This was another day of hit and miss at SXSW for me. Mostly hit, but one really egregious miss.

I’ve only got one set of detailed notes despite the fact that there were three awesome sessions.

The morning started out great with a social design strategies panel. They went pretty deep on what does and doesn’t work in designing for social interaction. I’m not going to record a whole blow-by-blow of what they talked about here. But I will tell you that as soon as the podcast is posted to SXSW you should go listen to it.

No really. It was that good.

Todd Sieling of ma.gnolia gave a surprisingly detailed summary of the history of their efforts to combat spammers on ma.gnolia. The big take away there was that you can’t win the war against spammers, you can only minimize the damage to your community through good design. The key mechanism that he talked about was ma.gnolia’s “gardeners”. These are folks entrusted to help police the community by moving other users on and off of a whitelist. All those not whitelisted are greylisted and their stuff does not show up in public searches. Todd, I hope I got that right.

Joshua Porter (bokardo) talked about how you encourage good (i.e. desired) behavior. He pointed out that you want to tie behavior to a persisted identity. I think that in principle this is similar to the policy on The Well to “own your own words”. He went on to suggest that you give recognition Like with digg.com’s Top Diggers (though they said Digg took that feature down because it made more sense with a smaller audience but as it got larger it became aggressively competitive for the people at the top of the list and less interesting for everyone else). Joshua also noted that recognition works best when it isn’t permanent. It should be transient otherwise the current top people stay there. He gave a good example in how threadless.com (who’s party I’m going to tonight) handles the ephemeral nature of voting on designs.

After that great panel I went to “Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces”. Great presentation and excellent discussion. Really the kind of gee-whiz stuff that gets you thinking. I didn’t take notes because I was enjoying it too much!

Then came the most dismal flop in the history of floppage. I think I can safely say that the Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview was weapons grade fail. While the interviewer didn’t actually say, “Oh, Mark you’re so awesome and cute and smart and rich I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you!” We were all thinking it for her. Watch it… it’s a train wreck.

Then… redemption. Kathy Sierra showed us her awesome!

I really can’t do her talk justice. You’ll just have to wait until SXSW posts “Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users.”

Oh Kathy, you’re so awesome and beautiful and smart and… ahem.

Anyway, day programming is over. Back to drinking.

Okay, hard night of drinking last night but never the less I was up and in the first sessions this morning. Good thing too. There were two really good panels and two… well… less than great ones.

The “Getting Unstuck: Desktop to Device” panel was a really good one. The panel was lively and covered the current state of convergence between desktop (or web based on a desktop browser) applications and mobile applications. The interesting thing was how bullish the panel was on the blurring of the lines between desktop and mobile applications. They strongly pointed out that they are indeed quite different in design and use, but they’re getting closer in implementation. Lots of talk about css3 and html5 standards. Speaking of standards…

“The nice thing about standards is that there’s so many to choose from.”
- John SanGiovanni (zumobi.com)

That’s gotta be my favorite quote so far.

I asked the panel what they thought the most common “newbie” mistake was when going from a web application to a mobile application.

• Not realizing how much testing is involved in mobile applications
• Making rookie mistakes in form design (e.g. using alpha numeric fields when you should have used a numeric)
• Not taking enough time for development interation between testing cycles

Mobile patterns of use are quite different from website patterns according to the panel. Website design tends to aim for “stickiness” whereas mobile should aim for “bouncy”. Bouncy is where people come in, grab a nugget of info or interaction, and then leave. Mobile isn’t just a smaller desktop.

Over the next 3-5 years the expect to see…

• category killers in one segment hopping into other segments
• what we think of as a “phone” will be very different
• richer browsers on phones
• movement from a phone with a computer to a computer that does phone stuff
• identity will be less phone number based and more URI or email address based

Overall a great panel and really well moderated by Liz Danzico (Bobulate)!

The other big winner panel that I went to was “Managing Communities that Work”.

The discussion about how to manage your online community was lively and surprisingly practical. Some of the best suggestions actually blurred the line between online and offline community.

• go physically talk to the members of your community
  • travel to them and meet even with small groups
  • combine the online and offline community experience
• identify your community experts (and cater to them)
  • talk to them about how sharing knowledge can help others
  • build guidelines on how to be a good moderator/participant

They also covered a bunch of stuff on how to get a community “off the ground”. Things like developing relationships with connectors in your community and trying to get access to their mailing lists or newsletters and attending networking events are pretty standard practice, but a good reminder that in many ways this is not rocket science.

Things they said that were “community killers” were moderating too heavily/toughly and trying to reduce your risk to zero through taking too much advice from your legal team. They were really emphatic about how important, but hard, it is to trust your users at first.

