Jury Duty 101, the Fulton County Edition

This isn’t really about the user experience, and it may not be interesting to anybody who doesn’t need to serve jury duty in Fulton County, GA. There were a lot of things that would have been helpful for me to know, so I’m going to capture some of my thoughts here, in case they’re of use to anybody in the future. Bear in mind that my experiences were for Fulton Co., and I think it differs quite a bit from county to county.

Note: I have always wanted to serve jury duty, but now that I finally got called, I’m a contractor. So I did not want to serve at this time. Hopefully next time, I will be an employee and can serve.

Don’t worry about being exactly on time. I arrived 20 mins early. They will be happy to accept you late.

Bring a comfy chair, the kind you take to your kids’ lacrosse games or whatnot.  The reason will become clear later in the post when I go over the chain of events.

Your jury summons states that there’s  free parking and a shuttle from the Ted. Screw that. Park in the Underground Atlanta lot for under ten bucks.

You will know where to go. Just follow all the other people. It will be obvious.

Take a snack that contains both protein and carbs, along with a water bottle. You’re going to need sustenance if you don’t get dismissed.

Pray to get dismissed.

They show you a video that thanks you for your civic duty and explains nifty things like the difference between jail and prison. This is not helpful compared to knowing what will happen if your group goes on to voir dire (the part where they try to determine which 12 of the 60 in your group to select for the jury). That’s why I’m posting this.

So, here’s how the day went:

7:40 arrive and go through security, including metal detectors and potential frisking. Go to the jury assembly room and make yourself comfy-ish. It’s really not bad. You will look back on it wistfully later. Check in. Watch the video. Read. They have reading material in case you run out.

9:45 several other groups lucked out and were released. Evidently, being confronted with the specter of a Real Live Jury motivates previously intractable defendants to plea bargain (criminal) or settle (civil). My group gets a 20 minute break. You’re allowed to go down to the “cafeteria” or get items from the vending machines.

11:00 My group is called. I am told I am number 21, and I need to remember that. We are told to go upstairs to courtroom 8A and wait in the hallway.

In the hallway, a clerk attempts to get us to line up in order of our numbers. It’s not easy. People have forgotten their numbers, and the clerk must speak softly because there’s a trial ongoing in the courtroom next door. As she places you in line, the clerk hands you a laminated card with your number on it. Everyone wonders aloud: why didn’t they hand us these downstairs when they gave us our numbers, and then tell us to go line up in order? Gang members abound, apparently present to support whichever of their brethren is on trial next door. You are now thankful for the metal detectors downstairs.

Noon We are still waiting in the hallway, which has a cement floor with a thin coating of industrial carpeting. My feet hurt and I want to sit down. People begin to sit on the floor against the walls. Shortly thereafter, they get us to file in to the courtroom.

The defendant and his attorney and the prosecutors (2) attempt to make eye contact with each of us, presumably to identify anybody they know or people who look like they might be sympathetic. The judge comes in and tells us how grateful everybody is that we’re doing our civic duty (as if we had a choice). The judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney begin voir dire, asking the group as a whole questions. If you feel the question pertains to you, you raise your card. They will interrogate you more later. Questions are things like, “Have you ever hired a defense attorney?” and “Are you prejudiced against the defendant’s race in a way that would prevent you from reaching a verdict based on the facts?” Plenty of cards went up for questions like the latter, either from people who were bold enough to identify themselves as racist (in front of a black judge) or from people who had a race-based escape strategy.

Note: This will NOT help you get out early. Every single member of our jury group would be there until the bitter end, regardless of how they answered the voir dire questions. That’s probably the big takeaway from this posting. If you make it to voir dire, make yourself at home. NOBODY will tell you this at the courthouse, allowing hope to survive. Just go ahead and abandon all hope when you get your number.

1:00 Jurors 1-12 stay behind for voir dire part 2. Numbers 13-24 (my row) get an hour lunch break. Everybody else is told to report at 4.  Non-yummy lunch in the “cafeteria” ensues.

2:00 Back to the hallway for some more waiting, then we’re called in to sit in the 12 actual juror chairs. We stand up in turn and answer a series of questions printed on the back of our juror cards: Name, Neighborhood, Occupation, Spouse’s occupation, children, ever been a victim of a crime?, how ’bout your family and friends?, ever been involved in a trial?

