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Focusing on improving the performance of your employees is a big contributor for improving the overall performance of the team. When you have a large team (or when you have a small team), you will get people with varying levels of productivity and with their own personal traits. There will be people who will be extremely skilled at being organized, there will be people who are extremely good at writing code, there will be others who are good at architectural work, and so on. Over a period of time, you will also learn their personal traits and figure out which of them are good at what, and weak at what.
When you are looking at the performance of your individual team members, there is a certain amount of bias you would have. If you are an organized person, you would tend to appreciate people who are more organized, and so on. However, what is more important, and sometimes difficult for a manager to understand about, is to provide the right set of inputs that will help improve the performance of an individual. Now, this inputs about how to improve the performance of an individual should be done regularly rather than only as part of an appraisal.
Once I mention the word appraisal, there is the potential to write a book about Do and Don’ts, so let me take up a specific section in this post. This post is meant for people who work in the IT industry, and one important thing to keep in mind is that people in the industry can have an inflated sense of their own importance, and it is important to talk keeping this in mind. If you give them a clear and blunt feedback and it is harsh, there are chances that you risk pushing the person away. This is also try if you point out all the problems that people possess.
Hence, it is important that you focus on the 3-4 top issues that a person faces, and which would have the maximum impact on the person’s productivity, try and capture relevant examples that show these issues and focus on these on your regular performance sessions. It gets difficult if you start providing feedback on everything that the person does wrong, since it may be perceived that you are now nitpicking rather than proving the required feedback. And be sure to provide this feedback if you see an instance where you feel that the person could do with some improvement, after ensuring that you have got all the aspects of the issue, and make sure that the person has understand the feedback. Repeat this feedback in terms of checking again after a few days whether the person had any concerns over the feedback you provided.
However, to repeat, it is critical that you provide this feedback restricted to the top 3-4 issues, else you will start to lose your credibility as a person who is able to understand the good and the bad that the employee does. This part is very important, and I have seen a case where a person wanted a transfer since they felt that I was not able to understand them.
| 360 Degree Feedback : The Powerful New Model |
The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence |
How to Give Employees Performance Feedback |
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In the previous post (methods for getting team to view user testing), I had talked about the ways in which a development team can view the results (rather, the actual process) of the user testing (sending somebody to the actual location; getting a real time broadcast of the event; running the videos later). However, in this post, I will try to get into more detail of what the user testing actually reveals, and how it more than just a video of the session. Interpreting user testing does require a fair degree of professionalism, and to get the best value out of the user testing, it is recommended that you have an expert in the field of user testing to run through the entire process.
Why do you need an expert to run the user testing process ? Well, because if you don’t run the process properly, you get results that may not reflect the sample of the population you are looking for as customers, and you can make changes in your application based on the results you get, which means that you are now going off on the wrong path, and that can be very expensive for the application or even spell doom.
A user testing expert will work with the experience designer and the product manager to determine the questions that need to be tested, to break up the queries in a form that can be made into test cases for the users, such that you can have a query for the test users who can then take a series of actions that answer the query (something like, for an imaging application: “If you want to remove the red eye from a photo using application xyd, what would you do ?”). In such a query, you would find out how the users react, which menu do they try, do they look baffled or start trying out things and get to the required tool within a few seconds, and so on. The key in this is framing the questions in such a way that the user can understand it quickly, and yet in a way that the response meets the objective of the user testing process.
One of the biggest areas where the user testing expert starts out with is about ensuring that the right people are selected for the user testing. This is not so easy as it sounds. The conditions for selecting the right sample need to be enumerated based on discussion with the Product Manager (and these could be multiple people from the same type of sample, or a broader sample to try to represent more sections of the desired user set (and keep in mind, since user testing can be pretty expensive, in the tens of thousands, you cannot in most cases go for large sets)), and then the right set of people are selected. Part of this is whether the tests are needed to be carried out at the location of the users, or in a controlled location. Using the user location gives the background of the user environment, and can be helpful in determining the amount of time and focused attention that the user gives to the application. To be contd ..
| A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability |
The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics |
Designing with the Mind in Mind |
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Will continue this in Part 5 …
In the previous post of the series (Usability testing and its importance to the team), we talked about how to get the team to understand the value of user testing of new concepts and workflows, especially through the process of taking the team members through cases where the team members are shown an example of the users finding workflows difficult, and the team expected this workflow to be a bit hit.