There was a plethora of useful/informative links given:

http://www.smallworldlabs.com/blog
http://www.communityguy.com
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog
http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com
http://www.gindie.com/content/sxsw.html

Anyway, the first and the last ones that I went to were fairly, well… bad. Not truly awful, just uninspiring and bland. The content of the “Rome, sweet Rome: Ancient Lessons in Design” talk was actually pretty good. But the presenter just read her notes and it was a little flat even though I thought she had good points, neato observations, and really good slides. It was just a bit flat for 10am. The last one was just this ecomomist shilling for his book. Blah.

I’m already getting text messages asking where I’m going to drink tonight. But now I’m sitting down to the “Social Marketing Metrics: Where are They?” panel.

Well, I’m here in Austin. The conference registration process was very interesting. I really can’t tell whether it is one of the most efficient methods I’ve ever seen or one of the least efficient. But I’ve got my precious badge (don’t friggin lose it Bruce) and I’m going over the schedule trying to figure out what I want to go attend. In the mean time I’ve been talking.

Nearly everyone wants to talk. Those that don’t are clustered around power outlets in the lobby; Leeches attached to the walls sucking the life blood of technology. There is a stupefying quantity of technology sitting in laps.

Anyway, for a “warm up day” Friday has a pretty cool program.

I’ll be hitting up:
3:00 pm · Book Reading: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
3:30 pm · Book Reading: Building Findable Web Sites
4:00 pm · Book Reading: Subject to Change
4:30 pm · Book Reading: Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online
5:00 pm · Bankrupt Your Startup in Five Easy Steps
5:00 pm · Battledecks II
5:00 pm · Book Reading: Designing the Moment

Yes. I know there are three scheduled for 5pm. I have (of course) listed them in priority order. While the last one may be the most relevant to me, the first two look like more fun so to hell with responsibility. I’m gonna make my final pick on the fly.

After that? Well, I’ll surely be getting soused on Porter Novelli’s dime. They’re sponsoring the “Friday Night Mix at Six” and one of the Porter Novelli folks from DEMO made sure to make sure that I’d be sure to be there.

Sure I’m sure! It’s your bar tab.

We have been asked frequently if LiquidPlanner can be used for tracking the small stuff as well as the big stuff. The answer is most definitely, YES. In this post, I’ll share how our team incorporates software bug tracking into our software development process.

In LiquidPlanner, projects are organized in order of priority; the higher something is in the list, the higher the priority of the work in the project. We use an Agile methodogy called Scrum that groups development work into one month projects called sprints. We use a project to model each sprint (i.e. Sprint 11 is higher priority so it gets scheduled before Sprint 12).

We also create sub-projects (prioritized buckets) for bugs and features, as well as some supporting buckets for untriaged and rejected bugs…

The cool thing is that now we are capturing a complete set of the work (features + bugs) for each sprint and we have one system to manage the process. Note that our team likes to prioritize bugs over features; this aligns with our principle that quality is more important than expanding the scope of the product.

Having separate containers for bugs means you can get analysis on bugs, features, or both by selecting the container of interest…

Having bug containers set up as projects is really useful. I’ll show you what I mean using the image below.

First, when we enter bugs we start the title with “Bug:” this allows us to find them easily with search (eventually we will put this kind of tagging into LP as a feature). We also estimate our bugs. Whoever enters the bug takes a best guess at how long it will take to fix and assigns it to the person likely to own it. The bug automatically gets a yellow flag telling the owner that someone else estimated it and they should confirm the estimate/owner.

We use categories in LiquidPlanner to manage functional areas so we can do things like keep track of the “bugs” in the “grid control.” Here is that that looks like…

Putting it all together, we have a system where our bugs are completely integrated with our project workflow and prioritization processes. The bugs are organized by feature and by sprint; when we lose track of specific bugs we can use the search feature to find them again.

Of course we also attach comments and documents to each bug, including repro steps…

We like having a lightweight bug tracking process integrated with our project management process because it gives us a better picture of our capacity/schedule, keeps us from accumulating bug debt, and lets us spend less time on process and more on getting things done.

It’s time for our bug triage meeting, gotta go.

I’ve been doing a little bit of usability testing recently and stumbled on Morae from the folks at TechSmith. They’re the same folks that make Camtasia and my favorite piece of utility software SnagIt.

Now I’ve sat through a couple of usability studies in my time at Expedia but I never really thought through how the heck you go about capturing and scoring all the feedback that you get during a usability session. I’ve gotta say, Morae has completely exceeded my expectations for things like ease of use and intuitive interface. I guess one would hope so since they do make usability testing software.

