Insomnia

Creepy interaction or Good customer experience

2009-11-05T08:40:00.003-05:00

A few years ago, when I learned how AJAX worked, I immediately figured-out that, once you have reached a web site, every action you perform while using the site can be tracked by the site owner. That you didn't need to submit a form to send information to the server. This is a behaviour that you can plainly see when you use GMail.

However, yesterday, I surprised by this behaviour. I was shopping around for an online service. I found a place that seemed to qualify and was ready to make a purchase. I proceeded to the checkout page and started filling the form. I was almost done when I noticed some of the small print at the bottom of the page. After reading this, I realized that I didn't really understand what I was buying so I just closed the page without submitting the form.

A couple hours later, I got an email:

I can see from our records that you attempted to place an order with *service provider* today, but for some reason you ran into difficulties and the order was not completed.

To apologise for any problems you may have experienced, here's a special link to receive 50% off the usual cost of our *service*!

When you understand how the web works and you think about this. This is not super surprising. The checkout form was using AJAX to send the data in the checkout form as I was typing instead of waiting for me to push the submit button. When their system noticed that I never completed the purchase, it kicked-in an automated response.

The problem is that this is completely unexpected. It creeps me out a little that they recorded what I typed as I typed it. I had a feeling that we had an understanding: As long as I don't press the proceed button, you don't know anything about me.

Even if I was a little creeped-out, I did reply to the email and asked them a question about this fine-print text that I didn't understand and they responded quickly and provided me with a good experience overall.

But the question remains, is this behaviour creepy or is it a good customer experience?

The power of information sharing

2009-03-18T21:21:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, after an interesting debugging session, I was able to fix a long standing issue that was quite tricky to find. This problem had been plaguing the system ever since we inherited it from the customer. The problem shouldn't have been so difficult to find as it is really obvious when you understand what happened.

The reason why it eluded us for so long is that the root cause (database deadlock) was hidden behind layers of abstraction (ORM) that did not do a good enough job of abstracting the physical characteristics of the system.

Although the fix was simple, the root cause was tricky. To make matters worse, that pattern that caused the problem is used everywhere throughout the application. So this morning, I spent 30 minutes to write up an email explaining the pattern and the problems with it. The email also spoke of a way to fix the broken pattern. Sent it to everyone in the team.

To my surprise, the payout was immediate. Before the day was over, I had a patch to review. A problem with a customer notification email not going out. And lo and behold, the cause was a database deadlock. And the fix was to modify the pattern the way that was outlined in my email.

The lesson here is that knowledge is valuable, but it is much more valuable when it is shared.

Serendipitous Latte

2009-03-08T20:24:00.005-04:00

The actual cup

This evening, after dinner, I went for a latte at Starbucks. I was enjoying the beverage listening to the standard coffee house music. Tracy Chapman if I remember although my odds are pretty good with that guess considering the location.

Then I did something I rarely do. I read the little thought on the cup.

Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.
-Po Bronson, Author

I kept the cup. Even took a picture to remember.

And then I started to ask myself if I was successful at the wrong thing?

The limit of process improvement

2009-02-14T20:20:00.001-05:00

Jeff Atwood had a really quotable sentence in his latest blog post: Coding Horror: Real Ultimate Programming Power

"Throwing a book of rules at a terrible programmer just creates a terrible programmer with a bruise on their head where the book bounced off."

This funny sentence expresses something that I have had a really hard time expressing for the past few years: Rules and processes don't make your terrible programmers better, it limits the damage that they can cause to your project.

Not all problems can be solved by adding process.

The only long term solution to dealing with terrible programmers is to give them the tools to become good programmers. Training, mentoring and support. And the training shouldn't be about process but about the craft of programming. Reading code, using a debugger, how to solve a problem with software.

Even the mighty are vulnerable to human error

2009-01-31T15:03:00.003-05:00

This morning, while I was shopping at the store, I was looking for product reviews on my blackberry. Every search I made on Google issued a warning about the site being potentially harmful to my computer. Even sites that I know or run had this issue. This was obviously a mistake on the part of Google. They issued an explanation about this error on their blog.

Basically, it was a manipulation error in the lists they manage of known bad sites. I am sure Google has procedures to ensure this doesn't happen but things like that still happen in spite of best efforts.

