Entries Tagged 'Work' ↓

I think the Mister is *very* brainy. I just made a guest appearance at one of the regular Microsoft user group meetings because the Mister was giving a talk on optimising client-side performance … actually I *do* know what that means thank you! Not how to do it (well I didn’t before) just what it is! All the geeks jammed into the room were enthralled and taking notes and straining to see when he actually flicked out of his presentation to do some real time optimisation on a test site he had running to show them all how to make their sites go faster. He rattled off all this geek speak – he was barely speaking English, it was a kind pigeon code-English and he sounded like a genius! I’m so proud. I think his presentation is going to end up on the Xero blog sometime soon.

Oh, and there was a guy about 4 rows back who had on FAB orange pants!

You know you’re spending too much time at work when … you set the delay start on the washing machine to finish its cycle at about the time you expect to be home … 10 hours … and that’s to the start of the cycle … which on European front-loaders is 1 hour 58 minutes.

Included as a freebie with the next issue of Unlimited magazine is the second ever issue of Start Up magazine – and the Mister’s on the cover! There’s an article about start up companies choosing Wellington over Auckland.

So far I’ve only seen it on their website – am waiting for it to come into stores and to see if we get it with our Unlimited magazine subscription at the office.

I find it frustrating that when I’ve got time to kill at work that I don’t make the most of it and spend a bit more time at home doing all the things that when I’m there I always think I don’t have enough time to do. When I’m working 10 hour days 6 days a week I always wish I had the change to get to so-and-so shop or get the ironing done or take an hour out for myself. Yet when I have the opportunity to do so, I always find reasons to stay in the office – I feel so guilty for not being there. It’s ridiculous really and a great win for the company that they’ve employed people who work way over normal hours and don’t ever seem to even it out by doing way under normal hours another time. I thought about heading out of the office at about 3pm yesterday but when I came to write the list of things I wanted to get done I just couldn’t think of one thing! Well, clean the oven … but that’s a real mood thing and I wasn’t it that mood! And no good dreaming up a hobby because as soon as I get into it work will ramp up again and I’ll have to let it fall by the wayside.

Someone just flicked around a product review of Xero by a pretty influential accounting site in the UK. Made my day to a) see that amongst all the things they could have commented on or criteria for doing a product review they mentioned the online help and b) that they said it was fab.

Need help?

As with any new software you occasionally need help, and I was impressed by the breadth of the online help provided. It covers every aspect of the system and the search facility never failed to find me what I was looking for.

accountingweb.co.uk

Love my job! … help.xero.com!

Is it a plane? Is it a meteor? No it’s a big shiny new thing that will keep the Mister smiling for months and make him even more reluctant to come home at nights!

Update … moments later …

Aaaaaand the office grinds to a halt.

Google Analytics has been running away in the background over Help Centre for a couple of months now and often enough I look at the number of hits and top pages viewed. However this week I was shown how to take a close look at some of the graphs and charts and the one thing that blew me away was the map – where the Help Centre visitors are coming from.

You know me, pretty hopeless with politics and geography and I’d glossed over this map up until now thinking the green was some kind of shading that if not representing the commonwealth was an indicator of something else similar – highest rainfall, more than one official language, MMP, nuclear free … shrug (you have to wonder why I thought that in the context of site traffic analysis. Honestly!) In fact, it’s all the countries where Help Centre visitors have come from. AMAZING! I’m an international author!!!! And on drilling down further I found some little gems – like someone in a small town in France who spent 10 minutes reading a few pages!! Must say, I’m feeing quite awesome right now 🙂

Part of the ‘customer service’ offered by our
product is a ‘Contact Support’ link in the application itself and
the same publicly available from Help Centre. And people use it all the time.
It keeps our customer team fully occupied. It got me thinking about how I seek
help with applications and things on the internet that I’m using. I can’t
remember the last time I contacted the creator or owner or provider of software
(internet or otherwise) to seek support. Perhaps because ours is software as a
SERVICE (with service included in the subscription) people feel that they can and
will get service from us, that we are not just some big corporate who charges $1.99p/m
via an 0900 number. Maybe the majority of our customers are not in the IT space
like me, who when unsure of something turns to an internet search engine to
find commentary that others may have had on the problem. I guess we’ve
been quite ‘out there’ with our blog and presentations and face
time so our customers realise that they are not going to get lost in some
offshore queue for service.
 

And speaking of searching I’m always trying to refine
Help Centre so that people get what they expect when they search the user guide
and other content. Search result tolerance is interesting – unlike doing
a general Google search when you’re glad to see a hit related to your query
(regardless of what that site contains) Help Centre often returns multiple relevant
pages (as proven in the results abstract) for a query and because of the way
Google works (well in IE6 without the Google toolbar at least) when you open
any page you’re just taken to the top of that page. Tolerance barrier
reached. In many cases taking the next step to scroll down to look for what was
in the results abstract or using Ctrl+F to find the various terms is just too
much. It’s been ages since I’ve worked with bespoke search engines so
I’m now wondering if highlighting terms or jumping to the abstract text is
old technology. I’m working really hard to provide little table of
contents-style links or points of interest at the top of each page like I did
when I was first managing websites back in 1997 to help people identify what’s
on the page when they land at the top of it.

help.xero.com

A lot of the photos we have of stuff happening around work are ones that I’ve taken – and they turn up everywhere on people’s blogs, fly around email and on the Xero blog. The latest one of this fantastic NZ map made out of old business cards turned up on Rod’s blog yesterday. Work didn’t stop in order to make it – it’s been a while in the making by various people around the lolly table.

Again, I marvel at how teenagers these days keep their trousers up. We’ve got one working in our office at the moment and he is literally sitting in his boxer shorts directly on our office furniture! Following on from the photo I took of a random fella at Fuel, here’s the derriere of the lad currently in our office …