Paper Prototyping

Josh Evnin ran a brief session on User Centred Design for some of the graduates at TWU on Monday evening. He’s a bit of a hero when it comes to ‘putting the user first’ so the turn out for his session was pretty good considering it was nearly 9 in the evening.

After a few definitions, the majority of the session was spent doing an activity I have not done previously - paper prototyping. We had to design the interface for an in car music entertainment session that would allow the user to plug in their iPod and then select the song they wanted to play. After 10 minutes doing this we had to showcase our design to the ‘user’ and get their opinions as to how useable the design was.

We were in teams of 3 plus one user - the 3 roles being computer, facilitator and observer. The job of the facilitator was to talk the user through the process, the computer held up the screens for the user (basically acting as a computer screen), and the observer took notes on the way the user interacted with the ’system’, focusing in particular on areas where the user appeared to be confused by what they saw.

We finally concluded that usability of software systems is something that seems to be quite far down the list of priorities. In fact it is quite vital if you want to create a great user experience, and all the attendees have promised to speak to the project manager of their first project and try and get usability testing including in the project plan.

It remains to be seen how successful we will be with this.

Active listening

One of the first unusual (to me) things that I noticed from the trainers at ThoughtWorks University was that when they were listening to participants they would often ask questions and re-frame the participants’ comments. Intrigued and impressed by this I spoke to one of the trainers and was told that they were engaging in ‘active listening’. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

Active listening is an intent “listening for meaning” in which the listener checks with the speaker to see that a statement has been correctly heard and understood. The goal of active listening is to improve mutual understanding.

I believe this is a very useful skill to acquire, and I certainly hope to improve my ability in this area.

It reminded me of the 5th Habit that Steven Covey speaks of in his book titled ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. Certainly easier said than done…but then again we do have two ears and only one mouth so perhaps there is a good reason for that!

Browsing the ThoughtWorks Blogs yesterday evening I came across a link to an interesting site which spoke of the ‘Eight barriers to effective listening’. I found this particularly useful as not only does it point some of the common problems one can have when listening to someone else, but also suggestions as to how these can be overcome.

A couple of months ago I read a book titled ‘Coaching Yourself to Leadership’ - although I found it quite heavy going in places, it too touches on some listening barriers, namely:

Advising: After hearing only a few words, you believe that you know how to solve the person’s problem and you start offering advice. Comparing: As you listen to the other person, your insecurities get triggered, and you start comparing yourself to the person—assessing which one of you is better, more knowledgeable, more competent, etc. Daydreaming: You get triggered by something the other person says and you’re off in your own world. You don’t have a clue what the person said to you. Derailing: You find the subject matter uncomfortable, so you abruptly change the subject or interrupt with a joke. Filling-in: You don’t let the other person finish her sentence; instead you finish it for her. Filtering: You only listen to the part of the message that is important to you, and tune out the rest. You either pay attention to things that might be emotionally threatening (and fail to hear anything good), or you only hear what is good (and fail to hear the parts that are negative). Identifying: You identify with what the person is telling you and swing the conversation back to yourself, telling how something similar happened to you. You become engrossed in telling your story, and don’t really listen to the other person or allow her the space to continue her story. Judging: You make hasty judgments about people before completely listening to what they have to say. Mind Reading: You look for what you perceive to be the truth, and end up making assumptions that have little to do with what the person is actually saying to you. Placating: You want to be nice and supportive; therefore, you voice agreement with everything that is being said, even if you don’t really agree. Because you don’t really want to disagree, you don’t listen deeply enough to fully examine the other person’s viewpoint. Rehearsing: Rather than listening, you are mentally preparing what you are going to say. You might look interested, but you’re really concentrating on planning how you’re going to respond. Sparring: You quickly disagree with the other person because you have a strong point of view. The other person feels like she hasn’t had a chance to be heard.

I hope this is ok to post on here - I’ve just written up the points straight from the book. Copyright of the author Peter O’Brien and all that.

I know I do at least 3 of those, and that’s being kind to myself!

Giving effective feedback

One of the most interesting things I have discovered since starting at ThoughtWorks earlier this month is the emphasis that is placed on giving feedback.

The first lesson we were taught about giving feedback was that it could be one of two types. Either it should Strengthen Confidence or Increase Effectiveness.