We fell victim to something very similar this week. While we were testing an upgrade to the software of one of our customer's web sites, we misconfigured the staging server and sent outdated notifications to a few hundred of their customers. This must have surprised the recipients and surely triggered a few customer service calls that they were not counting on.

What make this story interesting is that we had planned for this and had prepared a procedure for staging that made sure to neuter the notification service. A manipulation error in the server configuration caused all this planning to go to waste. After we had fixed our mistake and notified the customer to expect a few strange calls, we looked at what happened. It was clear that the mistake did not sit with one particular individual but was a failure of our internal communication for this staging procedure.

At least we learned something and we can fix our procedure. But today's Google issue makes me feel a little better about it. Even the biggest web company in the world has its bad days.

You don't have to fake passion

2009-01-28T17:52:00.002-05:00

We are currently redoing the design of the web site at work. Since we didn't want to use stock photography (we wanted to be more authentic), a photographer came to the office yesterday all day and snapped action shots of some of us.

The photographer would set the stage tell us to sit here and there and proceeded to take pictures. At one point, he turned to me and asked if I could go back to my desk and fetch some random papers and other office supplies to lay out on the table that we were using for the picture.

We put that on the table and he said to us with a wry smile: "Now, look passionate and happy and authentic". We all laughed and went on to perform exaggerated pointing gestures and striking phony poses worthy of an 80's Sears catalog.

And then, something interesting happened. François pointed at the random paper that I had brought from my desk and asked what project it was about. And that is all it took. We started a genuine, passionate discussion of this project. I went on to explain the customer's needs and discussed the various technologies that we were looking at. I went on to explain that the project was early in its conception and that it required a lot of investigation for some of the most innovative parts.

Then François and Sylvain started making suggestions and asking more questions and the discussion became quite animated. By that time, we had completely forgotten that the photograph was there. He had to intererupt our discussion to ask us to take a different pose.

I don't know if the pictures will come out good. But I don't think we could have faked a better passionate, happy and authentic than this.

World usability day

2008-10-31T09:25:00.002-04:00

So, November 13 is world usability day. I will be at the OCRI event to listen to the discussion and maybe participate. I am looking forward to the panel and to meet new people interested in usability and design.

The internet is turning us into spastic readers

2008-10-25T15:24:00.003-04:00

I was reading the latest post on Fred's blog. It hit home for me as well. My personal problem is not that I have too many feeds to read (I prune my list regularly) but that I tend to skip anything that has any substance.

And it is only going to get worse. Apparently, blogging is dead, (many people have claimed that on blogs recently... completely missing the irony). Blog posts are too long for today's spastic readers. It's Twitter nation now. If it is more than 150 characters, you just lost most of your audience. "Smart" people don't blog anymore, they twit.

This translates in our everyday life and in our work habits too. Coincidently, I jut got an email from Fred this evening with a document to review. I read the first paragraph and I closed it. Preferring to respond to the stimuli of my Twitterific icon. This is a really bad habit.

Like a role playing game for programmers

2008-09-21T19:37:00.006-04:00

Last week, Stack Overflow opened to the public. I gave it a look. It is a simple system; people ask questions, people answer the questions. There is a system for upmodding and downmodding the questions and answers. Like many nascent crowdsourced web sites, the content is pretty good so far. Time will tell if the self-ruling system will continue to work or if the content will start to slowly drift towards mediocrity.

I am a lurker in most of the similar sites that I read. For this one however, I started to contribute right away. Why was that? After thinking about this for a little while now I think I have a theory: StackOverflow treats its participants like players in a role playing game.

Like many of the other community-based systems, there is a score that rewards user that create good content. Other sites call it karma, this one calls it reputation. The main difference is that this site gives you a compelling incentive to hoard the reputation points. You have goals, quests of sorts. You need to have gathered 15 points to be able to upmod someone else's content. You need 50 to be able to leave comments. There's a whole menu of things that you can do on the site but you need to gather some reputation to be able to do them.

In addition, the system will reward you with a badge for accomplishing specific tasks. You get the teacher badge for your first answer that gets modded up. You get another badge for completing all fields in your profile.

