Developing the web – by Noémie Lemaitre

As a UX team on my own I’m having a “department meeting” with my boss every 2 weeks to update him about my work and get input from him.
Even if the meeting itself only lasts from 30 minutes to one hour, I’ve developed some best practices to save time and improve the overall efficiency of my meeting culture.
So I’ll be writing about a few tips to consistently improve your career during a regular 1:1 meeting with your boss.

The surroundings
Your boss’ head is full with other stuff, too, so he’ll appreciate if you actively take care of the logistics. This includes:

• Making sure you and your boss both know exactly when and where your meeting takes place.
• Reserving a meeting room, a beamer, and whatever tools you may need during the meeting.
• Providing an agenda accessible to your boss before the meeting, for the case he’d like to take a look at it, let’s say, on the evening before, when he has some time left. (Talk to your boss about this topic. Maybe he really doesn’t want to get informed earlier, or just has absolutely no time for that. It’s OK. In this case, skip this step.) The agenda could be contained in an internal Wiki page or in some file you both can access and possibly edit.
• Keeping it private. People who are not involved directly need no access to your agenda. You’re not exposing your topics to the whole company and you’re not making publicity with it, e.g. “Point 3 – Ask for a day off because I’ve worked so hard during the past weeks and I need to go to the [insert embarassing doctor's name here]“.

Plan ahead
Keep track of your tasks to know at any time what you did and what you’ll do in a defined time range. For this, your preparation for the SCRUM daily meeting can be a great help. I’ll probably write about it in another post.

Be prepared!

• Use a template. You can download my meeting template here.
• Block time for your preparation depending on how your input will look like. I need about 10 minutes go through older tasks and to review new ones, and 10 minutes to write things down. I reserve a 30 minutes block of time, including a 10 minutes buffer. Those 30 minutes are a good investment.
• Have thought about what you want to communicate, and how – regardless of the topic. E.g. “I want to say that I like the interaction with the remote developer team and I want it to sound positive.” will have a different output result from “I want to say that I don’t think the new process should stay in place and I want it to sound conviced and ‘ready to change’”.
• Focus on the topics corresponding to the meeting’s nature. For example, asking for a raise isn’t a part of it, it requires a meeting on its own.
• If you’re the verbose and/or fuzzy type of person, knowing how to get your message across in a concise way will improve your image incredibly. Since this is not as easy as it sounds, you may exercise with a friend or go to a presentation training to get better at that.
• Have all the materials you’ll need at hand and organized. Order your printed screenshots, sort the files in your folder by date, etc. You may have to generate some more material especially for this meeting, e.g. overviews, combined images with annotations. It’s worth it: your boss wants to get to the point quickly, not to be taken on a trip to the meanders of your design process.
• Depending on the type of the files required for your meeting (multimedia, print, else), you’ll have to make sure you can play sound, display movies or get a colored print. As many of us already experienced, a change in the media type always takes more time to handle. (The printed will strike at 13:58, you know it!)
• Do you need the summary of your last meeting? If so, grab it and have a look at it.
• Free your head enough to focus on the meeting’s contents. You need to really “be there”.

The paperwork

• Print out your agenda. It’s usually easier for two people to manipulate a pen and a piece of paper together and interact with it than to agree first on a topic and then dictate and type the outcome into a document on the computer.
• Bring at least a working pen and some spare paper to draw schemes or share ideas.
• Have a dedicated paper/note book/Moleskine (or whatever fits you) to take notes and write down to-dos for yourself. Enter information in a way that you’ll be able to understand it later, the more the better.

The meeting itself

• Be on time. Not “your” time, not the “I estimated you’d come a bit late” time. At least 5 minutes earlier. Period.
• As a guideline, be serious, friendly and open-minded. The rest depends on your relation with your boss.
• If needed, review the last meeting minutes together. Have you done what you intended to back then? Has he thought about providing you the information you needed? This works in both ways and it’s possible that one of you missed to to his work, for some reason. Stay professional.
• Take notes. Write down your next actions.
• Better ask twice if you don’t understand what your boss says. Don’t let yourself go out of the meeting unsure.
• Be aware of time passing by. In a time-boxed meeting, one of you may point out that you’ve got to hurry a bit to get through all the topics. You may want to arrange another (bigger) meeting for a specific topic.
• Schedule the next meeting with your boss.

Afterwards

• Are you still writing down next actions while your boss rushes out of the room? Finish that task.
• Now your meeting is over. Take a deep breath.
• You’ll need a variable amount of time for the follow up process, ideally beginning shortly after the meeting. Transform your notes into to-dos, set reminders, modify documents, organize appointements, plan time for the tasks, prepare how to delegate work, etc.
• Write down a meeting summary for the next time. Make it accessible to your boss.

