See what your users are experiencing with Clarity!

Introduction

A while back Mike was telling me he discovered “Clarity” existed and that I should REALLY take a look at it. I remember in initially was a it sceptic also thinking about where the potential overlap was with “Application Insights“.

Tried out #Clarity today upon suggestion by @TechMike2kX. Pure gold in terms of discovering the real user experience on your webapp! If you want to demo it => https://t.co/JRrM3uqZSB pic.twitter.com/TGpvEPzr9H

— Karim Vaes (@kvaes) April 1, 2021

As I have been working on a new project, I decided to take it for a test spin, and I must say I am impressed! Clarity is a simple and free service that allows you to see what your users are seeing. Plain “simple”… nothing more, nothing less. It will provide you insights on the usage, heatmaps of your web app and session recordings of users going through your web app. Which will help like a lot when you want to refine your user experience!

Quick skim through the service

Once signed up you are prompted to create a new project ;

MBTI, Insights, Belbin, … Now how do they compare?

As I’m interested in psychology, I’ve always wondered how all these known frameworks within the business context relate to eachother. Apparently Richard Sivers already investigated the same question less than a year ago ; http://www.rsaltd.com/relationships-between-mbti-disc-and-insights/

His findings are summarized in the following image ;

(Click to enlarge)

If you are looking for a more nuanced look towards your Insights profile, check the website of “Rob Purfield”, as it summarizes the types very well!

Mimicking doesn’t work! Understand why you do things…

Cargo Cult
Ever hear of “Cargo Cult“?

“A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional pre-industrial tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults focus on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices. Cult members believe that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors. Cargo cults developed primarily in remote parts of New Guinea and other Melanesian and Micronesian societies in the southwest Pacific Ocean, beginning with the first significant arrivals of Westerners in the 19th century. Similar behaviors have, however, also appeared elsewhere in the world.

Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when the residents of these regions observed the Japanese and American combatants bringing in large amounts of matériel. When the war ended, the military bases closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behavior that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.”

The red thin line throughout this story is that mimicking doesn’t work! Attempting to recreate succesful outcome by replicating circumstances associated with the outcome, although those circumstances are unrelated to the causes of the outcome or insufficient to produce them by themselves, will fail! In our day-to-day lives, we come across this situation frequently. People who repeat a given ritual just because they were told to do so, without knowing why they actually do it. Let’s get down to earth, and reflect by looking towards our own job… Are their aspects where we just repeat things we’re said, without actually knowing why we do it? *silence*

The tail of the fish
There is another, not so known story, that reflects to the same situation.

A mother is baking a fish. Before she throws in the fish, she chops of the tail. The little daughter asks; “Mommy, why do you chop of the tail?”. The mother replies; “Because my mother did so.” The little daughter visits the grandmother a week later and asks ; “Granny, why do you chop of the tail of a fish before baking it?”. The grandmother replies; “Because my mother did so.” That week, the little girl visits her great-grandmother in the nursing home and ask here ; “Nana, why do you chop of the tail of a fish before baking it?”. The great-grandmother replies; “Because the pan was to small for the fish. So we chopped of the tail so it would fit!”.

So know why you are doing this… Mimicking might work out sometimes, yet in most of the cases you will not be working efficiently.

Insight on “Gartner 2013 : Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends”

Source : Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013

Gartner released their Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends of 2013. Here’s my insight on the relation / impact towards the Benelux market.

Mobile Device Battles
This battle will continue! Where it used to be Apple versus Google… We now see Microsoft coming up with a competitive offering. Here my opinion is that the true battle for the Benelux enterprise market lies between Apple and Microsoft.

Mobile Applications and HTML5
When one takes a look at the “App Stores”, “App Markets”, etc… You’ll notice that most “apps” are mostly frameworks to connect to back-end web services. This way the providers can reuse a lot of their logic for different clients. So I totally follow the vision of Gartner that web interfaces with a low technology impact on the client will be the way of the future.

Personal Cloud
Not sure about this one… People are still very reluctant to bearing costs. Yet the cloud needs to get financed. So where the need is there, I don’t think the wallet will follow.

Enterprise App Stores
Before we get here… I would hope that companies get thinking about a service catalog. That way they would not blindly follow technology, and get things aligned between IT and business.

