• It's amazing what even one day away, far from the home and the projects and the email, can do. We had planned a two-day trip but the first night fell through. No matter – a night and a day exploring northern Oregon and the coast is time well-spent.
• I'm ready for my presentation! Or as ready as I'm likely to be. I have plenty of time to rehearse and do a little polishing. Accept the pressure to perform as a sign that you're excited and should prepare, then prepare. It took me a little longer than usual to get to this point, this time, but I'm here now.
• Just when I'm worried I'm not accomplishing enough my manager points out that he's happy to see the progress I'm making. Phew.

The health scare has passed. That alone would be enough, dayenu. A little bit of this week was taken up by dealing with not having a good memory of what transpired the prior week. Even so,

• Simplification – as the SMS team learns more about the customers and how they can be helped with missed and after-hours calls, the proposed solution is becoming simpler rather than growing tentacles. That's a great sign; continued customer contact and analysis across those customers, rather than specific attention to any one of them, is driving this simplification.
• Simplification – learning about the sales process with another leader from R&D is causing us to explore simpler ways of trialing our product. And we had a breakthrough idea this week that will further simplify what we are prototyping, mostly taking the actual product and its attendant complexity out of the picture. This'll be cheap to try and could lead in so many interesting directions that it's really exciting.
• Teamwork – the UX team is swarming on a key set of usability and capability improvements for our growth product, and it's going well. The newest member of the team, from a design process and output standpoint, is running rings around one of the more senior members. It's nice to see the development.

Also, I stopped procrastinating on a thing, and now the thing is moving well.

It seems like we have a pretty good grasp of what quality should be when it comes to infrastructure – what technical soundness is, how much load we should handle, what kind of logging, etc. but we are less mature regarding other dimensions of quality.

An interactive item in general availability, operated by customer users, should

• be valuable to specific users
  • deliver value in results and conveniences
  • minimize toil
  • and this should be verifiable by experiment and by monitoring success metrics/adoption rate/etc.
• be usable by those users
  • intelligible
    • and this should be made more likely via concept testing, and somewhat verifiable by experiment and by monitoring success metrics/adoption rate/etc.
  • obvious in expected actions and right action (design guideline)
  • makes success obvious (design guideline)
  • makes good use of familiar controls and interaction paradigms where possible (design guideline)
  • and this should be made more likely through user testing, and monitorable via success rate/time on task/error rate/etc.
• be complete in its states, messages, and errors (design guideline)
• be instrumented so we can witness users’ successes and difficulties

There’s some disagreement about how important interactive quality might be for infrequently-operated configuration tasks in the platform. The irony is that an infrequently-operated item is not practiced frequently enough by a user to be well-learned, so it must be more obvious in its operation than something they do every day. So to the above there’s pressure to add

• be self-explanatory, relying on recognition rather than training and recall

For products in a growth phase, where catering to new users and bringing them to intermediate proficiency is arguably more important than catering to existing power users, “be self-explanatory, relying on recognition rather than training and recall” is also important for the most critical, central workflows.

Some attention to interactive quality is important even in experiments, since poor interactive quality can confound our measurements. For example,

• If it is not usable we may not learn what we hope to learn from an experiment or a beta – since actual use will be hampered.
• If it is unpleasant to use, its uptake will be blunted unless the value strongly outweighs the problems.
• If it is not visually credible, confidence in its function will be blunted.
• If it contains needless toil it will be unpleasant, time on task will be high, error rate may be high.

Some confounding factors inhere more strongly to “complete” features rather than experiments:

• If it is incomplete in the intended use cases it will seem broken.
• If it is incomplete in its states, messages, and errors for the covered use cases it will seem broken.
• If it is not obvious it is not usable. This is just a facet of usability that we should strive for in every delivery to live users.
• If it is not self-explanatory it has poor usability and increases the cost of training, which is backward from what we plan to do.
• If it is poorly-labeled it is not usable. This is just a facet of usability that we should strive for in every delivery to live users.

The general idea is that scope should scale but quality should not. All of these are achievable in small scopes and if we care about quality are not “extra” costs.

The week was dominated by a health scare that continues. Even so,

• My spirits are fairly light.
• No one (yet) is feeding me their crackpot health advice.
• It's really two issues that can be managed separately, and only one is a significant concern, so I'm free to focus on it.
• I felt not a twinge of guilt taking the day off on Wednesday to focus on this item.
• I and others have been kind with me spreading the workday out more gently. My concentration is off, but my reasoning is just as good as it has been, so I'm still useful to my charges…
• …and to the fellow that might be a new mentee; I was able to give him a little bit of help even in our "getting to know you" session.

This was not an easy week. Several things went at least a little sideways: Tuesday's workout wrung me out; Saturday's was cut short by a whopper of a headache; I recognized that I've taken on too many projects; several people were out and despite all of our preparation that did cause some disconcert in projects; I procrastinated on a thing I really care about and made no progress on it all week. And yet there is gold among the sand:

• A key project beset by inter-group politics, misunderstandings, and misapprehensions is seeing the politics die down and the plan emerge. And in response to a critical misunderstanding involving my team (no, while the key designer is out design capacity will not rise, but we do have a plan to maintain it and a plan to raise it further over time) a very nice meeting was had to negotiate scope. No voices raised, no disappointments even. Everyone played fair and it seems that everyone is happy with the result.
• Procrastinating on the thing I really care about that I procrastinated on made room for a handful of other needed things that, while not as important, helped me make progress on a few of the too-many projects. Structured procrastination FTW?
• …and Thursday's lifts went up just fine, while the prior Thursday was a struggle with some of them not completed. Bodies, they are strange things.