For me, this makes it very compelling to go there and participate. So, I'll stop writing right now and go see if I can't answer some questions. I really would like to get my good answer badge.

HP Goes Green and It’s More Than Just Marketing BS | Voltage Blog

2008-09-08T16:25:00.002-04:00

Reposting this link from the Voltage Blog.

HP Goes Green and It’s More Than Just Marketing BS | Voltage Blog

I'm not usually using a "green" label as a way to distinguish products. Usually... it is just marketing/PR. In this case, it seems like a genuinely original idea.

Proud to call HP one of my customers.

I will have to make sure I don't wear mine if I go to the UK

2008-08-15T13:58:00.003-04:00

I was really surprised to hear about it on Shneier's blog and then on boingboing a few hours later.

Then it was too funny I had to post about it. Police in the UK seized a boardgame called "war on terror". It is dangerous... It has a balaclava that "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act".

This is a picture of me with my Evil balaclava. I have owned this boardgame for over a year now. I don't play it very often because it is a 6 player game and you need to be in a certain mood to play it. But it is a very decent boardgame.

So be afraid... Be very afraid of my evil twin. He's the one wearing the balaclava.

They actually called back

2008-08-03T15:04:00.001-04:00

Remember my post about Winzip?

They actually called back to check if we did a license audit. I told their representative, in person, that we didn't really do a license audit as they requested. But that, instead of doing an audit, our staff was instructed to uninstall WinZip and use a free alternative like 7-Zip.

She seemed all happy at this conclusion and thanked me for my help. That's it! No sales pitch, no offer to help us with anything. They had me on the phone and didn't even make an attempt to establish any sort of contact. I had assumed that this was the reason for the whole license audit thing in the first place. But no. They truly just wanted people to comply with their licensing terms.

I am a little baffled.

Pretty good WebEx alternative

2008-08-02T15:04:00.001-04:00

Once in a blue moon, I need to demo a feature to a customer or host an application sharing session. Like many people, I had used the trial version of WebEx to do this. Since I don't feel like I do this often enough to subscribe to their service, I had not.

Last week, I needed to do another demo. Remembering the fact that the last time I had used their trial software, they called me for nearly a year to get me to subscribe to their service; I was looking for something else.

This is where I found Microsoft SharedView. If you are doing a demo for a small group (less than 15) and you have another mean of doing the voice conferencing, this should work great for you. I was able to set it up in 5 minutes, I already had a Microsoft LiveID (from MSN Messenger) and I had a sharing session setup in no time.

The system is free, lets you send invites by email and doesn't require the attendees to have a Microsoft LiveID. It worked flawlessly for me even if there were 2 firewalls and a whole lot of routing equipment between me and my customer. I had no special setup to do. Performance was similar to previous webex experiences. The system lets you give control to any attendee and lets the attendes "scribble" on the screen as they talk to point things out.

One thing that seemed different than webex is that you can only share one application at a time. If you want to share more, you have to share your entire desktop. Maybe there is a way around this but I didn't bother trying to figure it out, it is not that big a limitation. Obviously, this is Windows specific so that might be a no-go for you.

You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker

2008-07-22T08:18:00.003-04:00

My company is in the product development outsourcing business. We write software on behalf of other companies. Often, we work with other software companies. This is a hard sell. It requires a lot of versatility from our sales staff. They have to sell a service that they individually have no use for and that they don't fully understand themselves. Sometimes, the discussion with the customer becomes very technical and they need some backup from the technical staff to convince the customer.

That is usually when they call me. They start the discussion, introduce the company and then, they call me to fill in the gap. Once all technical questions have been addressed, they get back into closing mode and make a deal. So, in my naïveté, I thought to myself... How hard can this be?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get my perceptions reset. I went to visit a new prospective customer solo. This was a last minute thing and we couldn't assemble a team fast enough. I had experience with those meetings and I was prepared, I had a presentation ready, sample projects to talk about, I thought that I would just walk in there and close my first deal. The meeting went well. After the meeting, the customer and I were chatting on our way out of the office and he said something to me that just shocked me:

You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker.

That's it I thought. I flew all the way out here just to screw it up.

Seeing that I was... perplexed by this statement, he promptly clarified: You are the kind of guy that would walk away and not look back if the deal doesn't make sense to you. You will not try and fix it and close a deal that is not that good.

