Crawling and #2′s

Lucy, my youngest daughter, started crawling today.  She looks funny as she sort of drags here legs along a bit but it’s still a crawl.  They grow up so fast.

Emma the eldest daughter is close to being nappy/diaper free, in the second big feat of the day in the Barton household she went to the bathroom, without prompting, got on to the loo and did a number 2.

Can you tell i’m a proud daddy

Solitaire

There was a time when solitaire was something you played with a deck of real cards.  Then Windows added Solitaire and we played it on a computer.  As I got off the train this morning I saw two people playing it, one on their mobile phone and one on their ipod.  Interesting how we still play the same games that people have played for centuries (Napolean played it while in exile on Saint Helena) just on different mediums.

Emma on the Phone

So I come home from work to find my daughter busy on the phone. My family did not have a telephone until I was 13 years old, Emma is 13 months old…I guess that’s progress!

Emma’s First Steps

Emma decided that she would wait for the one week that I was away on business to start walking. Milena videoed her to capture this amazing momemt.It was interesting that the first time I saw Emma walking was via skype video conferencing. The wonder of technology

Send A Smile

Send a Smile is an interesting way Microsoft are using to elicit feedback on the new Beta of Office 2007. In Jensen Harris blog he describes why Microsoft are doing this.
"Send a Smile is the best way to send feedback about Office 2007. Believe it or not, your feedback goes directly to us on the product team—directly to the people responsible for making decisions about the product in every area."

According to MSBlog Send a Smile works like this "Simply when you’re using an Office Beta 2 application and your happy with a feature or think “oooh I didn’t know I could do this before” and you’re having a good experience, double click the green smile to send a quick note to the Office team along with an optional screenshot of what your screen sees, and send away. It even saves it as a JPG so that it uses up little bandwidth"

As a Product Manager I am always interested in getting feedback on what frustrates our users and what our users really like about it. We often deal with system support, "super users", and managers but I really feel we don't always get the chance to get enough feedback from the day to day users of the system. What I like about this idea is that it captures your feeling at its source, when you are totally frustrated that you can't work out to do next or you think of something that would save you time hit the appropriate face and send it to the people making the decisions on the product.

I'll be talking the team on Tuesday morning to see if this is something we can do with our upcoming beta releases. We try to schedule research time for Friday afternoons perhaps I can persuade someone to see if this is something we can do.

4 Weeks Old Today…

My wife and I gave birth to our first child Emma Primrose.  4 weeks on and despite less sleep life is wonderful.  It is amazing to watch the change in her each day as she learns about the world and adapts to her environment.  

Emma already has her own blog where she co-writes with her ghost writer about her life so far

jnd

Don Normans web site is called jnd.org and if you look close enough on the home page there is a reference that says What does “jnd” mean?. jnd refers to Just Noticeable Difference. Don explains it as “In the field of psychophysics, that branch of experimental psychology that studies sensation and perception, a jnd is the amount that something must be changed for the difference to be noticeable, defined to mean that the change is detectable half the time. My goal is to make a noticeable difference — many jnds worth — in human-centered technology.”

What jnds are you going to make today?

Rediscovering an old friend

When I look back at the things I did at University and in my first job it is interesting how the things I am doing now are not so different. If someone asks I would say things are much different but what occurred to me is how the things that interested me in the past are still important to me now.

For example, at University I studied Accounting and Finance and for my final year thesis I wrote about Japanese Lean Management techniques and how they had been applied at Nissan in the UK and productivity and quality was higher than in their Japanese factories. Today I am championing Lean development within a software company. Kaizen, change for the better, is a term that caught my attention when I wrote the thesis and has stuck with me and even though it is not something I expicitly refer to at work it is the essence of what I am trying to encourage each day.

One of the most enjoyable topics covered during my post graduate study on Business Systems Analysis was Human Computer Interaction. I remember reading a lot about the topic and in particular the writings of Don Norman. Just today I was reading a post from the Agile Usability newsgroup where they referenced an article by Don Norman on Usability in Agile projects. Funny how things come together.

Why I like reading?

The thing I like about reading is not necessarily what I am reading it is the fact that it helps me think of new ideas. Quite often I can read a book and it gets my mind working overtime and I come up with lots of new ideas.

I also find that it helps me discover new things. For example yesterday I was reading about OLAP as it is related to the latest MMF my team is working on. From reading about OLAP I discovered a radio show where someone was talking about OLAP and that led me to SQL Server Analysis Services, MDX queries and Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. As I learnt about these various things I was also generating new ideas and features that we could implement in our product such as Conditional Formatting rules to make important data stand out to users.

Listening To: Donald Byrd – Stepping Into Tomorrow

ActiveWords I Miss You

My laptops hard drive died yesterday and I have been using the spare laptop I am about to give to my mother, so that we can more easily keep in contact with her once the new baby arrives in May. One of the things I miss most about the setup on my old laptop is ActiveWords (http://www.activewords.com/). It is a great productivity tool that enables you to start applications, launch your favourite websites and much more through the use of key words and the F8 key.

Listening To: Artic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor