Lila and Eva posing on a rick in the river at Canyon Falls.
On our drive to my parents’ house in the Keewenaw, we stopped at Canyon Falls and hiked into the woods for a little sight-seeing. Enjoy the photos!
On Saturday I made it down to the National Pistol Championships at Camp Perry, OH to visit my dad (Ron Granroth), old shooting buddy Bob Gardner, and the Springfield Armory/Ottowa Sportsmen’s Club Junior Pistol team.
Congratulations to the junior team on winning the .22 caliber Junior championship! (These junior shooters went through the Ottowa Sportsmen’s Club Junior Shooting Camp.)
It was great to visit with my dad and Bob, and I ran into some old friends.
I haven’t competed at the nationals since the 1990s, and being down there on Saturday brought back a lot of memories. I stood at the assembly line for a while during the team .45 match, watching the teams compete. It was a hot sunny day with a strong breeze, and it was easy to imagine being on the firing line negotiating the wind and the shots. I’d like to make it there again.
Fear the Evil Silo!
After I was put in charge of a newly created user experience department, a young professional gravely warned me about silos.
He had argued against the new department because it would just create another silo in the company.
The passion of the warning gave the impression that this silo threat was real, imminent, and inescapable in anything but a flat organization.
Beware all ye who manage departments! Dread the ghoul of business quagmire: silo! 
The warning was overzealous. The fear of silos is a bad reason to force an organization’s structure into any particular shape. No, instead shape the organization to promote sustainable excellence in performance for the whole business.
That said, for all you suffering from silophobia, let me tell you how to spot silos and what to do when you find them.
I found this description after a quick web search for organizational silos. (It’s a nice short read on silos, so go on and read the whole article.)
“The symptoms of the silo effect are easy to recognize: lack of cooperation, internal competition and breakdown in communication. The result is that one division gets pitted against another – head office against operations, one department against another.”
Marcel Côté, A matter of trust and respect, CA Magazine, March 2002.
As Marcel says, the symptoms are:
Doesn’t that sound like squabbling children? Interdepartmental gossip may be another symptom.
Okay, let’s say you spot a breakdown in communication between departments. Do you have a silo? Don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe you just have poor communicators. Relax. You may not have a silo on your hands.
Now, if you do see all these symptoms, you have a problem, no matter what you call it.
The question is, what can you do about it?
Let’s say you manage an IT department and you have just spotted a silo in that other department, Communications.
Look out! You’re standing in your own silo peering out. Good job, you have just spotted two silos. Now what?
Now you do a gut check. Ask yourself if you have felt competition against Communications. Have you been looking out for own department at Communication’s expense? Think about your budget and your own maneuvering. When you think about your department’s plans, do you consistently consider how to keep the people over in Communications in the loop?
The key to tearing down silos is to go out of your way to help other departments.
(Fortunately for me, this is natural to user experience. We help other departments, like product development, marketing, and sales, do their work better.)
So, your next step is to go over to Communications and find out how you can help them the most. And then do it. Yeah, even spend a little of your own budget on the solution. And don’t begrudge it. Earn gratitude.
What will happen is that you will start strengthening relationships between the people in your department and the other department. With that will come respect, collaboration, and better communication.
Oh, and if you consistently help that other department, eventually they’ll get the idea and return the favor.
The idea is simple. Business silos exist when departments look out for their own interests instead of the whole business’s best interests. The solution is to get back in touch with the main objective of the company and help each other out in pursuit of that goal. Bingo.
In short, grow up and play nicely together.
P.S.—Or take this ITIL expert’s advice and admit that silos are a good thing and systematically work to strengthen them.
Stopwatch graphic by Casey Marshall
Recently, I watched a series of people observe informal usability tests.
Two of the observers have recently graduated with Masters degrees in HCI or an adjacent field.
Both recent graduates used a watch to record time-on-task and completion of the task. One actually broke out a stopwatch while the other referred to his wristwatch.
While these stopwatch fixations livened my day, I do wonder about graduate education in the usability field.
I recall that for the first half-dozen website usability tests that I moderated, I also recorded time. Then I realized that timing tasks obscured more important observations, and I haven’t bothered with timing since then. Besides, we can get times off the recordings.
So why did these two graduates pull out timers?
Well, I think they were parroting “proper” methods they were taught without understanding when it is useful. If, in grad school, they only practice for ideal research situations, they’re missing out on the realities of the work world.
I’ve worked in an Agile development environment for the last couple years, and for the decade prior to that I worked on fast-moving projects that used whatever SDL I applied to them. The mission: Deliver value, ASAP.
With that charge, decisions are made that don’t allow for insight from in-depth, long-term studies with huge numbers of participants. I’m grateful for even the small, quick sessions of user and design research.
Regardless, I got a chuckle out of seeing these two bring out timers for a completely informal, one-off usability test. As expected, they both missed seeing key interactions because they were watching the clock.
Okay, I’d hate to give the impression that time doesn’t matter. I just find that a long time to complete a task on a website is rarely the issue, instead it may be a symptom of other issues which become apparent during research.
However, I do find response times of a system to a user’s actions to be very important because too much delay in a system’s response can really hurt the user’s experience and even distract people from completing whatever they set out to complete. Still, this class of problem is often noticeable during observation. (Unless you missed it while you were fiddling with your stopwatch.)
With that in mind, I’ll gesture towards Nielsen’s take on response times.
delicious/granroth