I was called out by Dan Rigsby to do this, so here she goes:

1. How old were you when you started programming?

   I believe I was 12 or 13.

2. How did you get started in programming?

   I remember learning some BASIC in school in either 6th or 7th grade. Ya know, you draw a blocky gun and make it fire a one pixel bullet across the screen. I remember that being pretty fun. Also, right around the same time I started playing with QBASIC at home.

3. What was your first language?

   BASIC/QBASIC

4. What was the first real program you wrote?

   Not counting school, the first real program I wrote was a spaghetti code version (chock full of GOTO’s) of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?

   BASIC, QBASIC, C, C++, MIPS Assembly Language, VB, ADA, Java, C#, ASP.NET, Javascript

6. What was your first professional programming gig?

   I was a lab TA for the CS101 Java course at Purdue, so that was my first job involving programming, but my first job actually programming was at Raytheon. I worked there for six years before coming to Interactive Intelligence in 2006. At Raytheon, I worked on various project for the Army and Navy involving mortar aiming applications, handheld applications, route planning applications for helicopters and many other things. If I tell you anymore I’d have to kill you.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

   Definitely. Whenever I get asked what my dream job would be I always reply that it would be doing what I’m doing now (programming) or touring in a band. I deeply enjoy them both. But I must admit that programming for myself and writing whatever I want to write at the time would definitely be better than the maintenance programming I sometimes still have to do.

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

   Don’t waste time. I can think of numerous times in college and after college that I just screwed around and did other things when I could have been honing my skills more and keeping myself up to date. I’m trying to get myself back up to date now and it would have been easier if I had just spent the time after college to do so.

9. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

   I love programming for fun. Right now, my extracurricular programming activity is writing Bitter a Twitter/social networking client. In my spare time, I’ve also written a chat program, an email application, an account/password manager, an RSS aggregator and several Pocket PC applications including a file explorer, an RSS aggregator, a network scanner, and various other tools. I just find it a great way to learn and to me it’s extremely fun.

10. Who are you calling out?

    I want to call some fellow bloggers and non-bloggers alike (to see if they’ll actually start):

    • Aaron Lerch
    • Scott Bauer
    • Jeff Moser
    • Kyle Brown
    • Jake Robinson
    • Evan Byl
    • Brian McGreer
    • Todd Zerbe

I conducted an initial test run of a card sort today for my Twitter client Bitter. A card sort is a usability technique in which you hold sessions with potential users of your application and you, well, have them sort cards. Each card will contain a label used in your application. In an open card sort, the users will create groupings of cards themselves and name each grouping. In a closed card sort, the users will group the cards into the group names you provide them.

If your application is a web site, a card sort could help you organize the pages and links that belong under each section for your site’s navigation. If your application is a traditional desktop app, a card sort could help you organize the menu items under a top level menu. For my card sort, I used the labels from my options dialog (and even some potential future labels I plan to add) and had the user sort them.

I expected to end the card sort session with several groupings and have a better idea of how others may view the labels. I did indeed end up with that, but discovered several other things in the process that I didn’t expect. There were a couple assumptions I had made about how the options were to be used with the currently logged in user and the card sort showed me that those assumptions may not necessarily be made by other users.

Another thing I found was that you need to carefully think about and decide what to put on your cards. You have the choice of simply putting the label on the card, or you can put the label and a description of the label on each card. If you put just the label, then you’ll likely have the same problem as me of context-sensitive labels. For example, I have some labels named “New Tweets”, “New Replies” and “Sent Direct Message” among others. By themselves, you aren’t quite sure what they refer to, but once you see them grouped under the “Sounds” section it becomes more obvious. So should the cards stay pure and say precisely what the label will say in the application or should you muck with your independent variables and change the cards to include context like “New Tweets Sound“? That’s something you need to weigh the pros and cons of and determine for yourself and also probably consider when analyzing the results of the card sort.

Also, let your participant talk during the session. Let them ask questions. All this is valuable information. You can then ask yourself why the participant said this or that or why they asked what a certain card meant. You may think the answer is obvious, but maybe it’s not. But if they do ask you what a specific card means, ask them what they think it means. That’s yet more valuable information.

It’s also a good idea to video record the whole thing. It’s impossible to take notes and get everything during the session. Also sometimes you’ll see things on the recording that you didn’t see during the session. Just make sure you get permission first.

Overall, even though this was just an initial test run of a card sort, I can already see the benefits. I did this run through to see what works and what doesn’t work and now have a pretty good idea. If you are writing an application whether in your own free time or professionally, a card sort is a good idea. It doesn’t even have to be formal. Asking a coworker to take a few minutes and come over to your office for a quick card sort would work fine. Often times we just get so close to our applications, that we lost perspective. We get tunnel vision on how it’ll be used and how things will be used and interpreted. A card sort is simply a tool to get other perspectives and to rid yourself of tunnel vision.

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