en forma de beta muy cerrada, y como un servicio que permitía almacenar nuestra música para poder acceder a ella a través de nuestros dispositivos Android o desde cualquier navegador, aunque poco más.

Eran muchas las publicaciones que hablaban de un lanzamiento forzado, debido a las presiones y a la creciente competencia que había salido, con muchos nuevos competidores como Amazon que entraban fuerte en el sector con servicios como Cloud Drive. Y también, muchos los rumores sobre un posible lado oculto de Google Music que aún no había visto la luz.

Parece ser que poco a poco se van desvelando los detalles de lo que será otra parte del servicio, Google Music Store, que vendría a ser el equivalente a iTunes pero bajo la marca Google. Con una integración total con los cada vez más numerosos dispositivos Android, parece ser que no será lo único con lo que esté íntimamente relacionado. Según leo en TNW, parece ser que Google Music tendrá una fuerte integración con otro de los lanzamientos estrella de este año: Google+, algo que, en mi opinión, podría ser todo un acierto.

Google está haciendo que todos sus servicios se integren con la nueva red socia. De momento, esta es accesible desde la popularmente llamada barra Google, que parece estar cambiando constantemente, y desde la cual además de entrar en el sitio también podemos realizar muchas acciones sin salir de la página en la que nos encontramos.

Lo que se sabe de la nueva integración de Music con Google+ es que habría un sistema de recomendaciones en el que de momento estarían disponibles las pistas de las discográficas con las que el gigante ya tiene un acuerdo. Entonces, los contactos a los que hemos recomendado un determinado tema, podrían escucharlo de manera gratuita pero solo una vez, pudiendo elegir si comprar –al precio de 99 centavos— o no comprar dependiendo de si le gustó.

Yo esperaba ese momento con ansias.

Una historia de internet | Seek death and ye shallfind it.

2011-10-14T16:29:00.002-02:00

Internet Story from Adam Butcher on Vimeo.

Una increible historia.

Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors

2011-10-11T14:42:00.000-02:00

Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors:

It’s easy to see your top-visited pages, navigation patterns and conversion metrics using visitor-tracking tools like Google Analytics. However, this data doesn’t show the roadblocks that users typically run into on your website. Tracking and optimizing error messages will help you measurably improve your website’s user experience. We’ll walk through how to add error tracking using Google Analytics, with some code snippets. Then, we’ll assemble the data and analyze it to figure out how to improve your error message drop rates.

What To Track

The most helpful errors to track are form-field errors and 404 pages. Form-field errors can be captured after the form’s validation has run; this can be client-side or server-side, as long as you can trigger a Google Analytics event when an error message appears to a user. (We’ll be using Google Analytics in this article, but you can apply these concepts to many visitor-tracking tools, such as Omniture and Performable.)

Form-Field Errors

Forms that allow users to create an account, log in or check out are the places where most visitors will hit stumbling blocks that you are not aware of. Pick pages with forms that have high exit rates or that have high total page views but low unique page views. This could indicate that users are repeatedly trying to submit the form but are encountering problems.

The easiest way to track form-field errors with Google Analytics is to track an event each time a user sees an error message. The specification for _trackEvent is:

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value)

If the form is for signing in and the user submits an incorrect password, I might use the following code:

<script type='text/javascript'>
  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Error', 'Sign In', 'Incorrect Password']);
</script>

If possible, store the error message’s text as a variable, and call this variable within Google Analytics’ event tracker. This way, as you change the text of the error message over time, you can measure the differences between the versions. For example, in PHP, I might write:

<?php
  $message = 'Incorrect password';
  if ($message) { ?>
  <script type='text/javascript'>
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Error', 'Sign In', '<?php echo $message ?>']);
  </script>
<?php } ?>

If it’s possible for the user to receive more than one error message on the page at a time (for example, if they’ve missed more than one field in a form), then you might want to store all of the messages in the same event tracker. Use an array, or concatenate them into the variable that you call in your event tracker. You might see that a user has attempted to skip all of the fields in a form; this could indicate that they are testing the form to see which fields are required and which are optional. You’ll notice this if you have tracked an event that includes all missing fields in the same event. However, storing all of the messages in the same event might prevent you from tracking the effects of individual error messages over time, so begin by tracking each error message separately.

404 Pages

You might already know how many times your 404 page is being viewed, but do you know which URLs the users were trying to reach, or what websites are referring to those URLs? By adding a tracking code to your 404 pages, you can see both. The following snippet will include the URL that generated the 404 error and the URL that linked to that page:

<script type="text/javascript">
  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Error', '404', 'page: ' + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + ' ref: ' + document.referrer ]);
</script>

Google Analytics Reports

As you track errors as events using Google Analytics, you will find a list of them in your reports under “Event Tracking,” under the “Content” menu. Choose “Categories,” and then start drilling down through your error types.

You can save any of these graphs to your dashboard with the “Add to Dashboard” button at the top of each screen. I find it useful to list the top 404 errors on my dashboard, so that I can see whether anything new has popped up when I log in.

Google Analytics also lets you know of spikes in error messages. The “Intelligence” section allows you to set an alert for when a certain metric reaches a specified threshold. In my case, I want to know when the number of unique 404 errors has increased by more than 20% over the previous day.

In your custom alert, set the alert’s conditions to include “Event Action,” matching your error’s name exactly. In this case, the error name is “404.” Set it to alert you when the “Unique Events” percentage increases by more than 20% over the previous day. Be sure to check the box for the option to receive an email when this alert triggers!

Once you have captured enough data to analyze, start creating these dashboard widgets and alerts in Google Analytics, so that you can make informed decisions on how to improve your website.

How To Analyze Errors

Error messages will help you see in aggregate the most common stumbling blocks for users. Are a lot of users encountering errors with a particular text field? Perhaps the field for the expiration date of their credit card? Or for their email address? You might be surprised by what your users encounter.

Segmenting Data

If your website gets a lot of traffic, consider segmenting the user base to analyze the error messages. Look for groups of users who make up the majority of a certain kind of error event, because there may be something unique about that segment.

“New Visitors” are first-time visitors to your website. They are likely unfamiliar with the typical flow of your navigation and are brand new to your forms and so don’t know what fields are required. “Returning Visitors” will likely be familiar with your website, so they may not have a large impact on error rates (unless you’ve changed something that catches them by surprise).

To change the user segment that you’re looking at, go to your list of error events and click the drop-down menu next to “Advanced Segments.” By selecting “New Visitors” and then hitting “Apply,” the data will update to show only the errors that “New Visitors” have encountered.

Break down your data on error messages according to user segment in order to analyze the data more deeply.

Segmenting users by country can also give more context. I once wrestled with why so many users were triggering error messages for ZIP and postal codes in a form. After organizing the data by country, I saw a high number of errors from one country whose postal-code syntax I hadn’t accounted for in my form’s validation. I fixed the error and saw the error rate for ZIP and postal codes drop.

Check errors by country to see whether any patterns emerge in your error messages.

Referring sources for 404 pages is another way to examine the data. Use the “Filter Event Label” search bar to show errors whose referring source is a particular domain. Searching your own domain first is useful to see which incorrect URLs you can quickly fix on your own website.

Prioritize Issues

After segmenting the data, prioritize the errors that you want to fix. The top priority will be errors that affect a large group of people (i.e. ones that have a high number of unique events). Next, work on the errors that you know you can easily fix. You likely already know the cause of some errors (poor validation, unhelpful error message, etc.), so clean those up. For 404 errors, check which referring links come from your website, and fix those.

Examine 404 errors to see whether any particular referring links can be easily fixed.

Once you’ve cleaned up the errors that are easy to fix, track the new data for at least a week before doing another round of prioritization. Examine what has changed in the top errors and where they come from, and then research the cause of those errors.

Often, forms will need to be made more intuitive to help users avoid error messages. For example, if a lot of users are making mistakes when entering a date, then play with that field. Does your user base prefer drop-down menus for days, months and years? Do they make fewer errors if given a date picker? Are you giving them helpful examples of the syntax they need to follow? Track your changes and measure the rate of error events after each change to see what decreases user error.

Improve Your Error Messages

Improving the text, design and layout of your error messages could decrease the number of repeated errors by users. An error message might not be clear or might be hidden on the page; improve the user experience by testing changes to your error messages.

I prefer A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of error messages and their designs. On one form, I noticed that a number of users were skipping the phone-number field altogether, even though I’d indicated that it was required.

Some of the indicators of a required field that we tested.

After A/B testing different ways to indicate that the field was required and why it was required, we found that the combination of a link and a tooltip helped users recognize the need to fill in their phone number. This solution drastically decreased the rate of errors for this field.

On 404 pages, test out different content on users: link to your most popular pages; present a search form; try humorous content or Easter eggs to lighten the users’ spirits.

As you test different textual and design changes to your error messages, be sure to measure their effectiveness. Examine the following:

Total error events, and total events per error message;

Unique events per error message;

Exit rates on pages with forms and 404 pages.

All of these rates should drop. Ideally, your users should find the website so intuitive that your error event data will represent only those who try to “beat the system.”

Conclusion

To sum up, track error messages and 404 pages as events in Google Analytics, and analyze the top error patterns. Prioritize the causes of errors, and continue to improve your forms and 404 pages to avoid errors altogether. Lastly, test changes in the content and design of error messages to see whether they decrease repeated errors. Improving your forms, 404 pages and error messages will improve your website’s overall user experience.

Additional Resources

“Event Tracking Guide,” Google Analytics

“A Primer on A/B Testing,” A List Apart

“Optimizing Error Pages: Creating Opportunities Out of Mistakes,” Smashing Magazine

“Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Examples,” Smashing Magazine

(al)

Supporting Your Product: How To Provide Technical Support

2011-10-11T14:32:00.000-02:00

Supporting Your Product: How To Provide Technical Support:

Whether your product is an open-source script, a Web application or a downloadable product, you will need to provide some form of technical support. This article explores the subject based on my experience of supporting our company’s product, Perch, a small content management system (CMS) that we sell as a download for people to install in their own hosting space. Our support has been a key factor in the success of this product, not just because users love responsive support, but because we have used what we have learned from users to improve the product.

Don’t Underestimate The Importance Of Support

As Eran Galperin says in “You’re Pricing It Wrong: Software Pricing Demystified” on Smashing Magazine:

“A commercial product that comes with support will often win over customers who want that assurance that someone will be on the other end of the line should they need it.”

Support can be a key selling point, a reason for a person to choose your product over the competition. In our case with Perch, the competition is often free software, so including unlimited support with a license is a big part of why someone might choose us over a competitor. Even for products aimed at technologically literate users, knowing that someone is on hand to answer questions or fix bugs can influence the decision to buy or sign up.

Don’t Underestimate The Time This Will Take

Users will always need support. You could have a bulletproof product and the most excellent tutorials and documentation, and someone will find a way to break it or just not read the information staring them in the face. Later in this article, I’ll explain some ways to minimize support requests and the time spent in dealing with them. But you should expect to offer support and build it into the price of your product.

Your support systems should also help you track the amount of time being taken up by support, so that you can plan for future requirements. If you are a small company whose product developers are supporting the product at present, knowing the amount of time each license or user requires for support on average will enable you to project when you might need to hire additional support staff.

Methods Of Providing Technical Support

When launching your product, decide how you will support it. Depending on the product and the people using it, you might offer some or all of the following types of support:

Phone,

Email,

Social media,

Ticketing system,

Real-time chat.

Phone

Supporting users by phone is time-consuming, but for some types of products, it can reassure potential buyers, particularly if they are not Internet-savvy or if the product handles sensitive information (for example, financial or health data). Users might trust the product more if they know they can speak to a real person. You can take phone support further by offering a remote-desktop feature to help customers right on their computer.

We chose not to offer phone support at Perch, because the support requests we get generally require us to look at a customer’s config file, diagnostic report or template code. So, an initial phone conversation would simply raise the cost of supporting customers, because we’d have to ask them to send this information by email or some other way.

If you do provide phone support, clearly state when it is available, including time-zone information. Also, keep track of the time you spend on this and the issues that customers raise so that you can combine it with the information that you collect via email or your online help desk.

Image source: Opensourceway.

Email

A lot of companies start with email support. Simply publish an email address, and answer queries as they come in. The advantages are that you don’t need any additional software, and everyone uses email. However, it gets tricky if you are not the only person supporting the product. If all of the support staff logs into the same mailbox, two people could very easily answer the same query, or a request could get ignored because everyone thinks someone else is dealing with it.

Email is also less than ideal for tracking requests over time and for working out the amount of time you spend dealing with them. You also need to be quite disciplined at filing away “closed” requests before your inbox descends into chaos.

If email is your predominant support mechanism, then consider setting up template responses to common requests, much as you would use canned responses in a help desk system (as I’ll describe below). Don’t forget to keep improving, adding to and correcting these responses as your website or product changes. Inadvertently giving out old advice is easy when these templates get out of date.

Social Media

Support via social media has become so important that many large companies are far more responsive on Twitter than via traditional means. Social media should be a part of your support system, but it shouldn’t be the only way that you help people. Being able to quickly respond to someone who is having a problem or has a question about your product is incredibly powerful. We have set up searches in our Twitter clients, so as soon as someone mentions Perch, we can respond. If a person mentions that they are trying out our demo, we simply say, “Let us know if you have any questions!” and we leave it at that. It is important that you not appear to hound potential customers; just give them a way to ask informally about anything on their mind.

If you have staff dedicated to support on Twitter, make sure they are empowered to help people. Many large companies have dedicated Twitter support personnel who only seem able to direct people to answers on the company website, which is often more frustrating than helpful! T-Mobile in the UK handles Twitter support very well via its @TMobileUKhelp account. Its support personnel is able to deal with most of the things that the phone-support operators handle, once the customer has verified their identity via direct message.

Small companies can do social media really well, often better than large companies. If a customer is using Twitter to vent their frustration, a couple of quick and helpful messages can turn them from “I’m so annoyed” to “Wow! Support for this product is amazing!” People are generally very understanding about problems as long as they can get help quickly.

A lot of support requests are hard to deal with on Twitter, though. For example, at Perch, many questions require us to see the user’s code or to ask them to try something. In these cases, you need to be able to direct them to another channel, whether a ticketing system or even an email address. Long discussions over Twitter tend not to be very helpful; so, unless I can answer the query in one or two messages, I point the user to our ticketing system or forum, where I can pick up the conversation and provide better information.

Ticketing System

I would suggest that anyone with a commercial product use some kind of ticketing system. This support system can often be combined with the methods listed above. For example, many systems can turn incoming emails into tickets, or can log phone sessions in a useful format, or have an interface where users can submit tickets directly.

Ticketing systems make the process of providing support easier when multiple staff members are involved, because you can see whether a request is being responded to and who is working on it. They also make it far easier to keep track of the support requests coming in and how much time they are taking up.

To use a real-world case study, when we launched Perch just over two years ago, we started using a hosted software-as-a-service system called Tender. Tender is a fairly lightweight system that allows users to submit tickets that are either public (visible and answerable by anyone, not just support staff) or private (visible only to support staff).

We were happy with Tender, except for a couple of issues. First, we didn’t want our ticketing system to function as a forum, so we set up a separate forum elsewhere. But this meant that people had to look in two places for answers: the forum and the ticketing system. Our documentation was also located elsewhere. Secondly, because anyone could view and respond to support queries, we often saw customers themselves replying to tickets submitted by other customers; often the advice was helpful, but sometimes it was incorrect or confusing, and customers couldn’t tell the difference between official responses and responses from well-meaning customers. There wasn’t a way to stop this from happening other than to make all tickets private.

It became obvious that Tender, while a good system, just didn’t suit the model we wanted to use for support. This, it turns out, is key when selecting a support system — far more important than the feature list. When looking for a support system, decide first how you want to support your customers, then assess each system against that model to see whether it fits.

Having decided that our initial choice of Tender wasn’t quite working out, we made a list of what we wanted in a support system:

A system with tickets and public forums all in one place (plus, the ability to publish documentation on the same system would be ideal);

Excellent support for multiple people responding to issues;

A system that can handle HTML and code examples being posted by customers and by us as responses;

Statistics to enable us to track tickets, response times and so on.

We started to research, and we asked on Twitter which support systems people liked. Zendesk quickly rose to the top of the list, and were it not for a long-standing issue with code formatting, we would probably have used Zendesk. I really liked the integration of social media in the product; however, while this was a nice to have, the problem with the code snippets was a deal-breaker.

We then looked at Assistly. It is another feature-rich system, but it felt a little too oriented around email and self-service for what we wanted. It felt a little impersonal in some ways, and our decision came down to it just not fitting our model and how we wanted Perch support to look and feel.

Finally we were pointed to HelpSpot. HelpSpot doesn’t have as many features “on paper” as the other two systems we looked at, but, crucially, it supports the combination of forums, tickets and documentation that we were looking for, thus enabling us to support customers the way we wanted. After trialling version 3 of the product, which was still in beta, we decided to move our tickets, forums and documentation to a self-hosted installation of HelpSpot.

All of the systems we looked at are good systems with excellent features. Ultimately, it came down to which best suited our model for providing support. Having figured that out before testing the systems in trial, we were able to choose more easily between them, and we are still happy with our choice a few months after having made the switch.

Real-Time Chat

Real-time chat-based support is a feature of some ticketing systems, and is also available as a standalone service (as with Olark). We do use this with Perch, although primarily for pre-sales queries rather than for actual support. Like Twitter, it can be a really good way to quickly answer a question, but for longer answers and code samples, dealing with people in the main support area is much easier.

Real-time support on websites can be helpful for companies that offer a service. With Olark, you can see exactly where someone is on your website as you are talking to them, so guiding someone through a potentially confusing process would be simple. It does, however, require that someone be available to provide this support should users come to rely on it. With a ticketing system, people expect some delay in getting a reply.

How To Reduce Support Requests And Time Spent Dealing With Them

You will never eliminate support requests completely, but you can do a lot to minimize them and to reduce the time you take in dealing with them.

Design Support Requests Out of Your Product

With Perch, we actively try to see support requests as an indication that something needs improvement or clarification in the product or related support material. By tracking requests and seeing where patterns emerge that show people running into problems in certain places, we are able to prevent the problem from occurring or provide better support material.

For example, before logging into your Perch admin account on your own website, you need to go to your account on the Perch website and specify the domain where Perch is installed. You can actually set two domains — the live and test ones — but before you can use Perch, you need to set at least one of these.

In the past, if you hadn’t set a domain in your account, then when logging in you got a message saying, “Sorry, your license key isn’t valid for this domain.”

People who didn’t fully read their email invoice might have missed the bit about setting up domains and so would have been confused when they saw this message, and thus submitted a support ticket. In an update to Perch, we changed this process so that if an administrator hadn’t yet entered any content, we could detect that they were a new user who just needed to configure their domains and so prompted them to do so (giving them the domain that they needed to register in their account). Support tickets were no longer submitted for this issue.

Designing support requests out of the product as much as possible obviously benefits us, because the less support we need to provide per license, the more profitable our product is. But it also gives our customers a better first experience with Perch. Being confused and needing support before even logging in isn’t a great first impression.

Build Debugging or Diagnostic Information Into the Product

Perch is a product that people download and install in their own hosting space. As you can imagine, we are now experts in the many bizarre ways that shared hosting providers configure PHP! We needed a way to get information from not very technical users about the environment in which they were running Perch. To do this, we created a diagnostics report that gives us a lot of information about the server that Perch is running on, which apps are installed, what their path to Perch is, and so on. The report, coupled with the user’s query, often gives us enough information to answer the support request right away.

Building in some diagnostic information that users can find and send to you could save a lot of back and forth, especially if your product or app is self-hosted and can be deployed in a variety of systems.

Add Features to the Product

If many of the people requesting support are asking about how to do something that your product doesn’t currently do, then it would be worth thinking about how you might accommodate this as a feature. While your ideas about what your product is and is not might be pretty fixed, you need to have some flexibility. In our case, Perch is “a really little CMS,” designed for small websites. When we launched, we thought that people wouldn’t need features such as undo, create drafts, edit drafts and previewing. It soon became apparent through support that our users very much wanted these features, and so we found a way to add them without bloating the software. Use your support requests to help guide development. Once it becomes obvious that someone is asking for something that Perch doesn’t do, we will often ask them, “How do you see this working?”

Provide a Range of Support Material

People learn how to use apps in a variety of ways. I like to read documentation and play around with code. For many people — especially visual learners — actually seeing things happen is much more helpful.

We were getting support requests from people who were obviously confused by our documentation. But we also heard people say how good our documentation was! What was going on? Blaming the first group for not understanding the documentation would be tempting — but once you decide to blame the user, you miss an opportunity to help people in different ways.

To help visual learners, we started a series of video tutorials. Currently, these videos just deal with the basics of using the product, but they have made a huge difference to the number of people we have to handhold through the website-building process. Frequently, we will point someone to the tutorial and then not hear from them again until we see the first post on their newly launched website. In the past, we might have seen a number of tickets from them during that process. The lesson here is to provide material in different formats and for different levels of users: bare documentation is important for technical users and for those who like to read quickly and get on with it; step-by-step examples and videos will help others.

Use a Support System That Lets You Create Template Answers

Often we need to ask people who request support for additional information, such as the diagnostics report mentioned above. HelpSpot lets us store these answers and punch them in as responses in one click, saving us time on the initial interaction. If you can reduce the time spent saying the same things, then you will have more time to dedicate to solving problems and working on the product.

Image source: Opensourceway.

How to Phase Out Support for Old Versions of a Product

If you sell desktop, phone or self-hosted Web software, rather than software as a service, you might need to consider what to do about supporting old versions of your product?

Traditional software companies tend to give users sufficient warning that support for an old product will end on a particular date. Security patches are often made available past that date if flaws are found in the old product, but no other fixes or changes are made. For example, Microsoft’s mainstream support for Windows XP Professional ended in 2009, although “Extended” support (which includes security patches) will continue until 2014.

The most important thing is to be fair to customers and give them plenty of notice of the end of a product version’s life. Your company needs to make decisions about the status of old versions far in advance of doing anything about it, and let customers know when support for an old version might end or be limited to critical security issues.

Some Final Thoughts

A question we are often asked at Perch is, “Is the support a nightmare?” It is all too easy for software developers to view support as a necessary evil, a part of the job to deal with as quickly as possible or even to outsource. If you approach support in this way, then you are missing out on a chance to make a real difference with people. You are also missing out on product improvements that you could have made by listening carefully to customer requests.

I firmly believe that software developers should provide their own support — perhaps not all of the support, if the product is popular or gets a lot of non-technical requests on the front line, but certainly some of it. It’s only by seeing the pain points firsthand and helping users through them that you can start figuring out how to solve them — and solving problems should be what we software developers do best.

Cómo instalar aplicaciones Android en Windows fácilmente

2011-10-11T14:29:00.001-02:00

Cómo instalar aplicaciones Android en Windows fácilmente:

Las plataformas móviles están adquiriendo cada vez más importancia hasta el punto de que es mucho más fácil encontrar utilidades concretas en estos entornos que en los de escritorio gracias a sus tiendas de aplicaciones. La posibilidad de portar las apps móviles al escritorio es una idea que muchos apreciarían, pues supone no modificar hábitos al entrar en casa desde la calle o al utilizar los mismos desarrollos y entornos en ambos mundos. Y esto último es posible gracias a BlueStacks App Player.

BlueStacks App Player es una herramienta para Windows 7 que permite ejecutar aplicaciones de Android. Se encuentra en fase inicial de desarrollo alpha y es totalmente gratuita, versión Pro con capacidades especiales llegará más adelante. La tecnología necesaria para que este ingenio funcione ha estado capitaneada por el ex CTO de McAfee y miembro directivo de Cloud.com Rosen Sharma. Su desarrollo ha tomado a 10 ingenieros dos años en total, pues han querido hacer las cosas bien desde un principio utilizando un método de virtualización que posibilita la ejecución de estas aplicaciones en modo de pantalla completa sin que eso perjudique a la usabilidad o a la resolución gráfica. Por ejemplo, las apps de Angry Birds o Fuit Ninja se visualizan a gran tamaño.

Nada más descargar el reproductor y ejecutarlo veremos que tenemos a nuestra disposición 10 aplicaciones pre-cargadas como Bloomberg, LivingSocial, Huffington Post y Creative Mobile y tenemos disponibles otras 26 para instalar desde la nube que irán aumentando conforme se siga trabajando con más desarrolladores de apps móviles que quieran sumarse al proyecto. Además hay una interesante funcionalidad en este widget y es la posibilidad de pasar aplicaciones desde nuestro teléfono al escritorio gracias a Cloud Connect, de ese modo no tendremos que volver a pagar por aplicaciones que ya hemos comprado para nuestro smartphone Android.

Estoy convencido de que propuestas como estas van a pegar muy fuerte en el futuro a medida que nos damos cuenta de que el rendimiento de las aplicaciones móviles tienen poco que envidiar a las de escritorio. En BlueStacks ya están trabajando en su adaptación para Mac y esperan alcanzar el millón de descargas en poco tiempo.

Content Marketing Challenge: How to Use your Resources Effectively

2011-10-11T14:29:00.000-02:00

Content Marketing Challenge: How to Use your Resources Effectively:

Time and time again, the challenge of a lack of resources gets in the way of an organization creating great content marketing.

I hear these two questions all the time:

What is the right team structure?
How do I get my coworkers or employees on board to participate?

In this post I will provide a few different solutions so that you know how to use your resources more effectively when it comes to content marketing.

Photo from AA Resources

First off, let’s talk about team structure.

Many startup and expansion stage companies have small marketing teams and they are trying to figure out how best to structure the team in order to work most effectively. I know this is a common issue for many companies because when we were planning this week’s Content Marketing Workshop with OpenView Senior Advisor Joe Pulizzi and CMI Lead Strategist Robert Rose the question came up several times. In their new book Managing Content Marketing (and in our workshop), Joe and Robert provide a team structure that they have seen work well in other organizations. Here are the roles at a high level: (Check out the book for details on the structure, including job descriptions).

Chief Content Officer or Manager – responsible for ensuring perfection in everything related to content marketing
Managing Editors – responsible for the “day-to-day execution” against the content marketing program
Content Creators – responsible for producing the content
Content Producers – responsible for designing the final content products
Chief Listening Officer – responsible for listening across all content and social media channels

Now, let’s talk about getting employees on board to participate.

Let’s face it, there comes a time when even the most dedicated content creators within your organization will fail to meet their commitments. It may be because other goals or commitments take priority over content creation. If you have been executing against a content marketing strategy for a few months, I have no doubts that you have had challenges getting people to blog or create other content. I say this with 100 percent certainty because we haven’t figured out how to completely remove this issue at OpenView! I have written about it a few times before (How to Get Everyone on Board with Content Marketing and More Answers to your Top Content Marketing Challenges), so here are a few more ideas we have tested or are considering:

Set real expectations and explain consequences: I have blogged about the importance of senior management explaining the value of the blogging program before, so this isn’t a new idea entirely. In addition to explaining the value, ensure that management explains exactly what is required and exactly what is at stake. For example, each employee is required to write two blog posts per month and in order to receive 15 percent of their bonus, each employee is required to meet that commitment at 100 percent. Anything less results in a smaller bonus.
Share ideas or themes to get the creative juices flowing: Often times, I hear that people just don’t know what to write about. They say that they are excited about blogging, but have no idea what story they want to share. It is really simple to get rid of this problem, especially in the short term. The CCO (or main content manager) should have a constant backlog of topics for blog posts, articles, ebooks, etc. as part of an overall editorial calendar. It should be up to him or her to sit down with every willing blogger to share ideas and empower new bloggers to write consistently. If you don’t have a robust editorial calendar, execute some keyword research to begin to identify topics that your target audience is interested in. A few ideas for blog posts are bound to come from that!
Determine when it makes sense to get help – While tapping into your coworkers for content is the most economical way to create content (not accounting for lost time while they are creating content), it isn’t always that easy to get people on board. Sometimes your coworkers/employees are just too busy with their day-to-day responsibilities! In this case, evaluate whether or not it is essential to have that person actively contribute. If it doesn’t, consider outsourcing the content creation to a freelancer, content platforms (such as Contently), or hire a capable intern to ghostwrite blog posts. Schedule regular meetings between the employee and the ghostwriter to share ideas and talk through blog posts. Who knows, you may find a valuable asset on your team who isn’t comfortable with writing, but excels with this model!

What do you think? How have you overcome resource challenges within your content marketing program?

Puede que Nike+ haya salvado mi vida.

2011-10-11T03:10:00.001-02:00

Aun no lo se. Esa problemática cuestión de la prestidigitacion hace imposible saber si realmente uno realmente iba a abandonar este mundo a manos de un problema cardíaco hasta que le toca. Pero si para cuando te toca tu corazón viene preparado entonces es mejor prevenir. Asi que haciendo conclusiones sobre mi genética y mi propensión a engordar fácilmente, con dulces, muchos dulces, y harinas, pah; decidí que tendría una buena red de seguridad para cuando el bombo fallase y al mismo tiempo no tener que abandonar el eventual cucharazo de dulce de leche. Esto potenciado por dos historias coetáneas que confirmaban la teoría de que mas vale ser un atleta. Empece por buscar un zapato que fuera de suela fina (no apoyar el talón antes), me había hecho pelota las rodillas corriendo con zapatos altos y esta vez fui por unos económicos Pegasus. Bien, al principio duele recuperarse de una década de sedentarismo, y prepararse para los próximos 10, pero vale la pena intentarlo. La endorfina es adictiva creo. Es lo que te hace ir y comprar un champion como el Vomero, y salir a despertar el esqueleto. Para motivarse a correr para mi fue esencial el apoyo de Nike+ y de RunKeeper al principio, que permitieron auto motivarme. Les doy un tip a los que no corren con zapatos Nike+ compatibles, el chip, lo pones en la lengüeta, y el Sportsband hace un lindo reloj, no sale nada comparado con la cuenta del Hospital. Si te das manija solo bien, pero si sos de pisartelas como yo, entonces vale la pena. Ahora ya hay un Sportsband con GPS para subir la ruta directamente a Nike+. El nombre de la misión es "Caminando a los 90". Vamos arriba que podemos, ahora en verano es una papa salir a la rambla y sudar. A no romperse las rodillas, pasar del Pegasus al Pegasus+ es bueno, pero si vas por asfalto el Vomero 6+ es como fisioterapia, mezclar zapatos funciona para que el pie no se adapte a uno solo, y siempre es bueno descansar tanto el zapato como la rodilla. En MVD, Vomero $3200 Pegasus $1490, Pegasus+ $1890, Sportsband + Sensor $2000

10 barbaridades informáticas más del cine y la TV

2011-09-15T16:20:00.000-03:00

10 barbaridades informáticas más del cine y la TV:

Tanto el cine como la televisión suelen tomarse ciertas licencias a la hora de contar historias que, en el fondo, lo que buscan es entretener al espectador. Sin embargo, fruto de estas licencias o de la ausencia de asesores, solemos ver en la pantalla algunas exageraciones relacionadas con la tecnología que a más de uno nos hacen estremecer en el asiento por su poca verosimilitud y la idea errónea que dan al espectador. No hace mucho revisamos diez barbaridades informáticas del cine y la TV en el que analizamos errores de películas como Independence Day, Mentiras Arriesgadas o series de televisión como Castle o CSI, que llegaban a rozar el esperpento y daban una idea bastante alejada de la realidad.

Hoy vamos a retomar esta temática y vamos a revisar otros diez errores o exageraciones del cine y la TV relacionadas, también, con el mundo de la informática.

El informático de CSI Miami

La saga CSI no se caracteriza por su rigor cuando toca temáticas relacionadas con la tecnología. Tan solo tenemos que ver algunos episodios para darnos cuenta de sus pantallas imposibles, cómo aporrean los teclados para realizar un zoom (que se podría hacer con el ratón) o la programación de “interfaces en Visual Basic” para localizar direcciones IP.

