Back to paper

As those who regularly read these pages know I’m a guy of the Digital Era: I listen to MP3 music both at home and while on the move, I regularly wear a couple of cellphones, my alterego’s name is Blackberry, I own 3 computers (and regularly use each of them), the main method I get in touch with my parents is via Skype video, etc. etc.

But all these bits are starting pissing me off. I want some more Carbonium (or, better said, 6 athoms of Carbonium 10 athoms of Hydrogen and a twist of 5 athoms of Oxygen).

It all started in early last year. When I get rid of the ugly Word generated fax cover and switched to b-side of used A4 sheets and the use of a pen.

This simple operation boosted my performances when sending data via fax:

• Since I don’t usually use Word templates I’ve always got the need to search for them. Now I don’t do it anymore.
• Since your’re supposed to be creating a - ehm - good looking fax cover you should also give a proper form to what you’re writing. Now I grab my pen and wrote what I have in mind directly on the paper.
• Some times the printer crashes, and I have to reprint the cover and wait for the printer doing its job. Now I just take the first used sheet I find and I’m ready to start.
• And, most of all, I can draw cooler smiles then those you find in Word!!! (actually cooler then those you find in Wordpress too!)

But this was just the beginning. Then I received a present from one of our partners that definitely turned me on. A 365 days Moleskine diary. In full effect.

I’ve never owned a Moleskine book, but apparently all of my marketing/advertising/graphics/creative friends have one (Marcello, you know who you are), and I’ve always been kinda gelous of the particular feeling they have for their Moleskine.

Today I grabbed my beloved stylo and started copying all my meetings from the Outlook agenda to the Moleskine. What I loved more is the soft scraping sound the pen produces as the ink flow on the paper; it’s not a scheduler anymore, it’s a piece of me; an echo of my life tranferred on the Moleskine.

Wonderful.

Now I’ll tell you my friend what are my plans. I still need Blackberry and Outlook since they’re way too comfortable to be left behind. But the paper diary will become my preferred way of tracking appointments, it will be the first thing I’ll look at once in my office (just before opening my Bloglines account) and the last thing I’ll close before commuting to home.

Me, my stylo and my brand new Moleskine: technology for my own sake.

Creating the helpdesk experience

We all have, sooner or later depenging on how you feel lucky, a frightening story about helpdesks: labyrintic menus, looping hold-on messages, and ultra-dumb helpdesk guys (ever felt that strange experience when every guy you talk to asks the same identical question before passing your call to the next one?).

Believe me, I’ve always been kinda unlucky with helpdesks. Unfortunately. So I was happy my first day at Gabetti to discover I would have worked shoulder to shoulder with a small helpdesk team serving our 1000 agencies on IT related problems.

Back in June 2006 the only way to contact the helpdesk was to give a call to a phone number behind which laied an exchange that took care of the call forwarding to the first free operator. In other words the process was something like

1. call the number
2. stay at least 15 mins (if you’re the lucky boy) on hold
3. explain your problem to the operator (other 15 mins, at least)
4. wait until the IT team solves your problem

A syncronous helpdesk is a waste of time for everybody: for who has the problem and for those who solve it.

Then we started innovating the technology and the processes below the IT helpdesk; our keyword was “asyncronous”.

The first step was to provide the support team and our users with a web interface, with proper problems sections, to communicate and manage tickets. We’re really really happy with the open source software OTRS which could be managed both via email and web and is plenty with personalizations.

That was an important shift from syncronous to asyncronous assistace which brought some interesting features to our helpdesk structure:

• Our clients wouldn’t have to wait for a free operator to communicate their problems anymore
• We have the power to simultaneously close a large number of tickets in the very moment (that is to say make more users happy in less time)
• We can prioritize problems (both basing on the quantity and quality data of our users’ problems)

With just this change we obtained a huge (nearly half an hour) speed up of the ticket opening. Not bad, huh?

But the we moved fast forward both from the technology and process points of view: we rolled out Gabi, our Virtual Assistant, back in July to manage the whole help desk front-line and, more recently, we choosed to prioritize our asyncronous tools (such has gabi itself and the online helpdesk) by cutting the telephone helpdesk times from 8 to 3 hours a day.

