Monday I wrote about Joel Spolsky’s wonderful demo of Fog Creek’s new products. Joel did one other thing at his presentation that I found very interesting. He didn’t introduce himself (nor was he introduced by anyone else).

Pretty much everyone in the [...]]]> I’ve been writing this week on demos and presentations.

Monday I wrote about Joel Spolsky’s wonderful demo of Fog Creek’s new products. Joel did one other thing at his presentation that I found very interesting. He didn’t introduce himself (nor was he introduced by anyone else).

Pretty much everyone in the audience knew who “Joel Spolsky” was, but few would recognize him by sight. It didn’t matter; from the context, it was quickly clear that the speaker — and bug reporter — was Joel. (Just in case someone was still unsure, when he filed the bug report his name was on the onscreen form.) I’m pretty sure that if you went to that invitation-only demo, you know about Joel.

I wonder in my own presentations how much to say about myself, assuming I haven’t been introduced. One school of thought says, “What you’re selling is your credibility, so you need to establish your bona fides up front.” I don’t buy that, in most cases. If I’m part of a panel discussion, that’s one thing, but in most of my presentations people are coming to hear me. Over time, I’ve eliminated any self-introduction entirely, other than my name on the title or walk-in slide. I may start by saying, “Hi, I’m Steven Levy,” but then I jump into the initial content.

I’ve learned that people are there for the content. When I say they’re coming to hear me, what I mean is not that they’re looking to me to deliver the word from the mountaintop, but rather they’re coming because the topic interests them and they have some idea who I am, rather than walking into a room where the topic is known but the presenter is an unknown factor. I may weave occasional “bona fides” facts into my talk — e.g., “I saw in my decade and a half at Microsoft that….”

I sat through a demo Wednesday where the speaker spent the first ten minutes telling us about his life — and was proud of presenting himself in this manner. I found it profoundly uninteresting — and worse, a waste of my time. I am determined not to inflict that upon others.

So I appreciated Joel simply getting up and starting to speak. We knew who he was, even if we couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. We’re ready to listen; now give us something worth listening to.

I wrote Monday about Joel Spolsky demoing his product “in passing,” without overtly appearing to demo it. It was a terrific idea, brilliantly carried off.

However, few of us demo products whose use can be woven into the presentation itself. (Think of demoing PowerPoint itself for the [...]]]> I’m writing this week about presentations and demos.

I wrote Monday about Joel Spolsky demoing his product “in passing,” without overtly appearing to demo it. It was a terrific idea, brilliantly carried off.

However, few of us demo products whose use can be woven into the presentation itself. (Think of demoing PowerPoint itself for the ultimate you-can-demo-it-without-appearing-to-demo-it product.)

I designed one of the early Microsoft demos for Internet Explorer. Version 3.0 was the first version that was really a usable browser. The demo didn’t sell Internet Explorer per se; rather, it told a story about how we’d be using the web in the future to shop. Internet Explorer was simply there as demoers walked potential customers through buying a shirt — a welcome-back video, personalized pages, a rotating image so you could see the shirt from all sides, a checkout cart that remembered your information, etc.

These are all things we take for granted today, but nobody was doing them in 1995 because the technology wasn’t ready. People expected we’d get to something such as we showed, but they were amazed to see it working. As a byproduct, they took away two important messages that we delivered subliminally (and then probably pounded into them in what we said afterward): Internet Explorer was now Netscape’s equal, and you should look to Microsoft technology if you wanted to ride the next wave on the web.

I loved giving the demo (and teaching others how to give it), because I wasn’t demoing technology; rather, I was walking through a scenario that had everyone fascinated — it was 1995, after all.

I hated traveling somewhere to give the demo, because it required carrying two 15-pound portable computers, a network mini-hub, and other gear, in addition to schlepping my luggage (I hadn’t heard of wheels on luggage yet) and wearing my suit jacket so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. But in the end it was worthwhile.

So while it’s rare that you’re demonstrating something where the setting itself can provide context for your product or offering, take advantage of it when and if you can.

More importantly, consider the lesson here — people care about scenarios, not products. And more than just scenarios, people care about scenarios that match what they do in their life — work life, home life, commute life, whatever. Don’t demonstrate features. Don’t demo your product. Solve a problem. The trick is to pose the problem with as little setup as you can get away with.

Demoing an app for tracking software bugs? What setup could be better than a bug that shows itself to your audience.