I blinked, not knowing if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He picked up on that and told me that he was happy that I was a dealbreaker. He said that he wanted to deal with someone that would take ownership of their product and that would not compromise on achieving the objectives. He asked me a few questions and he asked me to work on some pricing to be discussed the next morning. Two weeks later, we're still negotiating and it looks like we're going to work together.

I realize now that I was lucky. I just happened to fall on the one customer that needed to deal with someone like me. I realize that I will have to let dealmakers make deals. And that I should just be happy with my support role. It takes a lot of skill to convince someone to spend tens of thousands of dollars with someone that they have just met. Without the dealmakers, us dealbreakers would be out of a job.

Wall-E

2008-07-01T13:13:00.003-04:00

Image via WikipediaThis week-end was a rainy week-end. So I went to the movies and saw Wall-E. To my opinion, this is the best Pixar movie so far. The visuals are stunning, the story is interesting and is different from their other animated movies. Plus, there is no dialog in the first 40 minutes or so. Only robotic bleeps that carry more meaning and emotion than any Ben Affleck scene ever recorded. Oh and the short animated movie they show before the main feature is really cool.

I knew little about the movie before I went. I had just seen one preview and it had nothing to do with the central theme of the movie. It was just the preview with robots flying around in space.

But right at the opening scenes... I was very pleased. The visual approach to the movie was reminiscent of Idiocracy. A relatively little-known film by Mike Judge. The story is different but there is a definite connection between the two movies. Especially in the way the movie portrays people as ignorant, wasteful consumers. The way that they are lazy and stupid and happy in their ignorance.

There are obviously differences between the movies. The fact that people didn't become idiots, they always were idiots. Another difference in Wall-E is that they had the technology to leave earth. So they did and their behavior didn't change. There's just more room in space to throw out your garbage.

Ignoring your gut

2008-06-29T20:58:00.001-04:00

Plug image by pulpolux.

Sometimes, ignoring your gut might be the thing that you do that requires the most experience and intuition. I find that this is a rule that often applies when trying to solve a software performance problem.

You see, my current project is a business intelligence and reporting product powered by Microsoft Analysis Services. I have spent a while on this project an I am getting pretty good at understanding what happens under the hood of the engine when the application performs queries. I have also spent a lot of time so far tuning the data cube to allow the application to achieve a good level of performance.

Recently, my customer started using the application with real-world data and was puzzled by the response times he was getting from one of the datasets. It was a rather small dataset with nothing out of the ordinary. One view, no calculations. Something really basic. But every time you performed an operation, you had to wait for an unusual 5-7 second delay before getting responses from the database.

I spent a day working with that dataset, massaging it, creating indexes and aggregations. pushing and prodding every which a way. Applying the same recipes that got me some level of success in the past. But nothing happened. I knew that what I was doing was improving things because I could measure the imrovement on the other datasets but this one remained very sluggish.

So I resigned myself to write to my customer with a hypothesis that I had about the reason why this dataset was slow (lots of "zero" values instead of nulls... that was my hypothesis... really lame in retrospect). As I was writing, I spent the time to explain the things that I had tried and, since my customer is smart but he is not necessarily an MDX query expert, I "took id down a notch" on the technical side. Taking care of going through all the details and all the steps. And as I was explaining, It struck me that I didn't really do all that I was writing. I didn't examine the data to see if it was different, I just quickly glanced and the text files containing the raw data and gauged the complexity of the dataset by their number and their sizes.

So I took a step back and I went back to the basics. I carefully examined all the dimensions of my data cube to realize that I had one dimension with a really large number of members. A 100:1 ratio compared to the other datasets that I had imported in the application before. It was so simple. The total "size" of the imported data files were similar but the "shape" and size of the resulting data cube was radically different. The way the queries were constructed made assumptions that were wrong. After that was identified, it was easy to come-up with a plan and test a few queries to validate my findings. All of this would have taken an hour if I had spend the time to go through all the steps.

Today, my experience and my knowledge was my worst enemy and it led me on a wild goose chase. When I started questioning my assumptions, the answer was staring at me right in the face. And yes... sometimes, you have to check if the computer is still plugged in.