In Layman’s term that means that if you want to make a positive comment about somebody’s contribution then you should make reference to something specific that you believe they have done well so that they can continue doing it. Equally if you believe there is an area that they could improve it, a specific example of this behaviour/fault should be noted along with a suggestion for how they can improve.

As a member of Toastmasters since January I was already used to this concept of feedback and there are certainly parallels in the feedback system encouraged at Toastmasters and that used at ThoughtWorks.

Although Toastmasters do not define types of feedback, there is an expectation that evaluators will apply themselves in a certain manner when carrying out their job.

One of the things which is frowned upon is known as ‘whitewashing’. This is where an evaluator would say that a speaker was ‘brilliant’ or give a summary just using complementary adjectives. Although the speaker may well be flattered, it does not really tell them anything or leave room for improvement. The use of the word ‘brilliant’ or ’superb’ is only the perception of the person using it, and the failure to make use of the word with regards to a specific behaviour or action means that it is rendered meaningless.

Equally when the evaluator believes there is an area that the speaker can improve in they should make a reference to the specific negative behaviour or action so that the speaker can recall their mistake and go about making the improvement. When giving feedback it is very poor practice to attribute your own feelings to the speaker - you are giving them control over something which they do not have control over! For example, if an evaluator were to say: ‘I felt bored listening to your speech, you should make the next speech more interesting’. In this case the evaluator is giving the speaker the power to make them feel bored. It is ridiculous to let someone have that amount of control over you and if we consider that another person listening to the same speech may have felt really engaged, a property of the speech cannot be that it was ‘boring’.

This is very similar to the way that ThoughtWorkers are expected to give feedback, although it is also emphasised that when giving feedback one should speak only for themselves, and not try and speak for a group of people. Doing this would assume that mind reading is possible and as far as I’m aware this feat has yet to be achieved. An example of committing this mistake would be to say something along the lines of: ‘It would be better for us if you could do x’. In this case ‘us’ is not defined and it is unlikely that one person can speak precisely of the feelings of other people.

This concept is very similar to that of Generalisation in the NLP Meta Model, which states the following:

“Generalization is the process by which elements or pieces of a person’s model become detached from their original experience and come to represent the entire category of which the experience is an example.”

This is an area that I am actually working on myself, and I am finding it very difficult to speak only for myself because I’m so used to generalising! Of course there are still times when generalisation is vital, and we would find it very difficult to live our daily lives without generalising on some things. Giving feedback, however, is one area where this ‘technique’ is counter productive.

Inheritance and Delegation

One of the major learning points this week at TWU has been understanding when it is appropriate to use inheritance and when delegation is the better choice.

I had heard stories about how inheritance could be misused but I didn’t think I would be stupid enough to fall straight into that trap! We were taught the concept using ‘Measurement’ as the problem domain. So to translate the previous sentence into English: The aim was to design classes which could handle old school measurement types such as Inches, Feet, Yards, and so on.

I went about the task by first creating a base Measurement class and then created Inch, Foot and Yard as sub classes of this. The code looked pretty slick to me and I was quite pleased with how it had turned out. I was feeling pretty confident that I had nailed the objective of the session. Alas, it was not meant to be!

Upon reviewing the code my partner and I had created, one of the trainers pointed out that the sub classes did not actually do very much at all. They were effectively useless classes and there was barely any difference between them! One of the other requirements for the code was that it should be possible to compare an instance of the Inch class with an instance of the Foot class, an instance of the Yard class with the Inch class and so on. No problem I thought and promptly created methods called ‘ConvertToFoot’ in my Inch class and ‘ConvertToInch’ in my Foot class.

One of the cardinal sins of object orientated programming had been committed! I now had 2 methods which did almost the exact same as the other for no additional benefit. What if there were 100 different measurements? That would mean 99 different conversion methods each to convert to all the other types of measurement. Clearly not an optimal solution - I had taken the bait and fallen into the trap of over use of inheritance.

Anyway, the lesson of the session was that in this particular case it was better to use delegation or composition. In this example it means that there is only the need for one Measurement class, each instance of which comprises of a Unit object. The concept of a ’slug’ was introduced - no not one of those nasty little insects, but in this case meaning an instance of an object with a private constructor and one public static instance. In other words slugs are like a poor man’s Singleton. The code looked something like this:

class Unit { public static readonly Unit INCH = new Unit(1); public static readonly Unit FOOT = new Unit(12); }

This made it far easier to add future measurement types, and meant that only two classes were needed instead of a potentially infinite amount.