Demoing a browser? I showed the “Internet lifestyle” in living color and real-live-before-your-eyes bits, and let the audience make their own connections between an experience they wanted and the technology I was showing.

You’ve all seen the cartoons about the door-to-door carpet cleaner salesman who dumps mud on your carpet. You don’t have to go that far… but if you want to sell me a vacuum cleaner, show me how it cleans up a mess with no fuss and no work. (I hate vacuuming, and I have to vacuum the house when I get done writing this article.)

————

Friday I’ll talk about one other aspect of presentations that came up in Joel Spolsky’s demo.

It was delivered by Joel Spolsky, the brains behind Fog Creek Software and a brilliant thinker about various computer issues.

To set the scene, he and his team were doing a roadshow tour of Fog Creek’s new releases, the unfortunately [...]]]> I’ll write this week about demos and presentations, based on a terrific software demo I saw Thursday.

It was delivered by Joel Spolsky, the brains behind Fog Creek Software and a brilliant thinker about various computer issues.

To set the scene, he and his team were doing a roadshow tour of Fog Creek’s new releases, the unfortunately named FogBugz 8.0 and Kiln. FogBugz is a terrific software-project-management tool, and Kiln is geekware beyond what I want to write about here. (It looks like pretty good geekware; if you develop software for a large team, you might want to check it out.)

For the 30 minutes preceding the scheduled start of Joel’s presentation, the screen showed a cartoonish countdown timer with a Fog Creek logo. Right on time, Joel heads up to the rostrum, the timer goes to zero… and it crashes/bluescreens!

Joel looks at it as the crash result fills the screen with white-text-on-blue-background gobbledygook. He says something to the effect of “Sorry, it shouldn’t do that. I’ve seen this before. Let me just enter a bug to make sure it gets fixed.” He does, and starts his presentation.

A minute later, he gets a popup EMail “toast” — that blue ghost-thing that Outlook pops up at the lower right of your screen until you get smart and turn it off — saying it’s already fixed. We all can read it, and he too gets distracted by it. He looks at us and says, “I don’t think it’s fixed. At least the developer’s on line and working today. Sorry, let me just see what he’s talking about.” He goes into FogBugz, pulls up the referenced “fixed” code, and says — to an audience made up mostly of programmers — “That doesn’t look fixed to me. Sometimes, you just have to do this stuff yourself.” Now totally distracted — but with the programmers all staring at the buggy code, of course — he changes a line of code and says, “That’ll probably work now.”

Anyway, as you’ve probably figured out, it’s all staged. He keeps interrupting his talk to look at the bug, fix it, check his fix with another programmer, and so on. Meanwhile, he’s demonstrating key features of his product in a context that couldn’t have been attained in a straight demo, the audience rapt with attention. (Every programmer has had the experience of his or her code crashing during an important demo.)

He pulled it off superbly. He never winked at the “joke,” nor did he ever acknowledge that it was staged; rather, he trusted his audience to figure it out and go for the ride along with him.

Wednesday, the idea of demoing-without-demoing… which isn’t some Zen concept, but an occasional opportunity from which we can take away lessons for more quotidian demos.

I went to put in my Visa info on a site, as shown in the picture. Note that the MasterCard radio button is selected by default… though I didn’t see that at the time. I know my name, of course, and even the card’s expiration date, but I [...]]]> First, the dumbness. Second, lessons from this dumbnosity.

I went to put in my Visa info on a site, as shown in the picture. Note that the MasterCard radio button is selected by default… though I didn’t see that at the time. I know my name, of course, and even the card’s expiration date, but I had to dig the card out of my wallet to put in the number. I did all that, filled in a few other items, and clicked OK.

The site told me my credit card didn’t match the type selected… and made me reenter my credit card number.

Dumb, inexcusably dumb on three-and-a-half counts.

1) You can algorithmically determine which card it is from the number itself; there is no reason whatsoever to ask someone to tell you want kind of card it is. (What, you think this will help cut down fraud? You don’t think fraudsters know the card algorithms better than any normal person?) Go here for an explanation of how it works. So stop asking for information you already have!

2) If you insist for some reason on a human being selecting one of these radio buttons, don’t start with one selected! Yes, that violates the normal rules for radio buttons… so see dumbnosity #1. Or don’t do it with radio buttons; make each clickable and put a big green border around the one selected, or something.