Personal comfort and working with overseas colleagues

2008-06-27T10:28:00.001-04:00

Phone image by grumbler.

Recently Matt was telling me that there was a certain amount of backlash in "The Valley" against working with Indian or Chinese colleagues. Not because they are not competent. But because it required people in California to stay at the office late in the day to be able to attend meetings with their Asian colleagues.

Interestingly, on the east coast, the situation is a little different. We benefit from the willingness of our colleagues in India and Eastern Europe to stay late for meetings (sometimes quite late). In order to be considerate to our colleagues overseas, we scheduled our daily SCRUM meeting early in the morning. By early, I mean 9:30.

Now, what is starting to happen is that our employees are complaining that this meeting does not match the core hours of our flexible time policy. The core hours are described in the employee manual as 10:30 - 15:30.

So begins the clash between HR needs and business needs. We need the help of our overseas colleagues to complete projects because there is not enough local talent to answer the demand. And we need to provide a comfortable, inviting work environment for our employees in all of our offices.

Anyone has smart ideas on how to solve this?

Shouldn't there be an easier way to do this?

2008-06-26T21:00:00.001-04:00

Those that have been reading my blog for a little while will remember that my wife has been having all sorts of trouble with her HP desktop computer with Vista on it. The reliability of the machine has been so bad that I decided to install the release candidate of Vista SP1 when it became available. That improved things slightly but the computer still couldn't properly shut down 2 times out of 3.

Well, the release candidate started complaining that it was not going to be supported anymore and that I had to install the real thing. So, on a rainy morning this weekend I started the process that would eventually take over 4 hours of my life.

The first step was to remove the outdated version of the the service pack. After some Googling to make sure that I was removing the right update I started the removal process. The first time, the machine froze and it had to retrieve a restore point to recover. The second time, the removal succeeded. But alas, the service pack did not show up in the Windows update dialog. Instead, Vista informed me that there were 19 updates to download and install first. I started the process and the computer froze at the 3rd update. I had to force a reboot of the machine and Vista retrieved another restore point. Back to square one.

Looking at the install log yielded no useful information. I turned to the HP web site for help. After describing the computer model and navigating to the support and downloads page. I was informed that I had to update drivers for SP1 to install properly on this hardware. No less than 6 driver updates were critical or recommended for this particular model of computer. From the Video card to the SATA drivers without forgetting a good old BIOS update. Each one of those updates had to be downloaded and installed individually. And each one required a reboot after installation.

An hour later, I was able to apply the 19 updates that would not apply before. After those 19, there were 3 more that appeared. And finally, Windows update offered SP1 for my installing pleasure.

So why the big rant? Is it just me or was this a really big missed opportunity by the hardware vendor? That PC came with a disk full of crappy software I didn't want. What if HP had invested some money and offered real value to their customers? What if they invested to streamline the delivery of critical driver updates. The same way Microsoft does it with its Windows updates. Something that a normal consumer, one without a degree in computer science, could understand. Something that didn't require me spending 4 hours on a weekend watching my computer reboot.

Interestingly, my Dell laptop had a different issue with a similar resolution. I was having trouble with the sleep/hibernate functions and I had to update the BIOS and Video drivers from the Dell site. The process was not much easier but at least, the hardware didn't hang while applying updates.

Does your employer need shock therapy?

2008-06-25T09:13:00.000-04:00

I was reading this article about the shocking steps that General Motors was taking to bootstrap their electric car project (called Volt). To allow themselves to innovate, they brought back a senior engineer from Germany and they threw all their processes out the window. The rest of the article describes how they peeled-off the industry's assumptions about car making (in general) and electric cars (in particular).

To me, one of the most interesting things that this article is the fact that they eventually realized that they cannot afford to just keep up with the Japanese car companies. They cannot play it safe. They had to "leapfrog" the competition and force them to follow their lead. This is the only way they could regain the technological edge.

The Volt is not available to customers yet. And it might still be a while before it is; But, according to the article, other car makers are already using the Volt's "technology" to design a new generation of electric cars. Even if the Volt never becomes a commercial success, the strategy already paid off for GM as it re-established them as innovators in their industry.