I read an interesting article on this topic by Robert Martin, titled ‘Template Method & Strategy: Inheritance vs Delegation’ which explains the reasoning much better than I have here along with a code example.

Watching a master at work

I’ve always found it fascinating watching people who really excel in their field going about business, be it footballers, tennis players, actors, whoever.

This week at TWU I’ve been playing around with some Ruby on Rails as I mentioned in the previous post, and yesterday I had the opportunity to watch one of the leading figures in the Ruby on Rails field at work. Take a bow Obie Fernandez, who gave several of the TWU attendees a demonstration of how to develop applications using Ruby on Rails. It was actually bordering on the severely impressive watching the speed at which he thought through concepts and then transformed them into code.

I also realised that the way I’d been using the language previously had been dubious at best. I hadn’t realised that you can take care of database creation without using MySQL Administrator, nor had I realised quite how ‘clever’ Ruby on Rails is at mapping database tables to models created in the application.

It was almost painful watching how simple it is to do arduous tasks, such as creating textboxes and drop down boxes, in Ruby on Rails and it almost made me want to weep as I recalled the many hours I’ve spend using PHP and C# tweaking interaction between code and stored procedures/queries.

So +1 for Ruby on Rails and I certainly hope to improve my ability with it over the next few weeks.

Treading the thin line between life and death

As a new employee of ThoughtWorks I’m currently in Bangalore, India attending the ThoughtWorks University program for new graduates at the company.

Yesterday morning we went on a trip to Mysore for the day. It all started off fairly promisingly and we saw several palaces and many great photographs were taken. At just after 3pm we went for lunch at a very flash 5* hotel, and that’s where it all started to go slightly pear shaped.

I suffer from anaphylactic shock reaction to dairy products, eggs and nuts - so as a result I have been very very careful when checking what ingredients are in the food here because I really have no idea what they could be including in them.

I continued with this strategy yesterday and put onto my plate several things which I thought I would be perfectly fine eating. It tasted pretty nice and I didn’t seem to be having any immediate reaction to it. My mouth was feeling a little swollen on my lip but I’ve had that problem before just eating cucumbers so I ignored it for the time being. We left the restaurant and headed for an arts and crafts store about 20 minutes away. As we got closer my throat started to feel a bit weird but I was still breathing fine so I thought it would just go away. Then it struck - within 2 minutes of getting off the bus my throat really started to constrict and my whole body was feeling really hot and itchy.

After trying in vain to reverse the effects with some piriton tablets and asthma medication I had in my bag I realised I was in real trouble and could stop breathing within the next 30 minutes if I didn’t do something about it.

I quickly found one of the trainers and upon looking at my face realised that I was going to need to go to a hospital immediately. The symptoms of an anaphylactic shock reaction include the throat swelling making it difficult to breathe, eyes becoming swollen, nose running uncontrollably and sometimes a hive like rash all over the body. I had all of these symptoms within 2 minutes of the attack starting and as luck would have it there was a hospital just 1 kilometre away from the shop we were at. After a crazy 5 minute ride in a rickshaw to the hospital my throat was swelling even more and I was in need of adrenaline quickly. I had chosen not to use my epipen injection for 2 reasons: 1) I’ve never used it myself before and I didn’t want to do it incorrectly & 2) The hospital was so close by that it would have been an unnecessary waste of it.

I was quickly put on one of the hospital beds and administered with a dose of adrenaline that was double that contained in my epipen. My throat was still feeling severely swollen but it seemed to slow down the rate of deterioration. I was then put in a wheelchair and taken to the I.C.C.U unit in the hospital (I assume that means Casualty) where I was connected to a drip and had further injections administered. In total I had needles in my left arm, right arm, left wrist, right wrist and left thigh.

My discharge summary says I was given the following treatment:

I.V. Hydrocortisone 100 mg Stat
I.V. Dexona 2ml Stat
I.V. Avil 1amp Stat
S.C. Adrenaline 0.5ml

I don’t really know what any of that does apart from the last one which helps open the airways. I was told afterwards that my heart rate was plumetting rapidly. The doctor told one of the trainers that left untreated I would have suffocated within 12 minutes. The hospital actually wanted me to stay under observation for 2 more days but they released me after 3 hours so that I could return to Bangalore.

I only slept for about 5 hours last night - that’s what having your body pumped full of adrenaline does! Perhaps I’ll also have a little more credibility about the thoroughness with which I pick my food from now on.