After you answer that, the judge, Defense Attorney, and prosecutors get to ask you personal questions. In front of the other 11 jurors. People volunteered info like having been arrested for posession, having confusion problems and health problems (“irritable bowels” one lady said), etc. They also had to share their stories of crimes committed against their persons. These were primarily further explorations of the questions people had answered positively during part 1 of voir dire.

It quickly becomes obvious that people’s escape strategies are, for the most part, going to fail. The judge was very calm and impressive. If you insisted that you were a racist (or whatever) he basically took you down the path of, “You’re going to be presented with facts and a simplified version of the law that pertains to the case. Are you able to take the facts and decide which side of the specific law they fall on?” It’s pretty hard to beat that.

Our row finishes, and we file out into the infernal hallway. I spent the next 3 hours sitting on my coat, my tailbone killing me.

5:20 We all file back into the courtoom. It takes about 25 minutes for the lawyers to sign off on all the papers confirming which 12 of us are lucky winners. The judge returns, thanks us again, and reads off the 12 names. It’s like being in the Miss America pageant when they announce the top 10, only backward: I count off the number of remaining spots on my fingers, praying not to hear my name. Hurrah! 13 names are called (13’s the alternate) and mine’s not one of them. It’s about 6:00 and I am free to go.

Why did I get not get selected? I think it’s a combination of having a teenage son coming up in April for a trial for some school misconduct and “hardship”. The judge made a big deal about inconvenience not being the same as hardship. I explained that I was a contractor and would not be paid for the duration of the trial, but more importantly, we have a release date 5 days hence, and it would create a hardship for the entire company to be without my services at this time. They could easily get somebody to replace me, and I’d lose my job. I’m not sure which of these reasons was more compelling, or whether it was a combination or something else altogether.

That’s it, for what it’s worth. I hope it helps somebody out. I’m serious about taking the camp chair.

Stupid FrameMaker tricks

Today I got FrameMaker to pretend it’s a marketing tool and create a document with 2 columns of unequal width, and the ability to spread graphics across both columns. It’s not at all elegant, though, and I wonder if there’s a better way to do it. I’ve trolled thru the user assistance, and it looks as though you can easily create columns of equal widths, then span the graphics across using the “Span all side-heads and columns” attribute in the Paragraph Designer. But if you want unequal columns, you’ve gotta use text flows, and I don’t see an easy way to span graphics over them.

Here’s what I did:

I went onto the master page of a 1-column document (no side-heads) and added 2 new text flows. Be sure to choose “Template for Body Page Text Frame”, name them B and C, specify 1 column each, and don’t select automatically connect to existing text flow (which is not on the same window as the other selections). When you draw the text frames, leave a reasonable gutter, at least .25″.

The result is that you can control the text in the left and right text frames (B and C) by clicking in the columns, and you can add graphics that span both columns by clicking in the gutter. Needless to say, this is very cludgy! So far, I’m controlling the placement of graphics with pilcrows! I don’t think you’d want to do this for anything longer than about 4 or 6 pages, like my brochure. And in a perfect world, I’d get a different tool for this (InDesign?).

Anyone else think it’s ironic that FrameMaker’s UA sucks?

OK, maybe that’s harsh. I don’t really use the documentation all that often, and it’s pretty extensive, so there’s probably lots and lots of good stuff in there. I do have a couple of suggestions, though:

1. When I loaded up, you asked me if I wanted to use the structured version or the unstructured one. So you know which one I use. Quit showing me search results for both. The results list becomes way too long, with lots of redundant entries.

2. I just need a hint sometimes about where to get started, but you always skip the first step in the directions. You do it so consistently, I think it’s part of your style sheet to do so. Here’s today’s example:

I want to use the Text Frame tool, but the help doesn’t tell me where to find it. It’s on the Tools Palette, eh? How do you find that? I finally found it by accident. It’s (interestingly) located on the Graphics menu. Graphics. It’s not the authors’ fault the Text Frame Tool is on the Graphics menu, but I think I would have said something to myself like, “Dang! Nobody’s ever going to find it there, so I’d better deal with that explicity in the help.” (And, no, the hypertext link after that sentence in the screenshot does not help.)

Next up, if anybody can find the Add New Text Frame dialog box, please let me know in the comments. If you follow the directions in this topic or the 2 that show up when you search specifically on “Add New Text Frame dialog”, you get the Create New Text Frame dialog box, and it doesn’t have the same fields as described for ANTF dialog box.

I have spent maybe an hour trying to find tools that I know the specific names of, because a) too many results show up due to my first whinge, above, and b) they’ve skipped the first step in the topics that do seem relevant.

OTOH, you don’t want to clutter up your procedures by prefacing them with 3 or 4  – or even just one – redundant getting started step. I solve this problem by prefacing procedures with a single navigation line that gets them to wherever I think they will be starting from. Something like:

Navigation: Policies > Management > Edit > select the policy you want to edit

(or sometimes Select the policy you want to edit may be #1 in the proc)

I’m interested in hearing about other ways people have handled this.

Preface Matter Minimalism

I’m not a fan of prefaces. I think they are just noise standing between the reader and the information he seeks. I really, truly hate “conventions used in this guide.” If you need a table to explain the conventions used in your guide, then your conventions probably suck.

However, I do feel the need for a brief statement of what the product is intended to do (not a big marketing blurb), and a description of the scope and intended audience of the guide, and — finally — information about what other user assistance resources are available. 

Interestingly, I’m looking at an Administrator guide that has that information on the front cover. Turn that page, and what do you have? Content! (Actually, the table of contents.) There’s not a single page of preface. It’s nice. I think I may go with that. 

Off-topic: This publication is clearly intended to be viewed online. The left and right margins are about .5″ It looks fine online, but it’s pretty annoying as a printout. The content is lovely, though. It’s been a long time since I read a user manual and thought the content was lovely.

I do like startups, but I don’t like Word

Happily, my “vacation” lasted exactly 4 weeks, to the day. I’m on my second day at a rather small SaaS startup. I like so many things about it, from the funding partners to the office space (gorgeous, easy commute). What I don’t like about it is that they are still using Word. This isn’t unusual, of course. The last startup I was with (the one I was laid off from) was using Word when I arrived. They were very receptive to me making any and all changes to their documentation, so the first thing I did was buy FrameMaker. This was convenient b/c I was completely dumping all their previous documentation and starting from scratch, so there was no painful Word-to-Frame conversion.

Here, there’s a pretty small amount of documentation in place. When you take redundancy and un-helpful screenshots into account, we’re probably talking about 100 pages. We expect that to grow considerably, so I would really like to talk them into buying FrameMaker or (maybe) the Technical Communication Suite.

I know why *I* prefer FrameMaker: the ease with which it supports the template I created, which is Information Mapping-like in some ways, if I’ve got to narrow it down to just one reason. Designing the same template in Word is difficult and has some elements that simply cannot be reproduced.

I’d love to hear what pfoduct you prefer for longer technical documents and why (longer being more than 30 pages, to me).

Here’s a link to an article comparing Frame and Word. Word doesn’t come out looking too great It’s a little dated; some of his complaints about Frame have been addressed in more recent versions.

http://ivanwalsh.blogspot.com/2006/04/microsoft-word-compared-against-adobe.html

On to the next adventure…

Sadly, my employer is not doing so well. It’s not polite to talk about money, but, frankly, there are no customers. As a result, we had a layoff last week and now some super lucky company out there is about to get ME as an employee!!! Yes, it’s true! If you know of a company that would like to compete to be my employer, let me know.

Maybe I’ll actually have time to blog now

Airlines: The Quintessential Bad UX?

Perhaps it’s because travel stresses us out. Perhaps it’s because many aspects of travel cut so close to the bottom of our personal Maslow’s Need Hierarchy (food, shelter, security). Perhaps it’s because travel so often is imbued with our hopes (I’ll sell $2M to the prospect in Topeka!) and dreams (Tuscany at last!).

Whatever the reason, people seem to get VERY PASSIONATE about their bad travel experiences. Mine? How ’bout the support guy named “Chris” in Madras informing me that I am “Veeeerrrrryyyy happpppeeeee” that Delta took my miles transfer money instantly but would not be transferring the miles for a couple of weeks, or our interesting and loosely defined-by-Delta weekend in Cleveland*.

