A quick reminder that we’re meeting on a different night to accommodate Valentines Day: Monday, February 7, at the Wilde Roast Café, from 6:00p–8:00p.

Our theme for the meeting is The Emperor’s New Clothes: Challenging Received Best Practices, Tools, and Standards. There are experts in all fields who promote a methodology or tool or best practice. Sometimes they are spot on and provide amazing insight and ease or enhance our work; other times they’re a red herring, wrong, or misleading and add unnecessarily to our workload.

Do you know any experts who got it wrong? Have you used tools which made your job harder, not easier? Were you forced to do something one way because “that’s how it’s done” when if only “they” had listened to you the project would have finished early and under budget? Well, now’s your chance to share your own expertise and insights. Come challenge the experts and conventional wisdom!

If you’d like to try on some of the Emperor’s fashions for yourself, he’s been know to shop at these fine stores:

Jared Spool, Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers:

http://www.uie.com/articles/kano_model

Is this tool meant to be used prescriptively or descriptively? Does it provide meaningful or useful data? Do you use it?

Jakob Nielsen, Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/guidelines-change.html

Perhaps we can see now that some people were correct from the beginning…or eventually! Are there pros to being the first, even though it bucks tradition or standards or trends?

Please feel free to share any books, articles, or musings where you’ve personally pointed out that the emperor had no clothes!

Regards,
The UX Meetup Organizers

Around 5 years ago or so, we had purchased Macromedia Studio MX. A few years later, we upgraded to Studio MX 2004. Good enough. I have no real need to upgrade to anything newer.

Alas, I ran into a snag. It seems that in my 6 years of employment, 2 cubicle moves, and several machine upgrades, I managed to lose the original paper sleeve of the original MX studio with the serial number on it. Since you need both the MX 2004 AND MX serial number to install, I can’t install the software we had purchased.

Thus begins the back-and-forth with Adobe:

- Adobe web site states that if there is a serial number issue, contact them with proof of purchase for new ones

- Adobe phone support claims they have no record of the MX purchase, and can only look up accounts by email address or phone number. Since this was a corporate purchase, there’s no way they can find it. Seriously? Adobe has a CRM database that can only query two fields? The *only* option is for us to purchase a brand new copy of Adobe CS3 Suite.

- Phone support transfers me to India where they promptly hang up on me.

- Email support ‘apologizes for the inconvenience’ and then states since they don’t support Studio MX, they can’t give a serial number, and the *only* option is for us to purchase a brand new copy of Adobe CS3 Suite.

Yep. It’s my fault I lost that little slip of paper with a number on it. Still, I think I’ll be avoiding all Adobe products as much as I can from now on…

Please stop. I can’t share links on any of these sites with anyone.

Thanks!

And while it’s nice…it’s also been a huge pain in the ass.

The movie  Babel came through our Netflix queue a few months ago. I thought it was an excellent, wonderfully moody movie. The next evening I had the urge to listen to more of the soundtrack. Well, as usual, eMusic didn’t have it. I don’t think Amazon had opened the flood gates yet to their MP3s, and iTunes only had the crappy DRMed version. But I had the itch and iTunes makes it so easy to purchase it, so against my better judgement, I paid for the DRM version.

And that was fine.

Until I wanted to also listen to the songs on my new iPod.

For some reason, every other track or so from this double album won’t play on my iPod. It just gets ‘stuck’. Crap.

Do a bit of googling, and find an Apple Tech Doc.

Step one: De-authorize and then re-authorize your machine. Ok, that was easy. Nope. Didn’t fix the problem.

Step two: Reset your  iPod to it’s original factory settings. Hmm…this is a bit of a pain. First, download the 60mb update file. Install it, wipe the iPod clean, then resynch it all. An hour later and…nope. Didn’t fix the problem.

Step three: Rebuild your iTunes library. Sigh. That’ll take an hour. And now I have to re-synch it to my iPod. There goes another half hour. And, yea, you guessed it…didn’t fix the problem.

“In Gen. 11:9, the name of Babel is etymologized by association with the Hebrew verb balal, ‘to confuse or confound’”. The myth is that Babel was the city that united humanity, with everyone speaking a single language. God didn’t like this for whatever reason and decided to scatter humanity across the globe and confused their languages so that we’d forever have difficulties communicating as one.

The movie plays off of this quite poetically, in my opinion. iTunes plays off of this with  stunning irony as well. I have to smile at clever irony. But must really restrain my urge to SMASH COMPUTER SMASH IPOD SMASH DRM!

As I plow through SharePoint, I’m sharing in that wonderment. Mainly wondering why it really doesn’t integrate well at all. In fact, I’m not so sure MS software teams really are aware of any other software team within the belly of that beast.