Conclusion
So you see, the meeting with your boss is not only you sitting together and discussing. It requires preparation and has consequences. Once you’ve gone through those steps a few times, you’ll have made a habit out of the procedure and your skills will improve.

What are YOUR tips for such a meeting?

I optimized my workflow by using a few handy Firefox add-ons and I wanted to share the bliss with you.

1. Morning Coffee
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2677
   Maybe a Firefox startpage is not enough for you. Do you want to know what’s going on in your company’s wiki on a daily basis? Have a look at your JIRA assigned issues in the morning? Want to login in your ticketing system every second day? Morning Coffee is the answer.
   You can configure the add-on to load many websites when you click on a single button in the Firefox toolbar, and even tell it to open a few only on Mondays and Wednesdays. That’s a really good start in the working day!
2. Sage
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77
   Sage is a light-weight RSS feed reader. Its interface is seamless but it works streamlined. A must to stay tuned about what’s going on in your particular expertise domain.
3. Read it later
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7661
   Did you forgot where you saved this website you were looking at last week in the infinite realm of your bookmarks? Read it later is for you. With this add-on you just click on a button to remember an interesting page you see on the web. It provides synching so you have access to your reading list from everywhere. You’ll never loose any hot link again!
4. Web Developer
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
   A must for IT professionals. Web Developer provides a lot of – you guessed – web development tools like screen resize, table outline and image hiding, to name a few.
5. MeasureIt
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/539
   Tidy, placed in the browser’s status bar, this add-on allows you to measure on screen. Ideal for getting a quick idea of an image’s dimensions or a form field’s width.
6. ColorZilla
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
   Also in the status bar, ColorZilla picks colors on the screen and gives you the color’s code in hex and RGB.
7. Firebug
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
   Another typical web developer’s add-on, Firebug has become the practical alternative to “View source”. It is full-blown with lots of features which will convince you.
8. TwitterBar
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664
   Allows you to tweet a site you’re just visiting on click. You can automatically add a prefix to your tweet (like “Currently browsing:”) and set it up to ask you for confirmation every time before posting.
9. SearchPreview
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/189
   Formerly know as GooglePreview. Shows a screen preview for each search result in your favorite search engine.
10. Personas Plus
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10900
    This one is for the wellness of your eyes. Make your browser look like an irish pub during St. Patrick’s day’s party or ornate it with your newest favorite movie’s cover.

Enjoy your enhanced Firefox experience and tell us what your top add-ons are!

A few years ago before Christmas I ran accross David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. Before that I wasn’t familiar with personal management methodologies, but since then I’ve been doing GTD successfully. Let me give you a few tricks on how to begin.

Starting
Let’s say you’d like to start GTD.
What you’ll need:

• David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”
• the notes you wrote about your projects and ideas while reading
• some days of vacation (the more, the better)
• undisturbed spare time for yourself during those days (in bunches of hours at best)
• distractions and rewards for your work
• a store with some office supplies, just in case

Assuming that you’ll have some days off around Christmas and New Year’s Eve and you’re not completely overwhelmed by parties and/or family gatherings, you may find out that there is some time left for yourself and your aim.
If you live in the north hemisphere of the globe, the weather is probably on your side too: It’s cold, rainy, snowy and dark, so you’re not tempted to go outside.
I suggest you start reading the book bitwise before your vacation begins; don’t hesitate to take notes, as ideas will come to your mind.

Make sure you have got rid of eventual errands before beginning, and ensure your home and your homemates are in a peaceful state.

Working
You probably already have some topics you’d like to work on, e.g. “Reorganize my workroom for a better workflow” or “Categorize and sort my papers, which have been thrown on a pile during the whole year”.
Avoid getting lost in the GTD revolution and begin with only one topic at a time. Start with a small or medium one; you’ll get practice without being crushed by the weight of the tasks.
It may take longer than expected to free your home office from the great chaos ruling there and it takes a lot of energy (yours!) to restructure something which has been left growing by itself for a while. Don’t forget to rest! Write down your ideas for the other topics on separate lists to clear your mind, but stick to the one you chose to work on.

Try to schedule your tasks in compact bunches. Your plan for a day could look like that:

• Have breakfast
• “Sort papers alphabetically A-K”, 2 hours
• “Go to store to get [insert list of office supplies here]“, 1 hour
• Have lunch
• “Sort papers alphabetically L-Z”, 2 hours
• Free time, shower, etc.
• Christmas dinner at parents

As soon as a task seems to become overwhelming, it’s time to part it in smaller ones. It is better to get the half of the bewildered shelf completely under control than to try to tame the whole shelf and end up with piles of stuff scattered around the place.