The Internet of Things
Everything connected! Every device is getting some kind of connectivity towards the network. So I totally follow this vision from Gartner.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
Next year (2013) will be a very harsh year for a lot of companies within the Benelux. Many vendors are repeating (and repeating) the “Cloud”-mantra to a lot of customers/prospects. Time and time again they say that “THE cloud” will reduce the costs of the IT organization. Yet the reality is far from it! Cloud service have a lot of benefits, yet reducing costs is mostly not one of them. Adding functionality is more the thing, yet reducing costs can only be done by reducing services/functionality. In my honest opinion, the only way organizations can reduce costs it to identify (and catalog!) their services. This list can become an argumentation internally in order to justify the IT costs and become a possible starting point to discussed (un)needed services.

Strategic Big Data
I think this is valid for the “Fortune 500”, yet the Benelux market is far too small for this. Some niche players may have a specific need for this (telecom, banking, … marketing agencies), yet most industry / service companies can surely do without.

Actionable Analytics
Analytics is the way to go if you want to optimize your business! Whether it’s an internal department looking to optimize its costs, or the general business looking to go “lean & mean”… How can one optimize, if one does not know how things are running? You cannot compare things without having a monitoring system.

In Memory Computing
This sounds too much like the “noSQL”-movement from last year. Whilst it sounds very nice, most Belgian companies are way too traditional for such technologies. This is mostly due to the fact that no transactional state can be guaranteed…

Integrated Ecosystems
Many companies are noticing that the cloud solutions they have engaged in are islands on their own. Identity management and federation services will move towards this need… Such systems will be able to integrate several islands into one logical system for the user. This as the 5+ passwords to remember are getting a bit too much.

Why do I need IT / Enterprise architecture?

This video gives a good insight…

Where USSR meets IT?

Check out the following article “Economic Theory and IT” at “Pivot Point”.

It’s a nice comparison between the old ways in the Soviet Union and the reluctance to change within our current IT market.

Accept every offer!

A while back Garr Reynolds posted an article about the “Tips for creative success from Pixar“.

An interesting quote from this article is the following statement :

Accept every offer. Don’t judge it, you’ll stop it. It becomes a dead end if you judge it, but unlimited possibilities if you go with it.

To be honest, when being a junior engineer, you accept a lot more tasks without judging it. It’s a zen saying that one must approach things with the child’s mind. So approach it without judgement. Creativity & openness is something we have to maintain, as it’s something we loss over the year due to our prejudices & the context we’re accustomed too.

The teachings of Budo in Business

Source of inspiration : Wisdom from the principles of Budō: Lessons for work & life

The article from Garr states that the teachings of Budo are based upon the following pillars :

• The Three Prohibitions
  • (1) To give up
  • (2) To misbehave
  • (3) To be clumsy
• The Three Joys
  • (1) Vicissitude (change)
  • (2) Honesty
  • (3) Skillfulness
• The Three Evils
  • (1) Fear
  • (2) Doubt
  • (3) Confusion

When going through this list, one can see that these points are also valuable for any business.

Drive!

After “What drives motivation?“, check “Drive” from Dan Pink!

You think your business has it rough?

Macworld features an article called “Ten business lessons from ‘Battlestar Galactica'”

A summary

• 1. Tech isn’t always the answer. : Totally agree… IT-ers tend to always go for a tech solution where a human solution might suffice!
• 2. Don’t neglect training. : I guess nobody will disagree here, but companies often don’t see the hidden cost of neglecting to do so.
• 3. Some things can’t be outsourced. : I’ll repeat it again; Outsourcing is good, but don’t do it on stategical areas!
• 4. Update your antivirus. : Personally I’d like to see this one renamed to “keep your organization up-to-date”
• 5. Democracy doesn’t always work. : A simple Project Management lesson; It’s a democracy until the scope is set, then it’s dictatorship!
• 6. Some problems can’t be killed. : Indeed, not all problems can be killed, just learn to cope with them.
• 7. Seek strategic alliances with competitors. : So true! Being a stategic game fan, I found that alliances either make or break any outcome of a game. The numerous time I’ve “won”, is always due to making (and breaking!) stategic alliances.
• 8. Don’t store all your backups in one place. : Better renamed to “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
• 9. The mission can change at any time. : A bit like 4., the world keeps evolving, incorporate that in your strategy.
• 10. Beware of visionaries. Zealots make bad leaders. – Awh, crap, that’d be against me… 😉