Bill Baker is so passionate about his bad experience with JetBlue that he’s suing them in small claims court and blogging about it! What fun. In Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody, he explains how the internet made it possible for vengeance to be wrought (against all likelihood) after a cell phone was stolen. Let’s see how Bill does vs JetBlue now that he’s got Time’s Person of the Year (You) and me on his side.

* Ahh, Cleveland. It’s actually a fun city, with many inner-city neighborhoods experiencing a revitalization that extends to their nightlife…or so we hear. We were flying up Thursday, early enough to hit a jazz club and then explore some cool ‘hoods before heading to rural Ohio later Friday for an event. When we got to the departure gate, we were all informed that there’d be a 20 minute delay b/c the crew was coming off another plane. OK, cool. Some time later, we were all informed that they had LOST THE CREW. They thought they were in the building; it’d be another 20 minutes. Long story short, they 20 minutes-ed us into several hours during which they found the crew! they lost them agan! they were getting another crew! the other crew was making its way to us! Finally we boarded and prepared to push back. And a maintenance guy appeared in the front of the plane and had some convo with the cockpit. Guess what? They had taken so long to get us a crew, that the plane would not make it back to Atlanta in time for a government mandated service window. The pilot actually took a stand for the forces of good; he came on and said something about it not being fair and him taking us to Detroit anyway (what???) and they’d just have to service the plane there. He lost. Delta asked us all to troop a couple of concourses down to another plane we could use. At this point, it was going to be too late to go out in Cleveland, so we tried to rebook for the morning, figuring we’d save the cost of a night’s hotel, get a good night’s sleep at home, and start fresh in the morning. Oh, no, Delta would not allow that. So we go to the other concourse, and guess what? We lost the crew. We could see the plane out on the tarmac, but all its lights were off and there were no Delta employees anywhere. In the end, we got to Cleveland around 2 am, on a flight originally scheduled to arrive around 6:30 pm.

I asked James why they couldn’t get us a plane/crew and delay a different flight, minimizing the pissed-off-ness of both crowds. He wisely explained that it was in Delta’s best interest to REALLY piss off the passengers who were already pissed off than to slightly piss off more people. He explains it better.

But wait, there’s more!

Our return trip was scheduled for Sunday evening around 6:30. Yes, they do a round trip from Atlanta to Cleveland and back. Or they would if they ever got their shit together. Sure enough, the plane from Atlanta was delayed. The gate agent told us it would probably depart around 2 am (how often do they screw this route up that they know what horrific time it will actually occur?) When pressed, the agent admitted that the chances of a plane flying from Cleveland to Atlanta at 2 am were “very small”. He agreed to put us up at the Fairview Park Ramada, which includes a club called “Froggys”. I’m not sure when those photos were taken, but it was evidently before the mold/beer/cigarette smoke/filth/bedbugs/Stevens party arrived. But at least they were finally honest about the fact that Delta does not give a crap about its Atlanta/Cleveland route.

That’s one of Bill’s points on his blog: if you aren’t going to service a route properly, don’t service it at all. Rock on, Bill!!!

Originally found on brandflakesforbreakfast.

Really bad UX turns into really good UX (and even some sucking up!)

I had a really bad user experience today. I looked at my bank account online and saw that Symantec had helped itself to 39 of my dollars for automatically renewing my antivirus. Hello? I never, ever authorize automatic withdrawals, so somewhere in the AV install I did last summer, auto-renewal sneakily authorized itself. It was probably in the click wrap that I agreed to without ever reading. God knows what all I’ve agreed to over the years.

I consider this bad UX because a) I really never do automatic withdrawals, so they really must have hidden the option (defaulted to “Yes! take my money!”) pretty well, and b) as a corporation, it’s stupid, because of the cost involved in dealing with all the people who call bullshit on that and ask for their money back. There’s the support call, plus whatever costs are associated with returning the money, including people resources and actual transaction costs. Maybe they make it back in float. After all, it’s going to be 6 working days before I get my cash back.