Even if this strong move towards the asyncronous life style hasn’t already showed its entire potential the results are huge: the mean life time of each ticket is now something less than 1.5 days and the monthly helpdesk performance has gained full 44 man hours (which is something more than the Italian equivalent of the work week).

How simplicity can improve your speech

I’m on a fast train connecting Florence to Milan together with my colleague Luciana (aka the uber wonderful Luciana Gabetti): today I had a talk at the Creativity Festival at the Second Life pavillion on the economy of the Gabetti project in the metaverse.

I don’t want to bother you with so much showcased informations and data (but, if interested, you might want to take a look at my latest presentations - both in Italian and English) but - instead - I’d like to share with you the thoughts that are crosing my mind will looking out of the window, in the glowing dark of the Italian countryside.

Simple is effective. Be simple to be effective or - in other words: increase your simplicity to increase your effectiveness.

I’ll talk about presentations in this post, but - probably - you can adapt this to other scenarios too.

I’m a loyal reader of the Presentation Zen blog and always try to strengthen my slide with Garr’s tips: I use more images then text, I write short and memorable sentences, I always try to engage my audience. But there’s one thing I ALWAYS do: I keep the technology aspect of my presentations at the stone age: very very few motion effects, no audio and, most of all, absolutely no need for an Internet connection. (and I use Keynote as my slideware)

Why? Because you don’t know anything of the scenario your going to find and the conference centre; you cannot know whether or not the audio mixer will melt up just before your presentation or the internet connection automagically crashes in the very moment you click on the link.

And, my friend, the today conference (albeight being plenty with SL professionals as speakers and a very interested public) was a PRESENTATION INFERNO:

• A speaker (a dear friend, by the way) presented using a cool mash-up that takes selected photos by flickr and let you organize and access them in presentation style mode; BUT he was plenty with shots (really too much) and not very used at the software shortcuts, resulting in most of his presentation time spent passing from one wrongslide to the other (again, wrong)
• Another guy based his introduction to the usage of a very laughable video of a famous italian showman; please note that the video itself wasn’t important but what the showman said in the video was the topic the speaker would have moved on… but there was no audio cable in the room at all; so the presenter tried to move the mic (with a HUGE tweet while passing in front of the speakers system) the mic nearer to the computer speakers… but no sound were heared at all. Creepy.
• On videos, again: a presenter choosed to use a Flash Video… choosing to compile it, in the Flash IDE, during his speech (and, by the way, audio and video were out of sync);The last one. Promise. It’s been a while I learnt an interesting lesson: your audience NEVER know when something in your presentation has gone wrong… until you tell them.
• This man chose to link a file from his presentation but something gone wrong and the magnificent “file not found” window opened. And, adding problems to problem: he started looking for the file in the operating system!

Conclusion: the simpler your presentation is (and I’m speaking about presentation style and technical aspects) the more chance you have to appear a really smart presenter.

P.S. The organizer told me his appreciation for my presentation saying “It was so obvious the you were the marketing guy among the others looking at your presentation style”. Ehm… It’s now 10 years I’m working in IT related teams/companies

Cited by Luke Wroblesky

Wow, it doesn’t happen everyday to be cited by LukeW in his speech at the IA Summit 2007.

Take a look at the slides.

Switching to mac - a live experiment

My new MacBook Black arrived at the office last Friday. It was a nice chance to showcase to my colleagues the “Apple Way”: precision in every single detail; that would a nice method to apply to our daily tasks, I’m planning an internal presentation about this.

At Gabetti we have a whole Microsoft infrastructure (and it’s a kind of a network if you think we manage 1 headquarter, 7 branch offices and more than 700 agencies all over Italy) so we’re about to face the complex task to insert a Mac (well, actually 2 of them since we’ve bought a Mini for the IT meeting room) in this MS world.