En esta ocasión, los chicos de CSI Miami se llevan a la escena de un crimen a un “experto informático” que es capaz de obtener, mediante la introducción de un pendrive (suponemos que en cualquier sistema operativo), todas las trazas del uso de un ordenador a partir del “rastro que queda en la memoria RAM” y, tras procesarla en su ordenador (que, lógicamente, no para de teclear) obtener el uso que se le ha hecho del equipo.

Es curioso cómo vemos en la imagen que el ordenador de la víctima es un iMac pero el interfaz que aparece en la pantalla es mucho más parecido a Windows XP que otra cosa pero lo verdaderamente inquietante es que el pendrive usb que usa este forense no se enchufa en ninguna parte, parece que lo va a conectar al teclado pero éste se cae y ¡se queda apoyado sobre la mesa!

Enemigo Público: haz zoom y gira la imagen

La película Enemigo Público (Enemy of the State) nos muestra la potencia de procesamiento que tienen los servicios de inteligencia estadounidenses que son capaces de ampliar la imagen de una cámara hasta límites insospechados o, llegado el caso, rotar la imagen de una cámara de seguridad para obtener una perspectiva distinta (sobre una grabación ya realizada):

Es impresionante cómo el personaje interpretado por Jack Black es capaz de discernir, por la sombra y la deformación de la bolsa, que el contenido de ambas es distinto. Todo gracias al zoom, a girar la imagen y a mejorarla “frame a frame”.

Firewall y la magia del iPod

En la película Firewall, Harrison Ford encarna el papel de un especialista en seguridad de sistemas y, claro está, con ese argumento, uno podría pensar que el guión estaría bien cuidado y la película habría contado con algún asesor experto en la materia. Yo creo que todos estos pensamientos se vienen abajo cuando nuestro protagonista acude a un banco armado de un iPod y un trozo de un escáner que, no se sabe cómo, es capaz de conectar (sin usar soldadura alguna) y convertirlo en un dispositivo que, pegado con cinta aislante a una pantalla, es capaz de capturar los números de cuenta de los clientes del banco:

10.000 canciones, 10.000 números de cuenta, no noto la diferencia.

El núcleo, hackeando todo el planeta

En esta pésima película de ciencia-ficción, los Estados Unidos desarrollan un arma para provocar terremotos que acaba parando el núcleo de la Tierra, lo cual da lugar a una serie de catástrofes naturales. Con el fin de arreglar el problema, el gobierno recluta a una serie de científicos para que se adentren en el núcleo y a un hacker para “borrar” cualquier filtración o rastro de lo sucedido por la red.

El hacker, de apodo rata, hace su aparición en la película y mediante un envoltorio de chicle que usa para silbar es capaz de enviar una señal a un operador móvil para obtener llamadas gratis:

Llamadas gratis para siempre, quién las tuviera.

CSI Nueva York y las miradas que dejan huella

Volviendo a la saga de forenses pero en su spin-off ambientado en Nueva York, el personaje interpretado por Gary Sinise se encuentra investigando un asesinato y cuenta con una grabación en la que se ve a la víctima pero no al asesino, algo que podría dejar cualquier investigación en punto muerto pero, en el caso de este equipo de forenses, se les puede ocurrir alguna idea para darle la vuelta al problema y encontrar alguna pista:

En el vídeo se dan cuenta que aparece la sombra del asesino, así que no tienen una imagen directa de él pero, teniendo en cuenta que nuestra visión se basa en el reflejo de las imágenes en la córnea, se puede intentar hacer un zoom sobre el ojo de la víctima en busca de una imagen nítida, por ejemplo, de su ropa.

Y pensar que alguna vez oí que CSI estaba dando demasiadas pistas a los delincuentes y éstos se estaban volviendo mucho más precavidos…

Las Vegas y la interpretación de la escala de grises

Esta serie de televisión, la verdad, nunca se ha caracterizado por un gran rigor técnico, de hecho, tan sólo tenemos que ver alguno de sus capítulos para darnos cuenta del alarde de zooms imposibles que se muestran en cada episodio. El casino en torno al cual gira la serie se caracteriza por unos avanzados sistemas de vigilancia que son dirigidos por James Caan, un ex-agente de la CIA, que, como era de esperar, es todo un experto en inteligencia. En esta ocasión, andan buscando a un individuo cuyo rostro estaba tapado por un pasamontañas y, lógicamente, su software de identificación de rostros no puede identificar a nadie teniendo como muestra, únicamente, los ojos y parte de la nariz del sospechoso. Veamos la solución al problema:

Efectivamente, si la imagen es el blanco y negro, por la escala de grises se puede adivinar el color exacto de los ojos y la tonalidad de la piel, información clave para buscar “esa mirada” entre la multitud. Viendo esto, se nota que el protagonista es un agente de la CIA jubilado.

Hackers, viajando a las entrañas de una computadora

De la película Hackers creo que lo único bueno que podemos decir es que una de sus protagonistas es Angelina Jolie porque, en cuestiones técnicas, la película es un completo desastre. Representaciones tridimensionales del interior de un computador que parecen el skyline de Nueva York, teclados imposibles, interfaces gráficos que parecen de una máquina recreativa de principios de los años 80… Todo un alarde de lo contrario a la realidad.

Unthinkable: desarmando una bomba nuclear usando Excel

Unthinkable es un thriller que gira en torno a un interrogador del FBI, Samuel L. Jackson, y su equipo, que andan a la caza y captura de un grupo terrorista que quiere hacer detonar unas bombas nucleares en Estados Unidos. Bueno, hasta aquí, el argumento de la película se sostiene un poco, sin embargo, a la hora de desactivar una bomba, estos agentes del FBI nos sorprenden con su método:

Efectivamente, Microsoft Excel (o cualquier otra hoja de cálculo) es la herramienta idónea para desactivar una bomba nuclear. Supongo que habrán utilizado una macro o habrán desactivado la bomba mediante el uso de tablas dinámicas porque, la verdad, no le encuentro otra explicación posible.

Ahora entiendo por qué me decían que saber manejar el Excel era tan importante, bien usado puede desactivar bombas nucleares.

CSI Las Vegas y la superposición de vídeos de YouTube

Asistir a un concierto que, por ejemplo, se grabe en vídeo puede ser nuestra perdición, bueno, más bien para aquéllos que hayan cometido un crimen porque los chicos del laboratorio de CSI Las Vegas son capaces de superponer el plano de un estadio con las entradas vendidas y con un vídeo de YouTube para identificar a los sospechosos de un crimen:

Y como no, un zoom sobre el fotograma del vídeo para poder leer el logotipo de la gorra de uno de ellos y facilitar la identificación.

El product placement con funciones imposibles: CSI Miami y Noche Loca

El product placement es la inserción de productos comerciales en series y películas para hacerles promoción (ya sea discretamente o de una manera mucho más directa). No es raro encontrar ordenadores (Apple en Independence Day) o teléfonos (terminales Nokia en El Santo o en Matrix) en muchas películas y dado que nos encontramos en la era del ebook y el iphone, ¿por qué no mostrar sus bondades en una película o en una serie de televisión? El problema no es mostrarlo sino que se muestre bajo un uso imposible.

El primer caso lo encontramos en CSI Miami donde, cómo no, se utiliza el iPhone para realizar un zoom imposible en un vídeo y, a través de un reflejo, localizar a un sospechoso:

Sabemos que el zoom en el iPhone funciona muy bien pero no creo que sea tan bueno como para poder distinguir un rostro en un reflejo.

Otro caso de uso imposible lo encontramos en Noche Loca (Date Night), donde el protagonista confunde un Kindle con un tablet y no hace otra cosa que introducirle una memoria usb para visualizar su contenido:

Epílogo

Tanto el cine y la TV buscan entretener al espectador y, al final, buscando impactar en el espectador acaban entrando en una dinámica de tópicos y erratas que se terminan repitiendo en muchas otras series y películas. Como homenaje a todos estos zooms imposibles, retoques en vídeos y descubrimiento de sospechosos a través de reflejos, sirva este vídeo resumen:

Seguramente se nos hayan quedado algunos errores más en el tintero, si conocéis algunos más hacédnoslo saber en los comentarios.

Google presenta Flight Search, su propio buscador de vuelos

2011-09-14T08:40:00.000-03:00

Google presenta Flight Search, su propio buscador de vuelos:

Google se mete de lleno en el mercado del turismo, con la presentación de su nueva herramienta Flight Search. Básicamente, Google nos permitirá buscar y reservar vuelos a través de Internet. Ayer, la compañía de Palo Alto presentó algunos de los detalles con los que contará Flight Search, a través de una demostración con vuelos para algunas ciudades de los Estados Unidos, como Los Angeles, Nueva York y Chicago.

Algunas de las compañías que ya están participando de Flight Seach son Delta, JetBlue, Continental y American Airlines. El anuncio fue oficializado a través del blog de Google, con la presentación de un video explicativo que pueden apreciar al final de este post. A partir de ahora, cuando escribamos, por ejemplo, “vuelos desde Nueva York a Chicago”, nos encontraremos con un link en la barra izquierda, que nos conducirá a Flight Search. Allí, podremos encontrar aerolíneas, horario de los vuelos, y tarifas.

Por supuesto, y hasta que se sumen más partners, el servicio estará disponible exclusivamente para Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, tiene todas las posibilidades de transformarse en global gracias a la utilidad que tendrá el servicio y las necesidades actuales del mercado de viajes, que aún no contaba con una herramienta de este estilo. El hecho de que esté integrado con Google también significa un gran atractivo para las aerolíneas.

En mayo pasado, Google había lanzado un servicio similar, pero sin enmarcarlo en una funcionalidad, como podemos ver ahora. La funcionalidad ahora es mucho más amigable para las personas interesadas en conseguir vuelos.

La llegada de Flight Search es algo natural, después de la adquisición de la compañía ITA Software hace cinco meses. Ya desde ese entonces, Google había insinuado que esta funcionalidad llegaría, también en un post de su blog. La verdad es que se trata de algo muy útil para encontrar en un buscador, dado que se eliminará mucho de lo engorroso de tener que buscar vuelos a través de Internet. Ahora, todo está centralizado en una sola barra.

Google ya nos tiene acostumbrados a actualizaciones constantes, y Flight Search es tan sólo una muestra de todo esto. Sabemos que Google no tiene problemas en eliminar a las aplicaciones que ya no le sirven o que entran en conflicto con otros de sus servicios, como pudimos ver en la eliminación de Slide de hace algunas semanas. Veremos si Flight Search logra posicionarse dentro del buscador como una de las herramientas más utilizadas.

De Bitelia: Windows 8, reimaginando el escritorio

2011-09-13T14:01:00.000-03:00

Windows 8, reimaginando el escritorio:

¿Qué hay mejor que empezar un mes con un nuevo sistema operativo en la mesa? Bueno, por lo menos encima de la mesa, porque no se puede comprar aún. Estamos en Build Windows, conferencia mundial para más de 5000 desarrolladores en la que Microsoft está mostrando el futuro Windows 8.