Popping corn with your cellphone

2008-06-09T08:50:00.002-04:00

Maybe this is old news to most people. But this is the first time I see this video. It is a little scary.

[Edit] Many people say it is a hoax. Here's the page from Snopes.

AideRSS -- when you just want to hear about the hits

2008-05-30T12:56:00.000-04:00

I was made aware today of a new RSS utility called AideRSS. It takes the content of a blog, analyzes it and collates a whole whack of statistics related to the relevance of the content, participation of readers, other people that link to it (diggers, reddit, del.icio.us etc...) and gives each post a ranking. That it itself is cool.

But then, it republishes the RSS feed for the blog. But the twist is that it republishes it in multiple flavors, filtered by their PostRank score. So if you follow a lot of blogs, you can subscribe to the "just the hits" RSS feed and you will only be made aware of posts from that blog that generated a lot of "excitement".

Here's what my blog looks like when viewed through the AideRSS tool. It determines that about 50% of my posts are "great". I don't know if that is good or bad.

Insomnia - AideRSS

Vista SP1 (one month later)

2008-05-26T09:34:00.003-04:00

Finally, I got rid of my glass ceiling

A quick look at the reliability meter tells me that I am having a much more stable system.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is related to my last "tuning" of disabling the Adobe quickstart application. There was another Windows update in between and the number of failures has been a lot lower recently. Pretty much all the failures that I see in the reliability meter now are Windows shutdown failures. You shut the computer down and it freezes on shutdown. Aside from that, my system has been really stable. I guess I am going to stop bitching about it now.

A strange way to treat customers

2008-05-20T12:55:00.003-04:00

This morning, I received an letter from WinZip Computing. In this letter, they were respectfully asking me to make sure that no unlicensed copies of their software was being used at our company and to prepare for a call from their representative that will assist us in our audit.

I'm going to channel Seth Godin here but that was an awful piece of negative marketing. The letter is full of words and phrases like: "It has come to our attention" and "internal compliance". Nowhere in the letter do they tell me what their software can do for me or my organization and why it would be a good idea to give them money instead of using what is available for free in my OS or on the internet. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying for software, I make my living from people selling software. But it has to add value.

What is more ironic is that I got this email because we were a WinZip customer. We bought licenses a few years ago when there was a compelling reason to use their software. Now that the reason is not so compelling, they "threaten" me into compliance instead of telling me why I should continue to do business with them. If I was not a customer of theirs, I would not have gotten this "request for compliance".

There was an email address on the letter and I will follow-up with them with a letter thanking them for the reminder that I should let everyone on my staff know about the existence of excellent WinZip alternatives like the free 7-Zip. And that they should uninstall WinZip to be compliant with their license requirements.

Why did design become so important to me

2008-04-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

I have been ranting about design for a while. However, I am not a designer, I am a software engineer dammit. I got all the design information that I know from books and blog posts.

I finally got it this week. I just finished reading Made to stick. I finally realize that it is not all the books with their statistics and theories about design and usability that stuck. It is the personal experience that I had years ago (with a previous employer) when I participated in a usability study of the software that my team was writing.

It was one of those one-way-glass usability studies where the developer team sits on the other side of the glass watching user after user struggle doing simple tasks with the software. It was a softphone type application and users had a lot of trouble just making a call. Despite the huge button that said "call" in the middle of the application window. Some of the developpers were litereally yelling at the glass: "Push the damn call button!"

The Made to stick book made me realize why this experience stuck with me. It was Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible and Emotional. Given the fact that I have a good story to tell about it, it scores a perfect 6 out of 6 on the stickiness scale.

I highly recommend this experience (witness a usability study of your software) to anyone involved with creating software. Then, tell me if it sticks with you.

Why developpers should never disable the Vista UAC security prompt

2008-04-11T19:02:00.000-04:00

As ars technica hypothesizes, it was put there to annoy you. Yes you, the software developer.

In the past, Windows developers were making assumptions about their privileges and calling all sorts of Windows APIs and accessing all manners of resources and files without thinking about the required privileges. Now, with the UAC, if you want to avoid being annoying to your users, you will attempt to get your work done without requiring an elevation of privilege. And yes, that includes things like installers.

So, developers, don't disable your UAC. Feel your user's pain. It will make you a gentler, kinder developer.