Here’s a fun example:

SharePoint issue #27 for the day has me stumped. I’m probably annoying everyone on the Yahoo group with my questions so I’ll jump over the Microsoft Newsgroups. Oh, that’s right–it’s rare that you’ll get an answer in there. OK, I’ll go to sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/.

What is Sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/? It’s a community site that ACTUALLY BUILT using MOSS 2007. Cool. And they have forums! Great. I’ll post.

Oh, I need to enter my Live/Passport/Hotmail/whatever MS calls it now login. OK. Done.

Ah, I need to make a different username just for these forums? Fine. Separate email address? Ah…it says here I should use a fake one because it’ll show up on the forums and I wouldn’t want spam. Uh…that makes a lot of sense to force people to enter fake email addresses rather than just not exposing them, but fine, whatever…

Now what? Oh! Cool, I can choose to get alerts for this forum. I think that’s useful. OK, let’s sign up for alerts.

Done! ERROR: The message you want to be alerted about no longer exists or was deleted. What? I’ve been censored already? Wait a minute…how’d I end up at forums.microsoft.com!?!?

Smooth, Microsoft. Real smooth…

Sometimes it’s in public. Sneaking a date at the coffee shop.

And sometimes it’s even at work under the harsh flourescent lighting.

I can’t help it. It’s just who I am, and so, I ask–nay, PLEAD–that you all stop discriminating against folks like me.

I’m looking at you, Adobe, who will gladly let me install software on two machines (appreciated!) but refuse to acknowledge that a good chunk of your users are bi-OSuals. Some of us have been known to even tangle with that Linux once in a while. Yes, I know, you can get an extra licensing fee from us by refusing to allow it, but all you’re really doing is driving us to clandestine open source brothels where we can get a quick fix of software without jumping through registration hoops.

And Apple. Apple, apple, apple… I can’t believe even you would stoop to this level. You even allow Windows on your own machines. A little hypocritical giving your stance on who your iPods can date, eh? I have a 160gb iPod. I’d like to put my music on it. I’d like to put my photos on it. iTunes on my PC. iPhoto on my Mac. Not allowed, huh? What, are we living in the 50s still? Are you still hung up on inter-OSual dating? What gives?  I’m rather disgusted by your OSist prejudices, Apple. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Ah…so THAT’S where Karl Rove is working now. He took a pay raise write spin for Microsoft.

Today, customers are far more likely to talk about their experiences with a company on their blog, facebook, twitter, campfire, yelp, amazon, etc – especially those that want their voice to be heard. Like this:

“15 minutes is 15 minutes I could spend working (or blogging about an annoying survey email!). Without any incentive to fill out the survey, why would I even bother?…I took the survey and they didn’t give me a single stinkin’ thing” – Tony @ Halogen Labs

Here’s the process I expected:

1. Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
2. Click on a ‘Renew Now’ button
3. Enter my membership number and a credit card number
4. Get back to work

Instead, they made it much more “engaging”:

1. Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
2. Create an “online” Costco account with a bunch of profile info they already have in my existing membership
3. Create a password. Such a bad idea, if passwords are to be meaningful, they need to be generated by the site – not the person.
4. Click ‘Renewal’ in the left-hand nave of the resulting page
5. Click the only option they offer me in the main page body
6. Then, they want me to guess how much my membership fee is (seriously). They know my membership number, they can just tell me.
   
7. After guessing a few times, I decided to call them
8. They were experiencing “heavier than expected call volumes” and my hold time would be 20 minutes.
9. I hung up, closed the browser window and got back to work

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to renewal anyway. They made it easy to decide.

I thought I was through with eBay, but then I ended up with a Sony Cyber-shot camera that I wanted to get rid of (Canons are SO much easier to use), so I thought I’d give eBay one more chance.

Well, after spending an hour figuring out their interface to get an item listed, I got it listed. It sat there for 5 days. In that time, I got 6 emails asking about the item. 5 from Nigeria.

In the end, though, it sold for a tad higher than I thought and I was happy. Except that 2 minutes after the auction ended I get an email from eBay stating that the listing has been deleted as the winning bidder’s account had been hijacked.

Another 2 minutes later I get the supposed email from the winner asking to ship to Nigeria.

This is all ridiculous as it is (c’mon eBay…WTF? How hard is it to put in a Nigerian filter!?) but the real kick in the pants is that eBay states that ‘we’ll refund your listing money within 7 days and, oh…btw, we can’t relist the item for you…you’ll have to jump through all the same hoops again a second time.’ Yea, right. Just want…MORE email from Nigeria.

Well, that’s it. No more eBay.

Anyone in the cities want a slightly used Cyber-Shot? It’ll be up on Craig’s list shortly…