On Tuesday February 20th myself and fellow BSc students Ameer Ashhab and Naomi Winter and BA Graphic Communications student Callum Brown (whom has just secured a internship at the company this summer!) visited Redgate Software’s headquarters in Cambridge. The visitor was organised by the BSc course tutor, Jamie Gledhill, with an aim to introduce us to the world of UX in industry.

Redgate Software is a software house that specialises in creating SQL database development tools for customers. Some of their products include SQL Compare (for comparing and synchronising database schema), SQL Source Control (for connecting databases to version control systems), SQL Monitor (for monitoring performance of SQL server databases and SQL Data Generator which is used for generating realistic test data based on column and row headings. These pieces of software and several other pieces are available in a suite called ‘SQL Toolbelt’ which Redgate claim is ‘everything you need to work with SQL Server’ and will help you to protect data with backups and monitoring, doubling productivity with industry-standard tools and make databases easier and faster to use in agile situations. Notable corporations that rely on Redgate software to manage and protect their own SQL databases include Microsoft, Intel, Google, FedEx, Apple, Dell, Boeing, The Coca-Cola Company, Ford, AT&T, TATA, Pfizer, The Walt Disney Company, General Motors, HP, Amazon and Exxon Mobil just to name a few.

We began the day by learning a little bit about how Redgate go about UX design and what their thoughts on it are. They have their own design language called ‘Honeycomb’ which is a framework that Redgate use in their experiences to unify their products. It’s a little like other frameworks I have used during my BSc User Experience Design course such as Bulma and Bootstrap in that the design language has certain styles for certain elements that can be used to produce web-based products.

Afterwards we had the opportunity to sit in on a real phone call that Redgate were having with a client that they were developing their SQL Monitor software for. The phone call was a conference call and it was interesting to note that Redgate had a team of UX designers and software engineers on this call whilst one representative spoke to them about what they’d like to see in SQL Monitor and described their present situation with databases and how they thought that a product like SQL Monitor could help them. The UX designers were thinking about possible UX pain points and how to make the product easy to use whilst the software engineers on the call were thinking about whether what the client was asking for could be done. After the call, the UX designers and the software engineers conferred notes and went away to discuss the project further. The phone call showed us how professionals in the industry connect with their clients to learn about what their needs and build products that work for them. We were given a list of pointers that Redgate tries to follows whilst having telephone conversations with clients in order to try and find out what they need and to help structure the phone call a little because timing is essential – often calls contain a lot of detail but need to be kept as short as possible so that time can be spent developing the product. This was the tenth call that the team had had about this product and it lasted around half an hour, so this gives an idea of how much time needs to be spent across multiple phone calls to acquire the information that is required to build a thorough product.

We went onto have a demonstration of SQL Prompt which is a piece of software that Redgate is developing as an extension for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (often abbreviated to SSMS). SSMS is a product developed by Microsoft that allows you to write SQL code to create databases – a little like Visual Studio for databases. Visual Studio includes ‘IntelliSense’ which gives you code suggestions as you type and also includes translator diagnostics which means that syntax errors in your code are underlined – other editors have similar functions. However, Redgate has spotted that there is a gap in the market for a tool that suggests improvements to your code once it has been written (even if the syntax is correct). You can write that has the correct syntax but is inefficient or slow and likely not ever know about alternatives that would make your code run faster and more efficiently. Writing efficient code is especially important in databases that are being accessed and indexed heavily, so SQL Prompt aims to inform the user of how they can improve their code. I personally feel that this is a fantastic tool and will encourage people to write better code and it will be a great learning tool. I asked if they planned to make an extension for Visual Studio that did a similar thing for other languages such as C#, C++, JavaScript and so on and they said that whilst the software itself is written in C# (so the company definitely has the knowledge of the language to write such a tool for C#), they don’t envisage extending it to other languages at the moment. It’s a shame because I feel that many people (including myself!) could benefit from it, but perhaps in the future they will make a similar tool for other languages.

 

Finally, we went to their user testing room and had a chat to some of their UX testers to ask some questions about testing. This was a perfect opportunity to reflect on our work and ask professionals about the methods that we had employed in our work at university. I had just completed a round of user testing for my Nellie’s Nursery website prototype several days earlier and wanted to ask about my testing methodology just to see if I had got it right. I wanted to talk to them about eye-tracking and I said that I was a little disappointed that the eye-tracking data for my website prototype wasn’t terribly useful or easy to read and that the data that I had collected for my previous project (which was prototyping a simulator of a car infotainment system that I had made) was much more interesting to examine and understand. They said that eye-tracking is only really helpful for trying to test where users are looking on a page when they need to look at multiple things at once – they said my car system was a perfect example because users would need to look at the road and at the dashboard at the same time and that’s an application where eye-tracking is helpful.

Another question that came up was ‘when do you know you don’t need to do any more testing?’ The simple answer was that the professionals at Redgate stop testing when they are no longer surprised to hear what their testers are saying. If they have tested something with only 5 people and all 5 have said exactly the same thing, then they say they know at this point that they need to go back to the drawing board and redesign, ready for testing again. There is a myth in the UX world which is that ‘5 testers will find 80% of the problems’ – but Redgate argue ‘who will find the other 20% if 5 only find 80%?’ So, Redgate keep testing until the problems have been found and they say that it is best practice to use different testers for each round of testing so that fresh eyes are evaluating each prototype that is tested. They said that too many people in the industry (or who have an interest in UX) hear this ‘5 testers find 80% of all problems!’ myth and believe it to mean ‘you only ever need 5 people to test your products’ – which is incorrect.

To conclude, it was a fantastic insight to the industry and has made us all realise that we would love in the industry that we are studying – which is a good sign! We got fantastic advice from professional UX designers that we can apply to our work and we were extremely fortunate to be able to visit. Connections to industry like this is just one of the great reasons to study a BSc course at Norwich University of the Arts.