Rewarding
OK, now you’ve spent some hours getting things done… You’ve worked hard and your folder with the invoices for the year 2009 is full and ordered by date, but the rest of the room hasn’t changed that much. You may even wish you didn’t start cleaning at all, to avoid facing the irreversible truth: it’s a mess. Are you feeling guilty?
Well, guilt won’t help you fill the folder for 2008, right? A small improvement is better than none, and now you know how you want to handle your files. You can feel more confident about how to do it next time, maybe even tomorrow.
Reward yourself, you’ve done great work! Enjoy whatever you’re doing that evening, you have the right to. (By the way, GTD is a nice topic for small talk.)

Repeating
Plan, work, reward and repeat. Depending on you and other factors coming from the outside, you will be able to create habits in a certain amout of time. Don’t give up! Keep on living those habits after your vacation. Take even smaller chunks of work at once if necessary, but don’t throw your process away. Remember that you’re improving your life quality by doing GTD. Good luck!

Outlook
How did you start GTD? Was it easy? What are your thoughts, tips and tricks on starting GTD?

I know pen and paper are not suited for every type of prototyping, and I think the fact that I like them has something to do with my own preferences. Still I’ve become a fan of “Pen & Paper prototyping” and I’d like to tell you why.

The space factor
Whether you’re sitting at your desk in the office with all of your preferred office supplies, or you’re just trying to get an idea out of your head before going to sleep in your bed, you only need a pen and a piece of paper to do the job. You don’t have to get up and turn on the computer, you don’t have to beg your boss once again to buy this expensive prototyping software. You can carry you prototype with you around the house and the office effortlessly.

The time factor
Sometimes ideas are ephemeral. Turning the computer on and starting the appropriate software – how long does it take? Do you need to wait until some drivers are feeling ready on your machine to begin to get things done?
Or are you a perfectionist and tend to optimize your drawings before you even finish to insert all of your ideas into the software?

The dirt factor
Are you tired of people discussing designs at your workplace and constantly pointing at your monitor, leaving blurs and fingerprints on the surface?

The cost/eco factor
I use already printed paper left from the printer’s ramblings and unwished sheets to draw on (containing no confidential information, of course!). First, they’d go to the bin anyway, since they’re unusable for anything else having a longer life. Second, I like to draw only on one side, so I can compare the pages directly without having to flip them. Third, the sheet’s way leads to the trash can after I’m done and if I have moved on to a digital prototype.

The interaction factor
I have noticed that an informal drawing on paper rather invites people to interact with. It is possible to touch it, to write on it without compromising its holiness (as if digital was “carved in stone”). People can add modifications and notes without feeling guilty or the author of the prototype feeling hurt.

The distraction factor
PowerPoint presentations ideally should look nice. Your paper prototype has to be useful.

The upgrade factor
For some reason I like to believe it’s easier to take a paper drawing to the next level if needed (e.g. to scan it or to redraw it in a drawing software) than to really start over with a document that’s already digitalized. Applying Agile, I don’t need to beautify every concept I may produce – only the one or two which will be relevant for future work.

The reminder factor
I almost never forget what I thought and wanted to tell the stakeholders when I’m showing a concept I’ve drawn myself. Somehow, the same concept, digitalized and maybe even printed aftwards, doesn’t support this.

My company offers the possibility to organize what we call a “Lunch & Learn”. It’s like a brown bag session, except that the company sponsors the food. It always takes place during lunchtime and one of us picks a topic he’d like to talk about while the attendees are eating. The subject range varies from technology to business processes, from in-depth coding details to software overview.

So  I hold a presentation about our User Experience department and its work. I explained what UX is and what responsibilities and activities are related to it. I spoke about the UX workflow in the development team and the role of the UX Designer (me) in the making of our new platform.  We looked at samples of personas, task flows, use cases and acceptance criteria in detail. Finally I reported about the training “Designing complex applications and websites” at the Usability Week in Berlin last week, and what I learnt from the cool sessions with Lynn Pausic. My colleagues came up with interesting questions, e.g. “How many developers can be kept busy by one UX professional?”.
I chose to display some real work on the walls to make the experience more practical. There were documents used in the daily work like design concepts drawn on paper, low-fi interaction design sheets, or full-grown specifications.

Verba volant, scripta manent (“words fly away, writings remain”) – is my first reason to start a blog. I’d like to share my findings and accomplishments with the connected world which provided me with so much useful information; so that’s what I want to give in return for those many years using the web and its resources. This is for all of you out there, for the posterity and for myself when I’m old and I don’t remember it all