All my animosity toward Symantec turned around, however, during the second really excellent (probably offshored) tech support interaction I can recall in my lifetime*. All websites try to hide the link or email address for support. You can’t really blame them. If you’d just read the FAQs, you might just find your answer. After I found the link to a support online chat and completed a form to identify myself, the chat widget informed me that I was 54th in line.

Now, at this point, you’d think I’d be pissed: 54th!! But happily, I’m rocking the dual monitors and just kept surfingworking during the 30-ish minute wait. Eventually Sudeep The Support Guy joined me, and with a minimum of fuss did whatever magic necessary to refund my money. I didn’t have to grovel or bitch or anything!

BUT HERE’S THE BEST PART: Sudeep flattered me. He made me feel very good about my excellent complaining skillz. (Yeah, yeah. I know he sucks up to all the girls.) I have a screen cap (below). Since this was the best thing that’s happened to me so far today, I flattered him back and even gave him a smiley. I’m sure he made a screen cap too. When was the last time you had such a good user experience in the support domain? Yep, we’re all eating rainbows and farting butterflies today! 

*If you’ve read this far, you must be DEAD bored today and have absolutely nothing else to do besides read about the FIRST good support experience I had, coincidentally enough, just last week, and also involving automatic withdrawals from my bank account. OK, so I LIED about never ever authorizing auto withdrawals. Sue me. I was forced into auto withdrawal when my son joined ToonTown years ago. They insist on reaching in and grabbing $9.95/mo for him to play innocent Disney MMORPGs. ToonTown is the gateway drug for future online gaming addicts. I got to speak to an actual human who I believe was actually in America, which is notable only for its rarity. HERE’s where it gets amusing: she could not for the Disney life of her understand that I wanted to discontinue ToonTown because my son had grown out of it. How could anybody grow out of frolicking with Piggledy Miggledorf? I had to convince her that his tastes now run more to blowing people’s heads off for fun and profit in WOW and Call of Duty. She still didn’t get it (“HE’s GROWING UP!” I insisted). But she very nicely stopped the auto-withdrawal madness anyhow. See? There is good customer support out there.

Obama protest during girl-on-girl church shooting*

Holly Harkness recently blogged about the importance of having *interesting* presentation titles. Just today, one of my favorite bloggers, the ascerbic, bitter Jetpacks has a similar post on *interesting* blog entry titles. Check it out.

UPDATE: I just got an invitation to “Kill What’s Ugly While It’s Young™ & Other Unspeakable Mtg Truths” from PMI. What a great title! Best of all, what showed up in my inbox was truncated after “Kill”. I was in a big hurry to find out what/who needed killing, and clicked on the email right away. Excellent.

*Totally fictional, but attention-getting, you’d agree?

Excel and Big Pitchers of Beer

When I worked at ISS, my bosses forced me to try to do documentation project planning with Microsoft Project. Imagine the following problem:

• You have a giant pitcher of beer and 11 glasses of different sizes.
• There are 20 people in the other room expecting to get different amounts of beer at different, specific times.
• You will need to use the 11 glasses for all 20 people, some expecting their beer first, some expecting their beer last, and some expecting their beer sporadically; and some people are dependent on others for their beer.
• I could add more, but you get the point.

You would be about as successful in using Project to plan the on-time beer delivery as I was in using it to plan our doc team’s resource allocation and doc delivery. Project is not made to work the way we worked at ISS. It’s certainly not made for cross-project planning where everything is fluid: resources, project priority, units of work, etc. After trying to make it work for a few days, I called the best project manager I know: my sister. She works for a consulting company that specializes in IT project management on the Enterprise scale (so she really knows her shit!). She listened to my problem for about 90 seconds, and then told me, “You don’t have a project management problem. You have a MATH problem. You use Excel for math problems, not Project.” I told her my boss insisted on Project, and she said, “Well, then you’re screwed.”  And of course I was, so I’ve moved on to nicer things.

Since then, Mike Hughes started working over at ISS/IBM and has evidently convinced them that Excel is the way to go, probably because he has a really cool method for tracking projects with it. You should check it out, if you haven’t already.

Project certainly has its place; I think it works best when you have a projectized organization and a well-defined Work Breakdown Structure. Otherwise, I think Mike’s method is a better bet. I’d love to hear about methods that work for others!