Category: Professional

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lean collaborative usability

I don’t have notes for the keynote, but I do have thoughts. more later?

omg this room is too hot.

nice slide of options for testing

better screening helps with buy-in.

reservio.com — I would also love to know what her screening questions look like. this whole slide about automating scheduling, Susan should look at.

I want Susan & Jamie to watch this presentation.

remote unmoderated testing – half desktop, half mobile!

9 page memo as the results

short memo means people read the damn thing, also could turn issues into tickets

she’s big on Optimal Workshop, which I’ve been thinking about off & on

Notable, by Zurb

lean ux book: proto-personas. behavior-based over demographics.

* * *

It’s later; after lunch later, and the session I thought I wanted was totally not what I wanted, so I’ve got a little time to sit & think & write. So about that keynote: my personal reaction to it is pretty positive, for the most part. I had tiny quibbles with some of the science-y details, and I wish her recommendations for building empathy, influence, and adaptability had been as specific and actionable as the ones she gave for awareness. But what I think she heard from Twitter, and I think what I even overheard from someone in the exhibit hall, was a disconnect with the audience. Which is not to say that this stuff isn’t important for Drupal people, for developers, whatever — it absolutely is! (“unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.”) But I would have liked to see her be more explicit about WIIFM and more explicit of a connection with the Drupal community, issues in the Drupal community. I think there are ways to do that. (Plus also unspoken gender boundary, emotion as women’s work, etc. I don’t know it’s better to tackle that issue directly or to glide past it silently, but oh boy is it there.) So that’s what I’m thinking about that.

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avoiding the git of despair

gitforteams.com

Features, Git, & Drush!

I’m wondering if I really want more command-line-ish access, or if Justin does. Especially with committing theme changes.

Also, I want to do some sketching about what the ideal flow looks like for theme, module, structure, and content.

I’m not making a lot of notes in this one because there’s SO MUCH content in the slides, and TBH I want to walk through it with my actual test site. Plus that thing about wanting to sketch. I’m having thoughts about overall process as well.

I want all the more resources, except maaaaaybe the videos?

(plus also I need to watch The Princess Bride again.)

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site building like an engineer

the architecture, and complexity, of a drupal site is based on module selection.

nice runthru of heuristics for module selection.

special cases

panels (“is it done the drupal way or the panels way?” and this is why I’m always skeptical)
display suite
views
“I have this layer of complexity…do I use it?”
domain access
organic groups
rules (turing complete, apparently. “infinite complexity”)

avoiding building the homer-mobile.

data structures

[I don’t know if he’s talking about content types, but I’m feeling like I kinda need a full do-over of the Fields of Study content type]

ok, yes.

“every time someone tries to save a week’s worth of work on the building side, they create a month’s worth of work on the maintainence side”

site building smells

taxonomy: number of vocabularies, general size/complexity of vocabs

content types: number of types, overloaded with fields, do the lines between content types make sense, would taxonomy, entities, etc be better?

in all of this: is there a reason for this to be here?

documentation!

use the description field on the content type, taxonomy/vocab, menus, blocks

in views there’s a place to write comments about the view itself! “this display’s comments”

only add  complexity deliberately
name things carefully
comment liberally { every time you see a textarea just start typing }

that was really good, lots to think about. (and short!)

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battle for the body field

“I thought it was a training issue, but it’s not.”

This story about the HR site for the multinational makes me think of issue with my.e.e, which the admin computing people solve by not actually using any Drupal features. (Then again, my.e.e isn’t really text.)

[pope article after snowfall] this is the “blue box” problem, which we’ve been solving through just styles & snippets.

narrative text; islands of structure; placement that matters

paragraphs: still mostly just good for assemblages. (so maybe the campus life page?)

I’m feeling Insert View in this part of the discussion {cleaner markup slide} — how WOULD you do Insert View in a wysiwyg?

what is the actual vocabulary of the content? even if it doesn’t become a Drupal field, knowing this is important. So I guess the snippets that Justin has worked on is actually helpful?

Tagline!

transform for output slide – just this thing.

“i think im being tricked into using xml somehow” lol

“just have a footnote button and support that” yeah.

entity token embed

deadline vs new content  vs profile vs highlighted material

pattern lab

node embed, token insert entity, entity embed

I can’t believe he hasn’t mentioned Insert View

shortcode drupal module

oh, right, node view MODES. I could definitely play with that some more, esp for Fields of Study?

custom editor plugins?

I feel like maybe I’m in the best place right now, having spent the last three years relearning and doing XSLT, and now bringing that back to my Drupal work.

How to make sense of any mess – Abby Covert — I’ve been thinking about that book.

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morning thoughts

I found the Pre-note sort of dreadfully annoying, so I went out to one of the tables under the stairs, where the initial conversation was about hotels (Milner two blocks from the venue, my eye!) but then five of us were working together to help a gal from a college figure out a View. There was sketching and handwaving. Also turns out that one of the people at the table I’ve met before at a PNW Drupal Summit, so that was nice.

Twice now I’ve been awakened by a garbage truck under my hotel window at 5-5:30am. This morning I managed to doze a little bit after it left, but finally got up for an early morning stroll to the very close by grocery store for some Woolite. The state of my wardrobe is necessitating a bit of handwashing.

The “Driesnote” is packed to the gills; it’s weird that I could hear all the pre-speech bits from the coffee spot right across from the hall, but I can’t hear him at all. Which is fine; this part has never been that big a thing for me. (It’s weird to think of how I basically heard a Driesnote in Portland in what…2005? And it was just a handful of people in a classroom. Now the room is row after row after row of chairs.) I’ve got my day all planned out with sessions that I think should give me all sorts of crazy ideas. Plus there’s a Women in Drupal social event this evening, should be a good time.

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higher ed summit

Panel, no one in a communications or marketing unit — mostly folks who do contract sites for college departments, units, including chargeback models.

Interesting: discussion about how they decide whether to use WP or Drupal for any given project.

It’s so weird being here as a person from higher ed, but with no departments.

Stanford has ~1800+ sites. Business school does Acquia hosting. Most everything else uses their locally-hosted Stanford Sites service. There’s about 100 “special unique snowflakes.” [note also: Behat?] And then also Blackmesh & Pantheon hosting?

Monster Menus module (something with permissions? is it any better than Workbench Access?) But they (Amherst) actually even use Drupal, same one as their site, for LMS-type stuff.

People talking about Word editing issues. “We train people” but it doesn’t work. :\

Interesting thoughts about Features and upgrade paths — I really should reset all the “Features”, redo the ones I exported from my sandbox from scratch in my dev site. Because I’ve probly broken all of those.

Do most colleges have a SaaS or agency model of web development? So much site building in this discussion.

Nice mention of lynda.com. I really should see what’s available there for Drupal.

Migrating from another CMS

I wonder if I should talk to the UC Davis guy about Cascade? Because that was the best presentation at the Cascade conference.

So what ABOUT Migrate? It honestly looks way overkill for what I want/need to be doing. “It is important to recognize that the Migrate module is a developer’s tool — if you do not have object-oriented programming skills in PHP, this module is not for you.” So, yeah. Not for me.

Oh, I need to do a separate migration for the news stories, especially with the newer Cascade content type.

But I guess maybe I could try it? I recognize that I’m a bit fussy about my tech, and maybe I’m ruling it out in an overly arbitrary way. At least see what’s involved on the sandbox site.

Obvs, what I’m hearing is that it’s important to really understand your content types and workflow.

Migrate, per Ken Rickard: Easy to roll back and reimport, declare dependencies, do things in a phased way. And that sounds lovely. CAN MIGRATE IN PARALLEL TO EDITING IN THE OLD SYSTEM. “highwaters” and “stubs”

Getting a dev up to speed with Migrate – he’s selling it from the POV of having a programmer get up to speed with Drupal, but for me it might be finally getting my head around OOP.

I guess I’m also glad that we don’t have this “wild west” situation that a lot of folks do. I can give credit to Luke and past-Susan for that much, at least, whatever I happen to think of Cascade specifically.

Spreadsheets for field mapping. (Resources will be in the notes!)

I also need to go look at the OTHER Cascade content types (etc) for that mapping, which gets me back into the dreadful world of ye olde triple-nav pages.

Relatedly: is there ANY way to get enough RAM (or something) for Cascade to do an index block at full depth? Because ugh.

Got to mention my guinea pig process. 🙂

Oh, go back to that earlier CMS Users survey for what they wish they had. (was it contact forms?)

A little bit of ethnographic research, or even just ask Susan what she’s seen in the field, since she does so much user support.

“I like, I wish, I wonder” (maybe a second survey?)

The rest of the day

I went to the table to discuss user training, and first of all — it was over lunch. I’m pretty sure it’s a terrible idea to have a formal program over lunch. And then at the actual discussion I didn’t get much out of it. So TBQH I bailed pretty early, once I’d finished my food, and then I ran into someone I knew and met some new people and had some good discussions, and now it’s well into another session. I think there’s one more after that, and then “happy hour” (and again TBH I don’t much care about getting free drinks).

Was it worth it? I don’t know. Seems like it needed to be either a lot more structured or a lot less structured, one or the other. And the room was loud, hard to hear conversations very well. And and…the big schools in particular are set up so much differently that we are. :shrug: Dunno if I’d do it again, unfortunately. (Altho it’s nice to have a pre-day to get orientated to everything.)

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morning in LA

I’m up early because there was an incredibly loud garbage truck under my hotel window at 5:30 this morning, and the convention isn’t open yet, so I’m camped at the Starbucks between here & there. Yes, Starbucks. Because it’s open and I know it has wifi and I more or less know what to expect from it.

The ride from the airport to downtown was an exercise in oddly familiar and yet totally unknown. It’s not like I ever really knew this/that part of SoCal to begin with, so really it’s just — I know these trees, that haze, those hills. (Which since I’m still working on an essay about GTA: San Andreas & GTAV, seems particularly appropriate. It’s not an actual place in my head, but it’s LIKE places in my head.

This area where I’m staying and where DrupalCon is has that oversized slightly soulless feel that I’m realizing is the province of everywhere/nowhere. Makes me think I could give Atlanta another try someday when I don’t have to be where I went for that Cascade Server conference.

Today is the Higher Education Summit; I’m not sure what to expect from that, but I’m hoping to glean some ideas for infrastructure, some ideas for user interface and user training. I’m trying to just be open to whatever might happen, and to maybe meet some interesting people. I’m also hoping to keep my afternoon crash to a not-totally-debilitating level. :/

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Upcoming speaking!

After not even really thinking about conference talks for about a decade (HighEdWeb 2004), I’m going to be speaking in public TWICE this year:

In both cases, I’ll be talking about things we’ve done at work, what went well, what failed horribly, and so on.

The core values talk sounds really mission-statement-y, but the act of deciding what to measure our actions against was surprisingly important in the last two years of site changes. (Why yes I am trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to say four weeks from now!)

On the other hand, the work sessions presentation will be more tactical, sharing a particular process that we’ve evolved to get stakeholders involved in developing better web content. Also likely to include lots of psychology, because people.

I’m very excited to hear all the other presentations at these events, too!

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Knitting patterns & open source things

This came up again this morning talking about Grunt: how do you pick a plugin? (See also JQuery, WordPress, Drupal modules, and so on.)

I realized a while ago that how I make those decisions is a lot like how I decide what knitting pattern to use.

Does it do what you want?

Obviously this is the most basic question, whether you’re looking for a CSS auto-prefixer, a carousel, or a pair of socks. But the thing is, if you’re trying to do something that lots of people want to do, probably a few have tried their hands at it. (There are more than 21,000 sock patterns on Ravelry, more than 6,600 of them being free. There are more than 600,000 search results for “jquery carousel”.)