In the forthcoming days I’ll update this post on the results of making fully usable this list of applications and tools (and possibly avoiding dual boot):

1. Microsoft Project
   Update: Done! I’ve installed Windows Vista over Parallels and successfully integrated Project over the Project Web Server.
2. Using iMail and iCal Entourage on an exchange server (obviously using autocompletion for the email addresses)
   Update: done! the installation path was as slight as possible and withing a couple of clicks I had all my mails and agenda on the MacBook
3. Connecting the Address Book to our Active Directory
4. Exchange complexly formatted Word, Powerpoint and Excel files with my colleagues
   Update: partly done I’ve started working on our ppt templates without any assle. Need to explore further though.
5. Taking advantage of the Application Access Profile I have in my AD profile
   Update: partly done. It works in Vista over Parallels; not yet under Mac OS.

While I’m pretty confident that point 4. is not going to be a mess, I’d really like to hear from those of you who already successfully managed one of the remaining points.

Speaking at the World Usability Day

As previously posted, tomorrow I’ll be at the Bicocca University premises to hold a small talk at the World Usability Day 2007 (see details about the event). I’ll present UXnet - the User Experience related org I represent in Milan - introducing WHAT it is and HOW it can practically help other organizations.

Set your agenda on November 14th from 10.00am to 2.00pm (CET+1), Marco Martini Room, U6 building - Milano-Bicocca University. There’s also going to be a live webcast so you can follow the talks from your computer; stay tuned on the event official web site.

UXnet and the World Usability Day

As many of you probably know i am the UXnet ambassador for Milan, which actually means it’s my job to create connections between companies and the UX community, UX professionals and UX associations and son on.

In this continuing effort I decided to volunteer for the organization of the UPA World Usability Day at a global level becoming one of the UXnet provided Regional Liasons.

Since there’re just two of us in EU I’ve had the chance to get in touch with a whole lot of UX people from a lot of countries: UK, Spain, Belgium, Poland, France, and the list might continue… it’s been a WONDERFUL experience.

UXnet also recently welcomed Michele Visciola as ambassador for Turin and Rome. Michele alsso happens to be the President of the Italian UPA chapter and the organizer of the Italian WUD event in Milan (here’s the program and a list of speakers in English).

I think there shouldn’t be a better chance to talk about UXnet; yours truly has been invited for a short (short short short ) talk about our community. See you there.

Gabetti Open Points

Or, as I’d like to say: starting the innovation of the real estate market; Gabetti Open Points are interactive windows we started spreading through italy. They’re a 24h/7 Gabetty agency where you can search for an house or office, simulate your loan, and leave your data to be contacted by an agent.

These interactive shop windows are built using a supercool fanless hush computer, a 32′’ Nec LCD screen and a touch-sensible ultrathin film that converts the existing glass window into an input device. Even if the technology isn’t so cutting edge I’ve never seen something similar applied to a shopping experience, moreover if we talk about real estate business.

There’s an interesting effect that we observed as more and more of this open points appear in our shops: the Observers or - as my boss likes to say - the “Broken Window effect“. When you use one of our Open Points immediately a huge crowd becomes visible on your back: curious people that have never ever seen something similar: a shop window that can be touched to interact with a monitor. WOW.

If you leave in Italy (or planning a trip to) be sure to leave a comment here below. We’re starting with a promotional initiative that involves the Open Points and a mass market distribution firm. you could try these machines and also win a 150.000 euros worth prize.

Interfacce06

This year I’ll be involved - as part of the efforts of the divulgation of UXnet related themes in Italy - in the organization of the interaction day at Interfacce06 (Interfaces06) a whole 2 days on usability and user interfaces that will be held in Rome on the 10th and 11th of October 2006.

The call for papers is still open, you might want to give it a look (note: it’s written in Italian); don-t hesitate to contact me should you need further infos.

Eyetracking study on label placement in forms

UXmatters publishes today my latest article on the usability of web forms studied using eye tracking technology; I think that some interesting patterns arose, give a read if you’re building forms intensive applications and leave your feedback in the comment area of the article, I’d really appreciate that.
I based the test setup on Luke Wroblewski’s (principal designer at Yahoo) article “Web Application Form Design.” Luke himself provided valuable insights and feedback during both our test preparation and results analysis.

Hope you’ll find it useful.