The general idea is that you write a simple set of tasks that you want the user to try to perform. Then you record several people doing them (or trying to). The recorded files can then be pulled into a manager application that helps you score how the easily the users performed the tasks. You can also get timing information about how long it took them to do the tasks and a whole buncha other automagical data capture like mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, pages viewed, time between inputs, etc.

There’s more data there (fo’ free!!) after recording a session than I’d ever know what to do with (okay, I exaggerate, I’m a total data junkie). But you get the idea.

Anyway, I have nothing but good stuff to say about this thing. The tool itself is so cool that I’m actually looking forward to doing some more usability testing.

One word of warning; Watch the demo videos! I’m not kidding, you’ll miss a good half of the awesome that is this product if you don’t. While the basic stuff is pretty self-explanatory, there’s all kinds of features for tagging parts of the video of the session and for scoring how the user was coping with your application (or whatever) that you’ll totally dig once you figure them out. And the videos really help get you up and running fast.

Well, I’m off to SXSW this week. If you’re going to be down in Austin feel free to look me up in the SXSW member directory and hit me up for drinks. I’m buying, but you’ll have to sit through a 20 minute LiquidPlanner usability test.

“Round here, we eat our own dogfood.”

“You, uh… what?”

Interviewing for my job with LiquidPlanner late last summer, I was feeling a little over my head. I’m relatively new to the software industry and was meeting with really smart people who have years and years of software experience. And now they were talking about eating dogfood?!

What they were really referring to, of course, was using LiquidPlanner to build LiquidPlanner. And now, with a few months at the company and a successful product launch under my belt, I know why this is so unique, and so valuable.

There aren’t many industries in which you can use the very product you’re developing to inform the development process. Doing so has enabled us to find bugs before our users do, to test new features, and to see how changes to the UI appeal to different users. Not only are we capitalizing on the value of our product but we’re improving it at the same time, a very tasty proposition.

Since we launched our beta program at the DEMO conference in January, we’ve been thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for LiquidPlanner accounts. Many of them are already actively managing projects using LiquidPlanner, but of course, as with any new service, some of the new accounts are not yet in use.

This past weekend, we sent out a brief survey to a few of the folks who signed up for LiquidPlanner but weren’t yet using it to manage their projects. Could they not figure out how to use it? Were we missing critical features? Or were they simply too busy to try it out? The answers were varied, with the majority responding that they haven’t had time since signing up to really see what we were all about.

Interestingly, the answers to another question in the survey validated an assumption we’ve been working against for a few months now: that most people haven’t found a project management tool they like yet. We asked these same people what product they were currently using to manage their projects, and over 50% responded that they weren’t using any formal project management software. (?!?!) Maybe they were building lists in Excel, writing milestones on whiteboards, or sending task lists around in email. This percentage is amazing, given that the SimpleSpark catalog alone lists nearly 250 project management apps. One might think that, by now, everyone would have found the tool that’s right for them.

This is like hearing that someone hasn’t found the right bank yet, so they’re just keeping their cash under the mattress in the meantime. For serious projects, those types of tools just don’t scale.

Edited for clarification on February 22.

We just discovered Bas de Baar, also known as “The Project Shrink”… well… actually he discovered us. Note the interview he did with Jason recently. He has a lot of great things to say about people and project management and I recommend everyone interested in the subject consider adding his blog to thier RSS readers.

People who know me know that I like to have a plan, but I’m the first one to stray from it. This may seem like a strange contradiction or worse hypocrisy, but here’s my justification: if everything goes according to plan, the best outcome is limited to your initial imagination.

I’m not willing to settle for our “initial” imagination because routinely our best ideas come mid-stream during the project. If you are doing work where creativity counts and innovation is part of the formula, you might find that giving that creativity more room to breathe in your plan makes good sense. A great way to do this is with ranged estimation. We usually talk about a ranged estimate (e.g. 5 days – 20 days) as a way to capture uncertainty but it is also a great way to give room to possibilities in your schedule as well. Once you’re willing to admit that you can’t figure it all out up front, this gets easy, just ask your team to make the ranges a bit wider for things they have lingering and nagging thoughts about. You can always narrow it when you get closer but now you’ve left a bit of room.

With all this room in the schedule, why plan? Planning keeps us from getting lost and helps us stay focused on delivering business value. In our team’s case, that value is not always what we set out to do; sometimes it’s better because we didn’t follow the plan.

Of course because LP is flexible and eats changes for breakfast, our plan was smart enough to follow us.

So, I stumbled across this quote by Sir Francis Bacon (you know, the guy who invented the scientific method) regarding the relationship between doubt and certainty.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
- Sir Francis Bacon

It got me thinking because I this happens all the time in projects. And you know what happens when I start thinking… blog post. Yeah.

Oh yeah.