Durante ayer lunes hemos podido ver de primera mano cómo es y cómo funciona Windows 8, la nueva versión. Por ahora no tiene fecha de lanzamiento, pero seguramente tengamos una beta de desarrolladores dentro de muy poco para poder jugar con ella.

Windows 8 es una versión completamente reimaginada de Windows. Pasamos de Windows 7, un sistema operativo optimizado para ordenadores personales, a Windows 8, un sistema operativo cambiado desde el núcleo para que pueda funcionar con nuevos procesadores ARM en tablets o con tablets de procesador Intel (que existen), pero además está reimaginado para usarse en pantallas táctiles, y es ahí donde todo cambia para Windows 8.

La unión entre el escritorio (Windows 7) y la pantalla táctil (Windows Phone 7)

Desde el punto de vista más tradicional, va a ser realmente extraño para los usuarios de escritorio que usan un ratón y un teclado el nuevo Windows 8. Está optimizado para el uso de pantallas táctiles, sí, pero no hay ningún problema para usarlo con tu teclado y tu ratón de toda la vida.

Microsoft parece que ha visto, quizá algo tarde, cómo las pantallas táctiles están cada vez en más dispositivos, desde el smartphone que usamos todos los días antes incluso de poner un pie en el suelo, hasta ya algunos ordendores personales de escritorio que son capaces de tener grandes pantallas táctiles. Es por eso que Windows 8 cambia radicalmente de estilo.

Esta reimaginación pasa por un cambio radica en la forma que cuando entras a tu cuenta ves tus aplicaciones y ahí es cuando entra en escena el nuevo Start Screen, que no es una capa o una aplicación que funciona por encima de Windows como podría ser algunas interfaces que marcas de fabricantes de PC usan, sino que está integrado en el kernel de Windows, parte del shell.

Es la nueva primera pantalla que verás al entrar en Windows 8, donde se muestra un mosaico de aplicaciones (muy similar a Windows Phone 7) en la que éstas funcionan en pequeños cuadrados o rectángulos, mostrando continuamente información en vivo, desde nuevas fotos que cargas de tus redes sociales o tu blog favorito (léase Bitelia) con su último post.

Todos los cuadros son configurables y puedes moverlos de un lado a otro, creando pequeños grupos de aplicaciones, como por ejemplo añadir todas tus aplicaciones de vídeo en un grupo, un grupo con las últimas noticias de un puñado de blogs que leas siempre o tus contactos con los que más te pones en contacto en otro grupo diferente. De nuevo, el diseño de Start Screen es muy similar a Windows Phone 7, compartiendo transiciones, animaciones y características entre ambos.

Y es que seguramente lo que mejor describa Windows 8 es la unión entre el escritorio de Windows 7 y la interfaz de Windows Phone 7 para pantallas táctiles. Y sorprendentemente, lo han hecho muy bien.

Lo más interesante de Start Screen es que está desarrollado en poco más que HTML, CSS y Javascript, lo que va a hacer muy sencillo a muchísimos desarrolladores crear nuevas aplicaciones.

Veamos una por una algunas de las novedades.

Nuevas formas de login

¿Como entras en tu ordenador? Lo enciendes y si te preocupas un mínimo por la seguridad de tus datos, tendrás tu cuenta de usuario bloqueada con una contraseña, que normalmente es una palabra o una serie de caracteres. Una de las novedades en Windows 8 es el nuevo Picture Password, un sistema de desbloqueo de cuentas que usa gestos táctiles.

Es quizá bastante similar a los patrones de desbloqueo de Android, pero con un gran cambio, que no solo permite usar un patrón, también permite usar toques.

Todo se basa en configurar una foto personal como base para este nuevo patrón, por ejemplo piensa en la foto de la cara de una persona a la que tienes el suficiente cariño como para ponerla como pantalla de desbloqueo. En la configuración de desbloqueo puedes configurar que el patrón sea, por ejemplo el siguiente: toque en ojo izquierdo, toque en nariz, toque en ojo derecho y deslizar el dedo de la nariz al ojo derecho. Y con este gesto desbloqueas tu cuenta.

Es lo suficientemente complicado como para ser un patrón muy personal, tanto o más como una palabra o una frase. Pero claro, aquí es cuando entra un pequeño problema que tienen las pantallas táctiles, que puedes dejar un rastro en la pantalla que sea lo suficientemente visible como para “reconocer el patrón”. Lo bueno es que al menos funcionará igual de bien con un ratón, sin dejar ningún rastro en la pantalla.

Compartir es más fácil

Windows 8 incluye una nueva barra de información integrada en todas las aplicaciones y en el sistema operativo que se muestra en el borde derecho. Se muestra cada vez que pasas el mouse por el borde derecho.

Esta barra muestra unas pocas pero fundamentales opciones para el sistema operativo como son búsqueda, compartir, botón de inicio que te lleva a la Start Screen, dispositivos y configuración. Estas son las opciones básicas que necesitarás para funcionar con otras aplicaciones. Por ejemplo, mientras navegas usando el nuevo Internet Explorer 10 (y esperemos que para cuando Windows 8 salga a la venta el resto de operadores sea compatible con esta función) o mientras estás viendo una foto o un vídeo, con sacar este menú y pulsar sobre compartir, te permitirá elegir una aplicación, ya sea el email o una aplicación de una red social. Directamente desde una pequeña banda a un lateral de tu pantalla, sin perder el foco del contenido que quieres compartir, podrás enviar vía email usando servicios como Skydrive.

Es una de las características que más pueden gustar de Windows 8, poder compartir de una forma mucho más sencilla cualquier contenido que tengas en tu PC.

Multitarea, de forma más visible

Con la llegada de Metro, la interfaz gráfica de Windows 8 que ya está presente en Windows Phone 7, se añaden nuevas formas no vistas antes en los anteriores Windows para mostrar las aplicaciones. Microsoft, en un intento de unificar interfaces sea cual sea el terminal desde que estás trabajando, ha incluído una forma interesante de mostrar dos “aplicaciones Metro” abiertas, y es que una de ellas ocupará la mayor parte de la pantalla mientras que otra de ellas ocupa el resto, siempre siendo menor el porcentaje y pudiendo variar el ancho de cada pantalla.

Es más gráfico imaginárselo con dos aplicaciones, un vídeo reproduciéndose e Internet Explorer. El vídeo puede ocupar una parte pequeña de la barra lateral, mientras que el navegador ocupa más espacio mientras estás navegando por internet.

Esto no quiere decir que la multitarea tal y como se conoce en Windows acabe, para nada. Hay que diferenciar que ahora Windows tiene dos tipos de aplicaicones, las que todos conocemos y hemos usado hasta ahora en las que ejecutas Setup.exe y ahora las “aplicaciones Metro”, especialmente diseñadas para funcionar bajo “Start Screen” y que se instalan desde la tienda de aplicaciones.

Windows Store

Windows 8 integrará una tienda de aplicaciones propia, algo que se lleva rumoreando desde hace bastante tiempo en internet, aunque las primeras informaciones fueron falsas porque se mostraba una tienda de China y no una tienda oficial. Lo cierto es que Windows 8 integrará su propia tienda de aplicaciones.

Es simple, su belleza reside en que es una “aplicación Metro” construida con las mismas herramientas que los desarrolladores tienen a su alcance.

La tienda de apps de Windows 8 incluye las funciones que hemos podido ver en la Mac App Store de Apple, es decir, sincronización de tu cuenta de Windows Live y con tus diferentes máquinas. Si compras una aplicación en uno de tus ordenadores, la licencia automáticamente se guarda en tu ordenador y se puede descargar desde otro ordenador, sin tener que comprar de nuevo la aplicación.

Aplicaciones en Windows 8

Como decía un par de líneas más arriba, que Windows 8 tenga las nuevas “aplicaciones Metro”, no quiere decir que el resto de aplicaciones no vayan a funcionar bien. Al contrario, algo que promete Microsoft es que todas las aplicaciones de Windows 7 podrán funcionar sin problemas en Windows 8.

La diferencia es que ahora hay una nueva forma de crear aplicaciones mucho más simples y optimizadas para la nueva interfaz principal.

Pero al contrario que las aplicaciones tradicionales, las “aplicaciones Metro” funcionan de tal forma que toda la pantalla es para la aplicación, no hay barra de herramientas, ni barra de Windows, el 100% de la pantalla es para la aplicación y eso es una gran noticia para que te centres en ella y no en otros elementos que te despistan. No se puede negar que hay cierta similitud con OS X Lion, que también es capaz de mostrar las aplicaciones en pantalla completa, mostrándote solo esta aplicación y centrarte en ella.

¿Qué pasa con el escritorio?

Pero… ¿dónde está el escritorio de Windows? ¿Ese, el que he usado toda la vida? ¿Qué ha sido de él? Antes de que te pienses pasar a alguna otra plataforma, tranquilidad, el escritorio de toda la vida está ahí, donde siempre. Windows 8 será configurable, inicialmente te mostrará la nueva interfaz Metro, pero si eres de las personas más puritanas, o por qué no, para las empresas que no quieren tener estas opciones en sus ordenadores, se podrá desactivar que se muestre al inicio. No es que se pueda desinstalar, ya que esta nueva interfaz está integrada en todo el sistema operativo.

Algo que cambia por completo en el escritorio es el botón de Windows, que ya no es un menú, es acceso directo a “Start Screen”, aunque con el botón derecho seguirá mostrando un menú conextual con opciones.

Se han renovado aplicaciones conocidas por todos nosotros, como el Gestor de tareas que ahora muestra más información de tareas activas y nuevos gráficos más detallados. También tenemos una nueva visión avanzada a la hora de copiar archivos, mostrando un gráfico de la transferencia de los archivos en tiempo real.

Nuevo menú “Ribbon” en el Explorador

Esta ha sido una de las características más comentadas de las filtraciones sobre la interfaz de Windows 8 en su forma más tradicional heredada de Windows Vista o Windows 7. Windows ahora incluye en todas sus aplicaciones (excepto Internet Explorer), incluido el Explorador, el menú “Ribbon”. Para los no familiarizados con el nombre, es el menú configurable con acciones que se puede encontrar, por ejemplo, en aplicaciones como Pain o las aplicaciones de Office.

Ha sido duramente criticado porque aumenta muchos píxeles de altura a una barra, aunque en realidad no reduce la visibilidad de archivos porque se ha quitado la barra inferior de información. Seguramente aquí la mayoría de las personas sean tajantes: o te gusta o lo odias.

La buena noticia sobre Ribbon en el Explorador de Windows es que se puede esconder sin ningún problema y añadir algunos píxeles de visibilidad para archivos. Pero la idea de Ribbon es el poder tener todas las opciones más comunes a la vista y no tener que aprender atajos de teclado o usar menús, un simple click es suficiente para hacer una acción.