But you’re probably looking for something a bit more specific than that. And if you already know your problem pretty well, you can judge the nuances between Bundle Copy, Features, and Configuration Management. If you know that you have 400 yards of fingering-weight yarn, then you can narrow down your options.

So for me it’s first knowing what I want, including what my restriction are.

Does it do it the way that works for you?

Everybody has preferences in their craft. You want the code that comes out of that plugin to be a certain way. You want a certain workflow in your Grunt tasks or your data imports. You hate data attributes or lace.

Once I have a rough list of things that do what I’m looking for, I look into them to see if they do it the way I like. Sometimes (especially with Drupal or WordPress) it means actually trying them out. For knitting, usually just reading the pattern tells me enough, thankfully.

Do other people use it and what do they say about it?

Great thing about Drupal.org, the official WordPress plugin site, and Ravely: you can see how many people are using things! You can also see a variety of kinds of feedback, like ratings, comments, bug reports. So it’s good to read through those, with an eye to your own preference, and see if it’s worked for others. I may end up choosing things despite others’ experience, but at least I know what I’m getting into!

Related: I do try to participate, especially with knitting patterns. On my Ravelry account, I try to make my final notes on projects as useful as I can, and I always rate both in stars and difficulty.

How engaged is the creator?

Related to the previous point, if there are complains or bug reports, you can see how the creators (developers or pattern designers) respond to them. And that means both quality and speed. For software-related projects, that also means how often they update, and for plugins, how often they update to match new versions of the core software.

Knitters and users of open source tools: how do you pick things?

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introversion, imposter syndrome, and social anxiety

I asked Dylan & Kyle to talk about introversion at conferences on a recent Squirrel & Moose podcast. But really they ended up talking mostly about imposter syndrome, or at least the milder versions of it — seeing people they admired and feeling awkward about talking to them. And more hilariously, feeling intimidated by *each other*.

Which is kind of not what I was thinking of. It’s not that it’s not related. They’re things that look like each other: to the outside eye, the person avoiding everyone, you can’t tell why. Maybe they’re intimidated. Maybe they’re anxious. Maybe they’re just overwhelmed. And sometimes they play off of each other in really unfortunate ways.

I asked about it because I was at a conference, and really feeling the effects of being an introvert in an intensely social experience. Which was all about feeling tired and mentally taxed by just being around people continuously, and needing to have some solo time. It’s something I’ve learned from lots of conference experience, that it’s good for me to really engage and meet lots of people and have intense conversation and to be IN the moment. But that I also have to be deliberate about getting enough of that solitary time. Skip a party or an outing, or even a session, in order to get a breather, to soak up a bit of solitude. (There’s a cafe in Austin whose name I can’t remember, but which I associate with getting some of that solitary time during SxSWi. Same thing with J Cafe in Portland. At Confab it was the Ride Nice bikeshare bikes.)

I don’t know about Kyle, but I’m pretty sure that Dylan identifies as at least somewhat introverted, so I was somewhat curious what his coping techniques. (I have very happy memories of the two of us having a long conversation while skipping out on a session at WebVisions quite a few years ago. Oddly enough, having a quiet one-on-one conversation is almost as good as solitude for recharging from ALL THE HUMANS.) But the fact that instead they talked about being intimidated by web-famous people is interesting food for thought.

Because it’s not like those things don’t play off of each other. If people are kind of tiring or overwhelming, and then also I’m not feeling sure of myself, confident in what I know or can do…then it becomes an excuse for not trying. And for me it easily ramps all the way up to massive social anxiety: I don’t belong here, I’m going to make a fool of myself, no one here will like me, even being here is a terrible idea.

Whew.

So yeah. Sometimes it takes an absurd amount of effort to get out there and meet people, and often I go “home” (hotel room, quiet cafe, etc) early. But at the same time, when I get all the terrible voices in my head to STFU, and when I properly manage my energy, conferences are amazing opportunities. People are amazing and interesting, and I love it when there’s a real connection.