Ophir Kra-Oz, VP Products CloudShare

Ten Myths on UI, Usability and Israeli Developers

Disclaimer: This presentation reflects my private opinions and sometimes not even that . It is meant to be consumed with voice over, so irony is clearer …

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Founded January 2007

Backed by Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures, and Gemini Capital

Management from Check Point, VMware, Oracle, GE

CloudShare– “WebEx for Virtual Machines”

The First Myths

UI Developers are Cheaper than Kernel Developers

Usability == User Interface

Israeli Graphic Artists Are Inferior To American ones

Usability Experts can replace Product Managers

We will start with command line and add UI later

The Myths That Follow

Great UI Makes Up for Bad Products

If Google & Apple do it , we Must Follow

It is Just a Form

Outlook has it, why don’t we ?

Usability can not be Numeric

UI Developers are Cheaper than Kernel Developers

• Only if they are weaker• It is actually harder (in Israel?) to find

great UI developers• It is even harder with team leaders

• Story 1 :Cluster Setup– It is not the UI, It’s the Appliance

• Story 2: VPN Client Disconnect– It’s not the UI, It is the IP

• Story 3: New Cloud Creation– It’s not the UI, It’s the performance

Usability == Graphical User Interface

• There are more of them (American)– But you only need one

• Israelis are much cheaper and work in the same time zone as R&D

• The (good) Americans tend to be spoiled– “I only work on concept, but not the

actual pictures or HTML, god forbid”

• It’s possible to combine – But not very easy

• All artists need to be managed

Israeli Graphic Artists Are Inferior To American ones

• Most usability experts have no domain knowledge

• They usually have very little real customer or product interaction

• They need to be used, and actually need a lot more domain knowledge, IMO, but can’t do our work for us

Usability Experts can replace Product Managers

We will start with command line and add GUI later

• If they can’t see it, they will not use it• If you can’t see it, you can’t sell it• If you can’t see it, you will not test it• If they don’t use it, they will not

complain, you will not test, and it will not work

Great UI makes up for bad products

It does not, but it can really help

Users are far more forgiving for logical bugs when they feel in control

Great UI sends high quality message

If Google & Apple do it , we must follow

• Consumer product are not enterprise products• It is a good idea to learn from the best practices

– (e.g. Google feedback line)

• But Google has five ways to do grids• Not everyone can afford PHD’s to write JavaScript

It is Just a Form

It is almost never just a form

It has logic, otherwise we would not need humans to fill it

It usually represents multiple enteritis and rules

There are fonts, colors, events, default, order, layout , validations , annotations, interaction even for simplest form

Outlook has it, why don’t we?

It is very hard to buy good UI components

After you buy good components , there is still lots of work

We thought we got it figured (Windows) and than came (WEB) and now we are stuck again with ObjectiveC (iPhone)

Usability Can Not Be Numeric

At least 8 out of 10 users in study would complete the task we expect them to.

“An average User would Build his first CloudShare Pro Environment in 10 Seconds”

80% Of the Old error messages need to be converted to new modern format.

Contact me

• Email - ophir@cloudshare.com• Blog - http://ophir.wordpress.com• Free Trial

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