Personalmente veo que Microsoft con Ribbon ha dado un giro en su política de hacer el sistema operativo más sencillo a más difícil de entender. Seguro que Ribbon es mucho más sencillo si por ejemplo quieres mover unos archivos y hacerlo con dos simples clicks, pero es demasiada información, e incluso algo desordenada. Debes de prestar mucha atención a una barra y buscar un botón que hace un comando que deseas. Hay mejores formas de mostrar acciones, los menús son una de ellas. Pero claro, en este tipo de temas y como digo antes, o eres un fiel de Ribbon, o lo detestas.

Internet Explorer 10

Es muy curioso lo que Microsoft ha hecho con Internet Explorer en Windows 8, se podría decir que en Windows 8 existen dos navegadores Internet Explorer 10, uno que ejecutas con estilo Metro desde Start Screen y otro que abres desde el escritorio regular. Son dos aplicaciones idénticas excepto en la interfaz, ya que en la “versión Metro” podemos ver como ha heredado el diseño de Internet Explorer que llega en Windows Phone 7 “Mango”.

Con una gran barra superior donde podemos ver las pestañas que tenemos abiertas y en la parte inferior la barra de direcciones, es una opción que sólo se muestra cuando se está en pantalla completa. Pero son dos aplicaciones separadas, porque no se sincronizan de una forma en la que si pasas desde Internet Explorer “en formato Metro”, no se verá en la versión de escritorio tradicional.

Es evidente que el mundo de las tablets ha tenido muchísimo impacto en los dos sistemas operativos principales, Windows y Mac OS X, ya que ambos han implementado ideas, o directamente como parece el caso de Windows 8, integrar toda una interfaz.

Y todo esto es sólo una pizca de las novedades de Windows 8, que veremos más adelante gracias a las betas que Microsoft irá lanzando poco a poco.

The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience Strategy

2011-09-13T13:02:00.000-03:00

The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience Strategy:

I was a competitive road cyclist for four years. My bikes were good, but my race results were much less impressive. Instead of medals and trophies, all I had to show for it were shaved legs and a farmer’s tan.

Regardless, on the road to becoming a competitive athlete, I followed a rigorous training plan with concrete goals. These goals were specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. With this training plan, I was able to quantitatively and qualitatively assess my progress and adjust my routine to match.

(Image: Stig Nygaard)

In the years since, I’ve hung up my racing jersey and replaced it with a designer’s hat. While wearing this hat, I (and many others) have been told to “create a good user experience.” We’ve heard this in creative briefs, project kick-off meetings and critiques. It may have been a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation or uttered by someone trying to sell a client or company on the value of their services. But there’s a fundamental problem with stating that your goal is to “create a good user experience.”

It’s not specific, directly measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable. Thus, it will create disagreement and disorganization, sending many projects into chaos. However, we can avoid this by using S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting criteria when defining user and business goals.

Bad Vs. Good Methodology

Before we get started, let’s look at how a poor methodology can derail an entire project.

There was once a project to redesign a significant section of a company’s website. This section introduced visitors to the brand’s history and technology, and analytics indicated that customers who visited this section had a much higher conversion rate. Stakeholders believed that improvements to the content and navigation could result in even higher conversions. This was seen as a golden opportunity to increase sales by improving the awareness and presentation of the brand’s story. Thus, a complete project to redesign this section of the website was born.

Here is a summary of the project from the stakeholders’ perspective:

High-level project goal

Increase conversions and sales.

High-level project strategy

Leverage the history and technology section of the website.

High-level project tactic

Improve the content and navigation of the section to increase user engagement, better communicate the benefits of the products, and drive users into the conversion funnel.

Unfortunately, rather than communicate this to the design team, the goal for this redesigned section of the website was presented as follows:

Create a good user experience.

Sigh. There’s that phrase again.

The Problem

The designers were given a nebulous tactic masquerading as a goal. This meant that they had minimal understanding of the true objective of the project, which put them in a poor position to understand the problem and to hone the strategy and tactics to solve it.

To make matters worse, the lack of well-defined high-level goals, strategies and tactics made it difficult for the designers to define the architecture of the experience, in turn making it nearly impossible to set user goals and business goals for every page that needed to be designed.

(Image: numberstumper)

To make a long story short, the designers spent four months working through unsuccessful concept pitches and design revisions. The concept behind the designs constantly changed, and the content and features failed to support a cohesive user story. Meanwhile, designers and stakeholders had different expectations of what this section of the website was meant to accomplish, so solutions rarely satisfied both parties. Nobody knew the needs of the user, and the needs of the business were but a neglected thought in the shadow of “creating a good user experience.”

After these four months, there was zero progress. Not only was the project’s situation dire, but the lack of approved and delivered work was eroding the team’s morale. With no concrete user or business goals to satisfy, the team aimlessly pursued a “good user experience.” It was like being told to drive but not given a destination.

The Solution

I was subsequently pulled into this team as the project and design lead. My first priority was to bring awareness and understanding of the high-level project goals, and then lead the team through a comprehensive exercise to document the user goals. Although we didn’t have access to detailed user studies and customer information to create data-driven personas, we did our best with anecdotal experiences, competitive analyses, and website analytics to create user goals for each page. We then worked with the cross-functional teams to understand the business goals and KPIs.

Using these goals, I led the designers to write thorough content and feature requirements. The benefit to this approach was that all content and features were made to serve documented user or business goals. This encouraged product simplicity and reduced scope creep. These goals and requirements were then reviewed and refined with all stakeholders. Once expectations were universally understood and accepted, the team proceeded to create the architecture, interactions and designs.

This comprehensive methodology took less than three months. But the magic is not the methodology itself, but the discipline to identify concrete goals that satisfy five basic criteria.

UX S.M.A.R.T. Goal Criteria

As I mentioned earlier in my competitive cycling example, my improvement as an athlete was based on goals that each met the five criteria of the S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting technique:

Specific,

Measurable,

Attainable,

Realistic,

Time-based.

This technique can be applied to documenting the criteria for user goals and business goals:

Specific,

Measurable,

Actionable,

Relevant,

Trackable.

With these criteria in mind, what would be considered a S.M.A.R.T. goal?

S.M.A.R.T. User Goal Examples

Let’s use the product detail page for a fictional e-commerce website to illustrate. A product detail page is a page on which shoppers can learn more about a product for sale and add it to their shopping cart. It typically includes images of the product, the price, a description, and an “Add to Cart” button. Here is an example from a well-known fruit company:

The product detail page for earbuds in the Apple Store. Notice the images, price, description and “Add to Cart” button.

Based on a competitive analysis of many e-commerce product detail pages (and on personal experience from working with and studying how consumers make purchasing decisions), here are some user goals for the product detail page of a fictional e-commerce website.

Primary user goal (UG1):

I want to learn more about this product’s design, features and specifications to determine whether it fits my budget, needs and preferences.

Secondary user goal (UG2):

I want to purchase this product.

These goals meet the UX S.M.A.R.T. goal criteria because they are:

Specific

By stating exactly what the user needs to accomplish, these goals help us maintain scope and stay focused on designing content and functionality that is critical to our user’s success.

Measurable

For the primary goal, we can measure clicks to determine how users are engaging with the content. Alternatively, one-on-one interviews or customer surveys could provide qualitative insight into whether your content is relevant to the user’s interests. For the secondary goal, we can measure the percentage of visitors to the page who click “Add to Cart.”

Actionable

Because the goal is specific, we can readily identify content and functionality that satisfies the user’s goals. In this example, because users want to learn more about the product’s design, large product images should be included.

Relevant

These goals are appropriate for a product detail page, but not for a return policy or terms and conditions page. By keeping the goals highly relevant, the content and features that we introduce to satisfy those goals will be relevant, too.

Trackable

There’s no point being measurable if the data cannot be tracked over time. This is essential to determining the immediate, short-term and long-term success of our design and its future iterations.

In contrast, here’s a DUMB user goal:

I want a Web page that’s easy to use. (i.e. I want a good user experience.)

That’s not a witty acronym, and it doesn’t hide the fact that this user goal is not specific, measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable. It fails all five criteria because it fails the first: specificity. A good user experience has many facets, and without targeting a specific aspect of the page or product experience, there’s no action (strategy and tactic) to address it. If a goal is not actionable, then it has no reason to exist because there is no end towards which effort and action can be directed. Similarly, if the goals are not measurable, then there is no way to gauge the successes or failures of our actions, and subsequently no way to understand the product’s performance over time.

S.M.A.R.T. Business Goal Examples

UX S.M.A.R.T. goal criteria can also be applied to business goals. They are particularly relevant because businesses are run by numbers: number of clicks, number of customers, number of dollars, the list of measurable metrics continues. So, let’s take real-life business goals for the same product detail page of our e-commerce website as an example:

Primary business goal (BG1):

We want to increase the ratio of add-to-carts to page views for the product detail page to x%.

Secondary business goal (BG2):

We want to increase cross-sells to y% of total add-to-carts.

Just like the preceding user goal examples, these business goals meet the UX S.M.A.R.T. goal criteria because they are:

Specific

By stating exactly what metrics the design needs to affect, these goals help us maintain scope and stay focused on designing content and functionality that will put us in a position to hit our targets.

Measurable

For the primary goal of increasing conversions, we can measure the number of page views and how many resulted in an add-to-cart. For the secondary goal of increasing cross-sells, we can measure the number of clicks on cross-selling products.

Actionable

Because the goals are specific, we can create more targeted strategies to accomplish them. For the primary goal of increasing add-to-carts, this could mean making the content on the page more relevant to users’ goals, or something as simple as improving the success of the add-to-cart button. For the secondary goal of increasing cross-sells, this could entail changing the visibility of cross-selling items (assuming we have already done a good job of selecting which related products to promote).

Relevant

The relevance of this goal depends on the high-level objectives of the project. If the objective is to reduce the number of customer support calls each day, then this goal might not be relevant. But if the objective is to increase total sales revenue across all products, then it is very relevant.

Trackable

We can count the number of page views and add-to-carts over an extended period of time.

By contrast, here’s a dumb business goal for the product detail page:

I want to make more money.

This is a poor business goal because it’s not specific and might not be relevant to this page at all. There are many ways to make more money, and without specificity in the strategy to accomplish this, creating a successful plan of action will be much more difficult. Remember, if a goal is not actionable, then it has no reason to exist because there’s no end towards which effort and action can be directed.

UX S.M.A.R.T. Goals Applied

So, now we understand the criteria behind well-defined S.M.A.R.T. goals and have applied them to the user and business goals for the product detail page of a fictional e-commerce website. How can we use this to our advantage as we move forward with the architecture and design of the page?

Associated Content and Feature Requirements

Because the goals we’ve defined are specific and actionable, we are able to propose content and features that directly satisfy them. Let’s revisit the four high-level goals of our product detail page and attach appropriate requirements to them.

Primary user goal (UG1):

I want to learn more about this product’s design, features and specifications to determine whether it fits my budget, needs and preferences.