3) When it give me the error message, it erased my card number. So I had to dig back into my wallet, pull out the card…. You can use very simple on-page JavaScript to determine that the card and number don’t match, so don’t refresh the page because of this error. But this error shouldn’t exist to begin with (dumbnosity #1 again).

3.5) Why not make PayPal an option? I don’t want to keep giving all these websites my credit card info. Each time I do this, there’s an opportunity for a costly mistake, one more place a security breach can happen. With PayPal (or Google Checkout, I suppose), security is much more locked down. Sure, PayPal could have a breach also, but if I have 20 places that have my card number and can screw up vs. a single entity in that situation, the latter is a lot safer. (And it’s not like I’m increasing the risk of PayPal exposure, since I already have a PayPal account, as I suspect most regular Internet shoppers do. If PayPal exposes my data, the harm is the same whether I use them once or have 20 merchants that they serve.)

I do recognize that PayPal sometimes charges merchants slightly higher fees than the credit card companies, and that it’s a pseudo-bank that isn’t regulated like a bank. I’m not saying that merchants should absolutely offer a PayPal option, just that it’s well worth considering. It has pluses and minuses that I won’t go into here. As a consumer, I personally would like that option in addition to using a credit card. Indeed, I have backed away from buying at a few sites because they didn’t offer PayPal and I didn’t really want to give them my credit card… and I live part time on a small island in the Pacific Northwest with no retail stores other than food markets, a small auto- and boat-parts shop, and a lumberyard/hardware store, which means I need to either buy stuff on line or spend most of a day and $30+ to get on a ferry and then drive 20 miles to a shopping center. So I need to shop on line!

Lessons From Dumbness

1) Think first. If you’re asking for information from a user and the user believes you already have this information, the user will be angry and will trust you less. This principle holds whether you’re asking for data on the web, gathering IT requirements, interviewing (whether interviewee or interviewer), and so on.

2) Push back on dumbnosity asked of you. The developer who put together this page a) should have foreseen at least dumbnosities #2 and #3, and it’s not inconceivable he or she should have spotted #1. C’mon, even if you didn’t know about #1, didn’t you at least suspect that this was the case? Surely you’ve encountered sites that don’t ask you what kind of card you have! The developer should have questioned this requirement in the name of customer friendliness. Developers who don’t think beyond the strict confines of “I do exactly what the specs say” aren’t adding sufficient value in these difficult times, putting both their own jobs and their employers at risk. If you don’t push back when you spot little mistakes, you’ll have neither the practice nor the credibility to push back on the big ones. This isn’t just a problem for developers, either.

3) If you’re managing, remember to specify the problem, not the solution. Here the surface problem was “capture the dude’s credit card info,” not “step 1, put up three card logos and make the user choose.” But the larger problem was “find a secure way that the user can pay for stuff.” Stated that way, the PayPal strategy becomes an option in the solution space.

TTFN From My Island

Okay, it’s not my personal island, though often it’s quiet enough to pretend. But as I write this, the sun is out, I’m watching two sailboats make their way across the water in front of my deck, in the last hour I’ve seen a young (no white head or tail yet) bald eagle soar by less than 100 feet away, and I know I’ll get yet another spectacular sunset over the water this evening. And there’s no traffic, no traffic lights, no cell phone coverage or TV to clutter up the day, decent Internet bandwidth, and most of all a slight slowing of time, room for an “ahhhh” between some of the tick-tick-ticks. And now a raven’s calling. (They don’t say “Nevermore,” but rather sound like a crow with a cold.)

I only miss the city sometimes.

Have a great weekend.

It says Mailing Address in big red letters. Then it says Mailing Address in bold black letters. The cursor goes automatically to the first edit box.

So what do I — and I suspect most other folks — start typing? My mailing address, [...]]]> I was filling out an online form today when I came to this section:

It says Mailing Address in big red letters. Then it says Mailing Address in bold black letters. The cursor goes automatically to the first edit box.

So what do I — and I suspect most other folks — start typing? My mailing address, of course.

Designers, it may technically be part of your “mailing address” database table, but we humans on the other end of the screen don’t automatically think, “you want my name here” when we come to an area boldly and colorfully (and redundantly) labeled “mailing address.”

(By the way, this form was the gateway to a site whose core product is known to anyone who travels even occasionally; it’s not a one-off, one-person operation.)

PMBOK Breaks Project Management

The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member).

Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a [...]]]> I found the following subject line on a mail in my inbox yesterday:

PMBOK Breaks Project Management

The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member).

Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a solution. The mail was from an electronic newsletter called IT Business Edge. It struck me as odd that an IT publication would be railing against the PMBOK.

Of course, what happened is that my inbox shows only the first 30 characters or so of a subject line. The entire subject is “PMBOK Breaks Project Management into Five Lifecycle Phases.” (It links to this slideshow — and it’s not a slow Flash thingy, so kudos to IT Business Edge for that!)

I’m not sure why this is headline-worthy news; did someone in IT just discover project management?

But now that I think about it… five phases? They’ve got it down as Initiate, Plan, Executing, Controlling, and Closing. Aside from the grammatical issue — it’s either “…Plan, Execute…” or “Planning, Executing…” — there must be at least one and perhaps three additional, explicitly called out phases in an IT project.

The unforgivable omission is Rollout. Without a specific Rollout cycle, there is a tendency — I’ve seen it over and over again — to “dump” the new solution on the users, point them to a (functionally useless) training website, and disperse the team after Closing — but long before the solution is embedded in user processes. Sure, you can technically put Rollout in one of the other phases, but it’s really a post-Execution activity, involving a handoff from the execution team to an operations team… and much more.

There also need to be User “Readiness” and Shakeout phases. These can be subsumed into other phases — e.g., part of Rollout. However, because the activities and players are significantly different, I prefer to call out explicitly at least Shakeout. In addition, if you’re using stage-gates (go/no-go decision points), these phases represent transition points where the sponsors and stakeholders need to get together on a go/no-go decision. (What, you think you can’t say “stop” after the project is rolled out to users? Wrong. If it isn’t working for them, you may well need to perform a rollback, and you’d better have all the stakeholder ducks in a row when that happens!)

As for the names of these last two stages — there aren’t universally accepted terms. I don’t like “Readiness” — it means everything and nothing — but it can serve as a catch-all for user documentation and training, adoption planning, helpdesk/support preparation, and so on. Shakeout represents the first few weeks to a month of actual use on live data, where numerous bugs and configuration errors will crop up, and where the original development/project team should remain in place to address them. One reason I prefer to see this particular phase visible at the highest level is that there is great pressure at this point to move the team on to other projects… especially if the project is late… and since we’re talking about software, the likelihood that it will be late is, oh, 100%. If the executive sponsor and the CIO are aware that there is a full project phase that is just getting started, there is less pressure to move the team, and more weapons with which to fight the pressure.

So maybe leaving off these phases from an IT project justifies the headline after all, with a slight emendation:

Misapplied PMBOK Breaks Project Management

I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. [...]]]> One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google.

I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. When will you be home? Is Joe coming to the meeting? Please call me back. Hi, this is Joe Blow, and I’m running for Congress.

There are two huge advantages to transcriptions.

1. You can read them on your computer or SmartPhone — and people generally read a lot faster than they listen.
2. Reading is silent; there is little more annoying than people in a conference room or shared office trying to listen to voicemail.

Transcription isn’t perfect. However, when there is low clarity, you can go back to the voice version… which isn’t always all that clear either.

We’ve come a long way since Garry Trudeau singlehandedly killed off the Apple Newton!

It started with this one.

There were more in the series, but this is considered the classic.

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has [...]]]> I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features?

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has worked really well. (I’m proud to say that the deck for my presentation in NYC Wednesday contains only a single slide with bullet points, a list of takeaways on the final slide.) Still, they’ve added a number of things that make it a “must” upgrade for me.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are also a few items that enhance it for relatively inexperienced users who just want to make their presentations a bit better.

So here are ten high-value items new to PowerPoint 2010:

1. Embedded video. Now, when you put video into your presentation and then move it to another machine, the video moves with it.
2. Fine-grained control over complex animations. Most PPT animations are not worth the bits they’re printed on, but if used well they can really clarify a point. Now you can make motion-type animations, such as moving an object along a path, a lot smoother. This is pretty nitpicky stuff… unless you really sweat over your presentations, which I do. I hate stuff that breaks the illusion and calls attention to the presentation itself, and this new feature lets me avoid some “corners” that I never felt comfortable with.
3. Save presentation as video. Use your presentation to create an actual playback video. You can even add narrations and timings.
4. Create sections of files, akin to headings in a Word doc. Now in a long PPT, you can find the individual parts easily. This feature is especially useful when people collaborate on a presentation. Given that PPT is often used in business for creating reports, businesses will find it a lot easier to pull these together from multiple people. (Is PPT the best way to present this info? That’s a different question. Nevertheless, like bullet points, this is a common usage, and PPT 2010 has improved the experience.)
5. Include video from YouTube or other online sites. Now you can include YACV (yet another cats video) in your presentation… or even some useful content. You do need a live Internet link to run the video — which makes sense in terms of copyright.
6. Place titles and other objects on top of video. Video used to run on top of everything else. Now you can add titles, pointers and arrows, and other objects in the standard bring-forward/send-backward manner. (You can also put the video in a non-rectangular frame.)
7. Video controls — brightness, contrast, recoloring — akin to what you can do with pictures.
8. Remove background from a picture. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough for most people on many pictures. For years, I’ve been doing this by the very complex method of drawing a closed Bezier curve around the object (that’s the tool that looks like a square with some rounded chunks taken out, called “freeform”); clicking Edit Points to adjust the curves to fit the object better; copy (Ctrl+C) the picture; right click the outline you drew and select Format Shape; select Picture Fill and Fill from Clipboard; trim as needed with the Offset controls. I still have to do that on complex pictures, but I’ve found I can nail about half of them using the new Remove Background feature, a huge timesaver. (Wednesday’s presentation has about 25 pictures from which I’ve cut out the background, from a watch replacing the head on a $500 bill — hourly billing! — to a stamp that says “Done” to a plate with a pretzel. You’ve got to come to the seminar if you want to know how a plate with a pretzel illustrates the concept of managing scope.)
9. Better cropping tool, which “ghosts” the cropped part of the image as you work, so you can see what you’re cutting out as well as what you’re leaving in.
10. Trim and fade video and audio. No longer do you need a separate editor to cut the end off a video, or fade it in or out.

There are 50 or more new features that add value.

As always, few people other than professional designers will use every feature. However, each user works with a different feature set; that’s why there are so many features in these kinds of programs. The trick is to (a) find the features that make sense for what you’re doing and (b) when you think, “I wish I could do that,” it’s ever more likely that you can do that.

======================

I took part in some ask-the-customer design sessions for Office 2007. Two things struck me that many critics don’t think about, because they don’t play well with the whole bash-Microsoft shtick. (There are lots of legitimate things to get on Microsoft’s case about, but there are many things the company does very well.)

The context is that we had about 15-20 law-firm CIOs and tech leaders in a room; they were asked about what they wanted to see in the next version, then called “Office 12.”

First, there were innumerable conversations like this:

Customer #1: I wish Word would do X in the next version.

Customer #2: It already does it. (Note — it was almost always another customer replying before someone on the Office team could say anything!)

These kinds of conversations sparked the Ribbon. What good are all these powerful features if people don’t know they’re available?

Second, it became clear from those conversations pretty much every feature in Office had fans that considered it essential, detractors who thought it was bloat or unneeded, and others who didn’t know it existed. (Note: Clippy was long gone from Office by this time.) All of those features do have their uses, because people do radically different things with the products. I know people who build reports in PPT, do complex slides, use it as a note-taking tool, even put together videos. All use different features.

If you [...]]]> When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on.

If you think spam has been increasing… well, you’re right. This report in Baseline Magazine notes that 97.5% — 97.5%!! — of email in December and January was spam. [Note: Unfortunately, it's another one of those annoying built-in-Flash-because-the-developer-thinks-it's-cool slide shows.]

The latest trick is manipulating the sent time so that if you keep stuff in your inbox sorted by date, the spam winds up spread throughout the folder; you can’t just pick off the newest stuff on top.

Almost 10% of the spam came from the US. As a US citizen, I find that both embarrassing and infuriating; how is it we can’t catch the folks within our own borders?

====================

The worst part is that about eight years ago Microsoft proposed what still looks like an elegant way to kill spam: make the spammers “pay” for their emails. [The link is to a generally readable page; it then has links to highly technical research papers with more detail.] Microsoft didn’t originate the idea, which has been around since at least 1992, but they actively promoted it for a time.

There was considerable discussion about the idea in the early part of the decade — but there was a lot of “oh, it’s Microsoft, so I don’t like it” and “this isn’t absolutely perfect, so let’s not do it.” That’s the stuff that kills projects, and we’re paying for it today.

Or as Monty Python notes, on the menu “there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam; that’s not got much spam in it.” Well, now we’re up to spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,  spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. (Yes, that’s the proportion.) As far as I’m concerned, that’s got too much spam in it.