a day in the life (part two)

8am

First order of business: email. I try to maintain an empty inbox, but I’m convinced that such a goal is unreachable. Instead, I employ the strategy of moving the goalposts and claiming victory: if I don’t have to scroll to see everything in my inbox, it’s close enough for my purposes.

Email this morning is a mixed bag. A couple of people sent me things about our meetings later today, and they got their responses. There’s a couple of blog comments that came in overnight that need moderation, and thankfully none of it is the comment spam that I’ve been getting lately. The folks who do our usability recruiting have a report on what they’re doing to recruit for Mac usability participants in the Bay Area. My dad sent me a joke about a blonde in a bar. Bernard’s hard drive is waiting for me at home, and his RAM has shipped.

Running over to the cafeteria for some much-needed coffee results in running into a couple of people from the UA (user assistance) team, so we chat about why I’m up here (‘I’m slumming,’ I tell them), my last usability test, and how the review process has changed this year.

9am

The first meeting of the day. One of my contractors completed a usability study last month on something new in Entourage, and today’s the day for presenting the results to the team. There’s six people in the room and another couple on the phone. My contractor presents the results, we take questions from the crowd, and we agree to try to find some time this afternoon that fits on my schedule and lets me get to my plane on time. (This statement will seem quite amusing later in the day.)

10am

Meeting #2, this time with my counterpart and our manager. We discuss the upcoming review cycle and a bit about how that is different. We discuss some future work and its impact on me and my counterpart, as well as our individual teams. I walk away with new action items.

11am

Meeting #3, this time to discuss the next usability test with my counterpart and one of our contractors. This usability test is for PowerPoint. We talk about the our research goals for the test and what tasks in the usability test we will use to reach those goals. We agree on the goals and general feel for the tasks. I mostly avoid action items from this meeting.

noon

The wheels fall off the cart that is my schedule. It turns out that today is the MacBU-Redmond team’s summer barbeque (the MacBU-SVC barbeque is sometime next week). I haven’t had the chance to check email yet, so I don’t know until now that my 2pm and 3pm meetings had been cancelled this morning. I breathe a sigh of relief: I can go to the barbeque and chat with some of the Redmond folks that I don’t get to see that often, then come back to the office for some quality email (and maybe even work!) time, and make it to the airport on time. (Oh, how naïve I was.)

Lunch is off-site at a park near campus, with catering provided by Milt’s Barbeque. Scott, the marketing manager, is offering up a critique of Milt’s van (too many fonts, he says). We compare notes about the hazards of our jobs: he finds himself critiquing other company’s marketing messages, I find myself with a laundry list of usability complaints about various rental cars. (Dear rental car companies: Please do not buy cars that don’t provide some kind of visual feedback when you click the ‘unlock door’ button on the key fob. I rely on that to find your car in a parking lot, okay?) I tease Kurt, the Group Program Manager for MacBU in Redmond, about wearing sunglasses when it’s raining. Rick comes up to me with this big strapping guy in tow, who turns out to be David Weiss, one of the other MacBU bloggers. We’ve somehow managed to not meet each other in all of the times that I’ve been up there. We tell the other people nearby that only the cool kids are bloggers. Rick and David tell me that Erik Schwiebert, one of the MacBU development leads, has also started to blog.

At the barbeque, Roz thanks us for our hard work. One of the MacBU lab guys gets his 15-year award. The people from my 9am meeting ask if we can meet at 2pm; I agree, thinking that this still leaves me enough time to at least check my email (if not do anything about most of it) and get to the airport.