In this post, I will talk more about how the team can actually get to experience the process of user testing. Here are some methods that depend on the techniques that the company may have adopted for this purpose:
- Actually being there for the user testing. This is easiest when the user testing takes place in the same location as where the engineering team is based. If they are there in the same location, then it is fairly easy to take the team to the room or location where the user testing is happening, and putting them where they can observe the user testing but not disturb the actual place of user testing. I have seen teams watching the proceeding from a place with a glass through which they can see inside but the people inside cannot see outside.
- When the user testing is happening in a different geographic location from the engineering team. In this case, the attempt should be to ensure that as many of the team members can be sent for the actual user testing. This gets difficult when the team members are in a different country and the user testing is in a different geography. Given the need to ensure that the team members understand the importance of user testing, it does make sense to try and make the budget for this trip, and get the people who are the most involved in the design aspects for the new workflows to make the trip.
- When the team members are not able to make the trip (or most of them are not able to do so), the next best option for the remaining members of the team is to view the user testing on a real time basis. This is through using some sort of broadcasting situation where the user testing is broadcasted through the user of a solution such as Cisco Web broadcasting or Adobe Connect, such that the team members can see the user testing. With modern networks, the clarity of such videos can be pretty high, and with proper placements of cameras and audio, the team can see it similar to what the user testing researcher sees.
- However, there are situations where all of the above situations cannot happen. When the team is in a different geography, especially when the team is based in India, the time zones are very different and it would be hard for the team to actually get involved in viewing the presentation real time. In such cases, the videos of the user testing should be shown to the team, and in a setting where the entire team watches the presentation, and are led by either the Product Manager or the User Experience Designer who can walk through the critical parts of the actual user testing.
| A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability |
The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics |
Designing with the Mind in Mind |
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Will continue this in Part 4 (link) …
In the previous post (User feedback and teams), the post was about the importance of getting feedback from users where you are evaluating changes in the workflows in your product, or modifying some of the features. In this post, I will write more of this topic, specifically with reference to the team members and their exposure to the user feedback sessions.
In today’s world, a lot of teams are spread geographically and hence getting all of them to the same location where the user testing is happening is not possible or feasible (it can be done if the budget is there, but given tough economic times and a lot of stress on the budget, it just does not seem feasible to ensure that the team members can all make it to the actual physical location where the user testing is done). In our case, we had team members in New York, in Romania and in Bangalore, and the actual testing was done in London.
So what are the alternatives that can be employed ? We will talk about some techniques that can be used by the team members to view these user testing sessions, but for now, we need to also ensure that these team members see the value in viewing these user testing sessions.
This is a difficult task. How do you get team members to see the benefits of being more involved with user testing, viewing how users evaluate the workflows that have been built or modified. One easy way of getting them more interested is taking one of the most radical feedbacks from the user testing and having the product manager present this feedback to the team (this could be something such as the users not finding the entry point to a feature which was supposed to be the most useful features for users). This should present a huge challenge to the team, since it would not be easy for many of the team members to understand how users could react in such a way.
This is the perfect point to get the team involved, by challenging them through such methods. If the user session has been video recorded, then at this point the product manager or the user experience designer should show the video from this point onwards (after first displaying some information about the user which shows how the user is part of the target population, and if possible, showing their setup where they use the application including the times of the day when the user typically uses the software). An important part is to emphasize the point where the users face issues in the workflow, and with modern techniques, it is even possible to monitor the movement of the eyes of the user. Being able to see this gives a very good insight into how the users react, and can be very surprising for the team in terms of the way that the users react.
| A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability |
The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics |
Designing with the Mind in Mind |
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Will continue this in Part 3 (link) …
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Software Jobs If you have the following profile, and are looking for a job in India or in the US, please send an email to getitjobsindia@gmail.com
1. Software developer in Java / C / C++ / C# with experience more than 2 years
2. Software quality tester with experience more than 2 years
3. Product Management for a software company
4. Program Manager / Project Manager for a software company
5. User Interface Designer / Graphics Designer / Visual Designer
6. Tech Writer
7. Software products support
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