Content and features required to satisfy this goal:

Relevant images that represent the product as a whole;

Relevant images (such as enlarged views and alternate angles) that show the product in detail;

General description that provides a brief overview of the product’s purpose and benefits;

Specifications that are relevant to consumers of this product type;

Product variations or options (such as color, size);

Selling price.

Secondary user goal (UG2):

I want to purchase this product.

Content and features required to satisfy this goal:

Selector for product variations or options;

Customer satisfaction guarantee (such as return policy, privacy policy);

Quantity selector;

“Add to Cart” function.

Primary business goal: (BG1):

We want to increase the ratio of add-to-carts to page views for the product detail page to x%.

Content and features required to satisfy this goal:

Reference user goal 1,

Reference user goal 2.

Secondary business goal (BG2):

We want to increase cross-sells to y% of total add-to-carts.

Content and features required to satisfy this goal:

Related products that the user might also be interested in (for example, if the user is looking at the detail page for a small digital camera, recommend a small case to put it in).

Because everything must serve a documented goal, scope creep during the project’s lifecycle is reduced. This is not to suggest that content and features beyond these goals cannot be included. Components such as global navigation or a site-wide search box might be required even though they are not the purpose of the page. Determining what belongs on a page is admittedly not as black and white as these example might lead one to believe.

That said, setting content and feature requirements based on S.M.A.R.T. goals does help to determine the visual hierarchy of information on the page. This is extremely helpful during the wireframing stage.

A wireframe for the product detail page of a fictional e-commerce website. The user goals (UG1 and UG2) and business goals (BG1 and BG2) correspond to those outlined above. Download the complete wireframe for this example.

As we can see in the above annotated wireframe, the content and features that satisfy primary user and business goals (labelled UG1 and BG1) are more prominent in scale and placement than those that satisfy the secondary goals (UG2 and BG2).

Now, having applied S.M.A.R.T. goals across the planning and architectural phases of a project, we can see the benefits of this UX strategy, as follows:

Goals are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and trackable.

Because the goals are specific and actionable, we can attach appropriate content and feature requirements to each one. Because the goals are relevant, these requirements are relevant, too.

The hierarchy of the content and features is determined by the hierarchy of the goals that they are attached to. This informs the architecture of the wireframes.

With these benefits in mind, we can begin to understand how this positively affects other stages in the project’s lifecycle:

Wireframes with well-informed structures and content are solid foundations on which to design higher-fidelity mock-ups.

Because the goals are measurable and trackable, we can determine the success of the design during testing, learn from it, and make improvements in subsequent iterations.

Ultimately, these all contribute to our ability to understand the problem and craft an appropriate strategy and tactic to solve it. Our discipline in gaining focus in the earliest stages of a project will determine our ability to maintain focus when designing the functional aspects of the product at the end.

Conclusion

A great user experience is the result of setting concrete goals that meet both user goals and business goals. Unfortunately, I have seen many teams kick off a project with nothing more than a goal of, “Let’s create a great UX!” While a noble thing to strive for, it’s not specific, actionable or measurable. It contributes nothing to the planning or design phases, and it is the UX equivalent of a motivational high-five.

(Image: Dickson Fong. Original artwork: Banksy.)

Banksy once said:

“Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Fame is a byproduct of doing something else. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.”

Likewise, a good user experience is the byproduct of many brand, product, design and development decisions. As designers, we must collaborate with our clients and ensure that we thoroughly understand the needs of their business and target audience. Only then can we be empowered to create appropriate strategies and tactics to achieve them.

So, don’t try to “create a good user experience.” Create a S.M.A.R.T. one.

Additional Resources

“Locke’s Goal-Setting Theory,” MindTools

A brief overview of Dr. Edwin Locke’s research on goal-setting and motivation, explaining how goals provide a major source of motivation and improve employee performance.

“What Does Usability Mean: Looking Beyond ‘Ease of Use’,” Whitney Interactive Design

Explains how user needs can be translated into user goals and requirements that are specified within a range of acceptable values.

“Defining Actionable and Business-Driven KPIs,” Kaizen Analytics

Explains how to define actionable business-driven KPIs based on business goals.

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Is your Sales Incentive Structure Fulfilling Its Purpose?

2011-09-10T02:03:00.000-03:00

Is your Sales Incentive Structure Fulfilling Its Purpose?:

Image provided by: brainsnorkel.com

Good customers are hard to come by, but when treated right they will reward your business with unconditional loyalty. So why then do so many companies take these customers for granted and elect to disregard and/or de-prioritize customer expectation management in their sales processes? The reality is that too many companies have sales teams that think short-term and are incentivized to do so through poorly designed sales incentive structures.

Here are 6 suggestions on how to design a sales incentive structure that motivates a team to execute against the short-term and long-term goals of an organization:

Plan ahead: Define the sales strategy and what the business is trying to achieve in the next year (short-term) and in the next 5 years (long-term) prior to designing the sales incentive structure. This information will be important in identifying the most important and effective metrics to target for individual and team commissions and bonuses. If you don’t, your sales management team will be trying to identify target metrics without really understanding what their target is.

Strategically select Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Your team should target no more than 3 KPIs, as you want to keep your team focused on the short-term and long-term organizational goals that matter. Each KPI should be tied to one or more of the organization’s short and long-term goals and they should not overlap too much with other targeted metrics in the incentive structure. This will encourage the sales manager(s) and sales representatives to execute against all of the targeted metrics, so that they can maximize their total compensation.

Evaluate the costs and benefits of each compensation design option: There are 3 primary decisions in designing an effective compensation program.

The first decision you need to make is how much you want to leverage your sales team. By increasing compensation leverage, you increase your ability to influence sales representative and sales manager actions through incentives. However, a highly leveraged compensation structure generally enables an individual to earn more money if they perform well, so it can increase the total cost structure of your sales team. All sales teams should be leveraged to at least a small degree, so that you have a tool other than fear to influence their actions.

The second decision you need to make is how you want to divide incentive pay into individual and team based incentives. To encourage teamwork, it is recommended that at least part of the variable pay is allocated to team based commission or bonus offerings. However, it is important to also maintain individual performance commission and bonus incentivizes as well, so that individuals are incentivized to work hard and follow best practices.

The third decision that needs to be made is how to structure each incentive. Most incentives can be structured as either a commission or a bonus. However, it generally makes sense to structure aggregate metrics as commissions and percentage metrics as bonuses. For example, total contract value is a metric that generally works best as a commission percentage and first-year customer retention percentage generally works best as a targeted bonus.

Select achievable goals: Pick attainable KPI targets that will inspire your team to work hard and follow best business practices. Setting metric targets that are rarely reached can actually discourage best practice behavior because the sales teams may write-off the bonus or commission opportunities as unachievable and decide to only pursue some of the targeted metrics. Maintaining lofty variable pay targets over several bonus periods will also damage employee morale and will eventually lead to employee retention problems that will affect the stability of your company’s sales organization. Conversely, setting targets that are too easily achieved can also be problematic as it will signal to the sales representatives that they are easily meeting expectations and there is no need to further push themselves. The key is to identify an achievable target that pushes the team to work hard, but is still regularly reached by a significant percentage of the sales staff.

Set clear expectations: Make sure the total compensation algorithm is clearly defined in the sales manager and sales representative contracts and regularly reviewed with the team alongside individual, team and organizational goals. Be sure to explain how the targeted KPIs tie into the overall goals of the organization. This will establish clear expectations for all parties and help them better understand the vision of the sales organization.

Update incentive structure as needed: As with anything sales incentive structures need to be reviewed quarterly and reconfigured to reflect changes in organizational goals and strategies.

These sales incentive structure design recommendations are intended as an introduction. I highly recommend reading Inc’s guide on How to Set Up a Sales Compensation Plan before attempting to design or re-design your sales team compensation program and incentive structure. I also recommend reading my previous post on unethical sales practices that sales teams can succumb to if they are not incentivized to evaluate customer opportunities from a short-term and long-term perspective.

Building Better Software Through Collaboration: Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

2011-09-06T12:02:00.000-03:00

Building Better Software Through Collaboration: Whose Job Is It, Anyway?:

In part one of this series, we looked at the consequences of designing and developing software in isolated environments. Some people work in lonely silos where no process exists, while others work in functional silos where too much (or the wrong) process makes innovation and progress difficult.

So, how do we break down the artificial walls that keep us from creating great things together? How can organizations foster environments that encourage natural, unforced collaboration?

There are no quick fixes, but these are far from insurmountable problems. I propose the following five-level hierarchy as a solution:

There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.

Let’s look at each of these levels.

Level 1: Make Sure Everyone Understands The Problem

Photo credit: TransGriot

Most organizational leaders would probably admit that collaboration is not as good as it should be, but they might try to solve the problem incorrectly. As Louis Rosenfeld recently said in “The Metrics of In-Betweenness”:

Many senior leaders recognize the silo problem, but they solve it the wrong way: if one hierarchical approach to organizing their business doesn’t work, try another hierarchy. Don’t like the old silos? Create new ones. This dark tunnel leads to an even darker pit: the dreaded — and often horrifically ineffective — reorg.

The first level is admitting that there’s a problem and that the current problem-solving methods just aren’t working. This isn’t about moving branches of the organizational tree around. It’s about planting the tree in more fertile ground to establish the right foundation in order to start looking for solutions.

Level 2: Empower Teams To Do Great Work

Once the organization is united around a common understanding of the problem, then the starting point for breaking down silos is to take a healthy look at the culture and work environments. Above all, the needs of makers (such as designers and developers) should be taken seriously by managers (those who direct and enable the work). Mike Monteiro takes on this issue by attacking the calendar in “The Chokehold of Calendars”:

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

Paul Graham takes a more holistic view in “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” He explains that managers break their days up into hour-long stretches of time, while makers need large blocks of time in order to focus:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces, each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

Makers need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get things done, and get them done well. Most siloed environments don’t support this because of an insatiable need for everyone to agree on everything (more on this later). So first, helping managers understand why this is such a big deal for makers is important, so that the managers can effect cultural change.

Michael Lopp talks about this in his article “Managing Nerds.” Substitute the word “nerds” in this article with “designers and developers” (no offense intended). Michael describes how nerds are forever chasing two highs.

The first high is unraveling the knot: that moment when they figure out how to solve a particular problem (“Finally, a simple way to get users through this flow.”). But the second high is more important. This is when “complete knot domination” takes place — when they step away from the 10 unraveled knots, understand what created the knots and set their minds to making sure the knots don’t happen again (“OK, let’s build a UI component that can be used whenever this situation occurs.”).

Chasing the Second High is where nerds earn their salary. If the First High is the joy of understanding, the Second High is the act of creation. If you want your nerd to rock your world by building something revolutionary, you want them chasing the Second High.

And the way to help designers and developers chase the second high is to “obsessively protect both their time and space”:

The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs.

So, how do you change a culture built around meetings and interruptions? How do you understand what designers and developers need in order to be effective, and how do you relentlessly protect them from distractions? Here are two ways to start:

Ask the makers what’s missing from their environment that would help them be more effective.

Find out what your designers and developers need, and then make it happen. A quiet corner to work in? Sure. A bigger screen? Absolutely. No interruptions while the headphones are on? Totally fine. Whatever it takes to help them be as creative as possible and to be free to chase that second high.

Start working on a better meeting culture.

This one is a constant struggle for organizations of all sizes, and there are many ways to address it. I try to adhere to two simple rules. First, a meeting has to produce something: a wireframe, a research plan, a technical design, a strategic decision to change the road map, etc. Secondly, no status meetings. That’s what Google Docs and wikis are for (agile standups are an exception to this, for reasons best left to a separate article).

Level 3: Create A Better Design And Development Lifecycle

Once a team is optimized for creativity, then it becomes possible to build appropriate guidelines around that culture to take an idea from vision to shipped product. This includes the development process as well as the prioritization of projects, so that you only work on things that are important.

The Design And Development Process

Formalizing the design and development process is so critical: from the identification of user, business and technical needs, to the UX design cycle, to technical design and, ultimately, to development, QA and launch. By formalizing this process based on a common understanding of the needs of the business, the team will have no excuse for skipping the UX phase of a project because “it would take too long.” By providing different scenarios for whatever timelines are available, the team ensures that design and UX always remain a part of the development lifecycle.

But one particular aspect of the development process has a direct impact on organizational silos: ensuring the right balance between design and engineering, and how designers and developers work together. This isn’t explored enough, yet it can have far-reaching implications on the quality of a product.

Thomas Petersen describes the ideal relationship between designers and developers in “Developers Are From Mars, Designers From Venus”:

They are the developers who can design enough to appreciate what good design can do for their product even if it sometimes means having to deviate from the framework and put a little extra effort into customizing certain functionality. If they are really good developers they will actually anticipate that they have to deal with it and either use a framework that allows them be more flexible or improve the framework they prefer to work in.

And they are the designers who learn how to think like a programmer when they design and develop an aesthetic that is better suited to deconstruction rather than composition. They know that composition in the Web world is not like composition in the print world and that what they are really doing is solving problems for customers, not manifestations of their creative ego.

Beyond the usual discussion of whether designers should be able to code, one of the main causes of bad blood between the groups is that developers are rarely asked what they need in order to write the best possible code. Designers should always ask their development teams two questions:

“How would you like to contribute to the product development process?”

It is amazing how few people actually ask this question, as is how the opinions of the people who understand the product at its most detailed level often don’t have a voice in ideation or prioritization. Any cycle that doesn’t include developers from the beginning will likely fail, because the conflict between design and utility cannot be resolved with detailed specifications. It can be resolved only around a table, with plenty of paper to draw on and time to argue about the best way to do things. Of course, designers need time on their own to create, but developers need to be given a chance to contribute to the product that they’re building in a way they’re comfortable with.

“What information do you need to start coding?”

The theoretical discussion about low-fidelity versus high-fidelity mock-ups or prototypes is largely misguided when it comes to real-world development. The goal is right-fidelity specifications, and that all depends on the maturity of the application you’re working on and the style of the developer. Some developers need perfect PSDs before they start coding; others are fine with back-of-the-napkin sketches along with a solid UI component library. Find out what they need, and provide just that — anything more than what they need will not get looked at, and that’s when tempers can really flare up.

Bringing such diverse worlds together is hard work. But, in “So Happy Together: Designers and Engineers,” Dave Gustafson warns what might happen if you don’t invest in this:

What’s the alternative to this kind of collaboration? Keeping design and engineering separate, where the pass-off from one to the other is aptly called “throwing it over the wall.” Designers may enjoy an unhindered blue-sky design process, but they’ll likely be disappointed with what actually gets made. Without engineers in the design process, there are bound to be some unrealistic features in the concept — and without an understanding of the designers’ intentions and priorities, engineers are likely to compromise the design with changes to meet cost goals. Some money may have been saved on the engineering and manufacturing — but not enough to offset a product that misses the mark.

The Prioritization Process

When there is no clear development process, “prioritization” can end up being a complex algorithm consisting of the last email request sent, the job title of the requestor, and proximity to the development team. This is no way to build a product. One way to address the difficulties of prioritization is through the concept of a “product council.”

At a start-up, the entire company could make up this group — even if it’s a group of one. In large companies, the group should include the CEO and the VPs of each department, including marketing, product, engineering, support, etc. The name is not important — the purpose is. The product council would have weekly or by-weekly meetings with two goals:

Review the current product road map to assess whether the right priorities are being addressed.

Introduce new ideas (if any) that have come up during the week and discuss business cases and priorities.

This meeting would have several very positive outcomes:

It would give the management team complete insight into what the product or design team is working on, and would allow for anyone to make a case for a change in priorities. This eliminates the vast majority of the politics you see at many organizations, and it frees up the teams to do what they do best: execute.

No one in the company would be able to go straight to a designer or developer to sneak things onto the road map. The user, technical or business impact of every big idea must be demonstrated.

It would prevent scope creep. Nothing would be put on the road map without something else moving out or down. This is absolutely critical to the development cycle.

From there, projects would move to small dedicated teams, which would have complete ownership of the design and implementation. The product council sets the priorities, not the details of implementation — those are up to the teams themselves. I’m always reminded of what Jocelyn K. Glei says in her excellent article “What Motivates Us to Do Great Work?”:

For creative thinkers, [there are] three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). All three are intrinsic motivators.… In short, give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.

In pursuit of collaboration, we run the risk of overshooting our target and gaining the false sense of security that “consensus” brings. Consensus too often results in mediocre products, because no one really gets what they want, so the result is a giant compromise. Marty Cagan says this very well in his article “Consensus vs. Collaboration”:

In consensus cultures people are rarely excited or supportive. Mostly because they are very frustrated at how slow things move, how risk-averse the company is, how hard it is to make a decision, and especially how unimpressive the products are.

So, even though everyone agreeing on something is great, having someone be responsible for the decisions in that particular project is infinitely more important. This person does not do all the work, but rather is the one who owns the product’s fate — its successes and failures.

In many organizations, this person is the product manager, but it doesn’t have to be. Whoever it is, the role should be clearly defined and well communicated to the rest of the organization. The role is not that of a dictator, but of a diplomat, working with UX, business functions and engineering to build products that are driven by user, business and technology needs.

Level 4: Communicate Better

Once the appropriate guidelines are in place and the teams are working effectively, it’s time to root out any other causes of mistrust that might still exist. And one of the best ways to build trust in an organization is to eradicate secrets.

I am huge believer in full transparency, and I see little need in keeping any relevant information about a project from anyone. (The prerequisite? Hire trustworthy employees!)

If plans, progress and problems are published for all to see, there is no need to hide anything and no need to play politics to get things done. Here are just some of the things that should be published on a public wiki for anyone to view and comment on (written from the perspective of a UX team):

Roles and responsibilities of the product and UX teams.

How road-map planning and the prioritization process work.

How the product development process works, including (critically) where UX fits into even the smallest projects.

The goals and success metrics for every product line.

Publish everywhere, invite anyone. The tools at our disposal make this so easy, from Dropbox and Google Docs to ConceptShare and Campfire. There is no excuse for keeping things to ourselves.

Level 5: Prove That It Works

When the groundwork is laid for silos to start crumbling down, one last piece of dynamite will blow it all up: it’s time to start proving that it works. People will believe you for only so long if you say, “Trust me, this is the right thing to do!” At some point you have to show them the money.

A common theme throughout this series has been that better collaboration results in better software. The only way to cement these changes into the organizational culture is to show that you’re actually shipping a better product because of it.

Here’s what I do to demonstrate the business value of a collaborative development process that includes a tightly integrated UX cycle:

Share case studies from other companies or projects that clearly show the business benefits of working this way. Showing that it’s been successful elsewhere should buy enough time and resources for the team to put in place its plans to follow a proper collaborative design and development process in one or more of its projects.

Start on a project where changes can be measured by an improvement in one of the three A’s of revenue generation:
- Acquisition
  
  Getting new users to sign up for your product.
- Activation
  
  Getting those new users to make their first purchase.
- Activity
  
  Getting those first-time purchasers to come back for more.

Benchmark well before the start of the project, and set clear goals to measure the success of the project.

Follow through on the commitment to collaboration, and measure your results. See “How to Measure the Effectiveness of Web Designs” for ideas on which measurement tools to use.

Publish your metrics widely so that everyone in the organization can see the results. And don’t hide the failures. There will be failures — the trick is to own those mistakes, learn from them and get better.

Summary (aka “Whose Job Is It, Anyway?”)

So, whose job is it to break down organizational silos and build a collaborative development process?

Guess what? It’s your job. Whether you’re a designer, developer or manager, this isn’t something that someone else will get around to — if it was, then it would have happened already. Building collaboration is best done through a groundswell in the organization, led by the makers, the people who build the actual product. It might be difficult, but I hope there are enough case studies and examples in this series to help you get started on this journey of organizational change.

Collaboration only works if everyone in the organization is open about their processes and workflows, without fear of being judged unfairly. Arguments over what’s right and how to do things differently will happen. And they should — it’s the only way to get better at what we do.

Building collaborative environments is not easy, because change management is not easy. But the positive outcomes of doing this far outweigh the pain of making it happen. You’ll end up with happy, creative teams that feel a sense of ownership over what they’re building and a sense of pride in its quality.

I often remind my team that we are judged on the products we ship, not on the number of times we ask for help along the way. So, what possible reason could there be not to collaborate and create a better product — because it will make us all look better in the end anyway? (Hint: there isn’t one.)

Go. Make it happen.

(al)

ShallowRed | Radical Blogger

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Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors

What To Track

Form-Field Errors

404 Pages

Google Analytics Reports

How To Analyze Errors

Segmenting Data

Prioritize Issues

Improve Your Error Messages

Conclusion

Additional Resources

Supporting Your Product: How To Provide Technical Support

Don’t Underestimate The Importance Of Support

Don’t Underestimate The Time This Will Take

Methods Of Providing Technical Support

Phone

Email

Social Media

Ticketing System

Real-Time Chat

How To Reduce Support Requests And Time Spent Dealing With Them

Design Support Requests Out of Your Product

Build Debugging or Diagnostic Information Into the Product

Add Features to the Product

Provide a Range of Support Material

Use a Support System That Lets You Create Template Answers

How to Phase Out Support for Old Versions of a Product

Some Final Thoughts

Further Reading

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Content Marketing Challenge: How to Use your Resources Effectively

Time and time again, the challenge of a lack of resources gets in the way of an organization creating great content marketing.

First off, let’s talk about team structure.

Now, let’s talk about getting employees on board to participate.

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