Yuval Ararat

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Netgear Nighthawk R7000 Review

I was investigating lately my slow Time Machine backups which were having an ill effect on my life. this drove me to look at NAS solutions as a replacement to old faithful 2008 Macbook. But i was a bit more through to verify my real pain point as the specs on most NAS are around the same if not lower than the Macbook dual core 4GB.

Even with its USB 2 drives it was still relatively speedy compared to the network throughput. when working with internal drive speed test.

So what was the real issue? i was wondering long and deep whilst trying many options in the configuration of the Billion BiPac 7404VNOX.

First i was looking at my current wired speed vs the wireless, it gave me the most grim reality, my router was slow! so slow that i was at best writing to the shared drive at 6MB/s and reading at 7MB/s. I was not sure what drove this slowness and in what areas the real culprit lied. I tried to get it to a proper 802.11n speeds to no avail. Wireless 2.4 Ghz channel was clear from competition, signal was strong, SNR was great. what was it?

Long nights and changes in the properties or the reading of many painful other experiences i came to the conclusion that it must be the router itself and that it probably has reached the end of the road for wireless speeds.

I was looking at the top of the market AC5300 and AC3200 dual bands and decided that i agree, there is no real need for more than AC1750 at this point and the AC1900 is quite good for my needs. this is quite counter intuitive to my nature to not buy the latest and greatest and didnt feel initially right. but once i figured out that all my devices just don’t have the latest and greatest network chips in them i was convinced this would be a good choice.

I have had 2 options to choose from in reality.

Asus RT-AC68U and the NETGEAR R7000 Nighthawk AC1900 and even went through a review comparing both, well many reviews comparing them and got to the point that i believe the Netgear was about to supply me better usability due to its features. This review which was giving the indication the Asus is better i was convinced the Netgear was my best option.

Thus i went out to purchase the Netgear Nighthawk R7000 from the local shop.

Once i got it home and dedicated my time to adapt it to my network i figured out how good the system was.

The first steps in the setup including starting the router up and logging in were quite simple and straight from the initial guide supplied. Type the domain name in and you get into the router setup wizard, but it is not that easy as it might be if you don’t use the internal DHCP and have another DHCP at home. What i had to go through is to neutralise my DHCP and finish the setup wizard as there is no way to go into the admin any other way. so 20 minutes after and i got my Router finished and all the nodes connected.

This was a bit of a surprise that the system was stuck in trying to get me to the URL when using the IP and that the setup locked the admin interface until i got through the last submit of the setup wizard.

Most of the things are quite easy and the UI, though not pretty is straightforward, is quite self-explanatory. only thing i had to dig around the web for was how to set the timezone. The trick was to navigate to the advanced tab -> security accordion -> schedule -> time zone and set your timezone and automatically set the daylight savings. job done.

At the end it was not that painful and i got everything, including the power down on timer of the wireless quite quickly setup. This allowed me to resume with my tests to see how did this affect the internet and wireless connection in the house

The biggest surprise was the speed. it was impressive! my internet speed, wired or wireless is amazingly fast, i use to get 40MB/s and i always wondered how is the 100MB/s cable network i pay for can degrade so dramatically to this. But in this test i was at 103MB/s mark which is way nicer and really is the full strength of the cable modem. This was a very nice warm fuzzy feeling.

The file transfer rate which was already maxed out when wired down showed similar write speed of 43 MB/s but the read speed is a bit better at ~80MB/s which is nice but not overly impressive compared with the 73MB/s prior router delivered. The interesting tidbit came to light whilst i was testing the wireless 5Ghz, Now I get 20+ MB/s write and 40MB/s read which is about 3.5 times better than the Billion 7404VNOX router i had before. and even the 2.4Ghz is almost double the speed of the Billion. this was nice.

I have yet to connect a USB 3.0 drive to the router to use as Time Machine backup yet and have not tested other edge features in the space of time that the router is in my possession and i most likely add to this review more information in later stages.

To conclude my thoughts i have to say i feel i have done the right choice, though the interface is not as slick and nicely looking it is very very intuitive and is very robust. some simple things need getting used to such as the DHCP DNS entries that are actually in the WAN settings, or the location of the time settings under security. but once this is done the VPN, File Sharing including time machine and the application for the mobile phone is quite nice. and with the great performance in both wireless and internet gave me the feeling that i made the right purchase decision.

Product design process for #startup

While reading About Faces 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin i began reflecting the information over the startup community.
The processes you get exposed to in the book, though aimed to the Interaction Designer / Information Architect, seem to be very useful to any product design process and seem to be very focusing when it comes to designing products from the ground up, as it is usually done with a startup.
Looking around the web for a one pager / cheat sheet of the books essence i drew a blank. there is a big void when it comes to interaction design.
So i will do my best to get this books essence in the shortest form i can to give the startup community a great guide for product design that requires less than the 600 pages in the book.
This will not replace reading the book if you want to get to the full depth of the interaction design, but it will be handy when you are limited on time and funds and want to get your product focused.
The book bundles together a few processes to create an aspiring for completeness process for creating a product.
When we think of a business about to create a product we let our thought roam in the realms of features/activities and functionality and in the look and feel of the product thinking about our users.
The reality is that we are not doing this in a methodological way and tend to try our luck more then fine tune the product before launch.
Most of us still approach the design of interfaces by asking, “What are the tasks?”.
The books takes us through the following processes

  1. Goal-Directed Design
  2. Implementation Models and Mental Models
  3. Understanding Users
  4. Modelling Users
  5. Scenarios and Requirements
  6. Framework and Refinement

I will try now to skim off the top of each of these and make some sense at the end.
Lets go

Goal-Directed Design
The first principle here is the Goals are not tasks, they are the end goals that the tasks lead to, the motivation for getting tasks done.
The main goal of a user is not to look stupid, keep that as one of the basic principles when you think of all the interaction of the user while using the system.
Most it products tend to:

  • Make users feel stupid
  • Cause users to make big mistakes
  • Slow users down hampering performance
  • Prevent fun and/or bore users

but how do we know what are the users goals?
User goals are not like tasks they change slowly, tasks and activities change often and relevant to context.
The way to find what are the goals are to do qualitative research understanding Why a user is performing the activity.

Goals will help later in the process to better understand the users as we model them into personas.
Implementation Model vs. Mental Model, You know how we always cry over software UI that it was “Developed by Developers”? a software like that was developed using the implementation model, thinking over the features from the developers perspective.
Mental model on the other hand is how a user perceive the experience, taking the car acceleration pedal for instance. the user needs to know nothing about the ignition or air intake to understand that pressing harder against the pedal will bring the car to higher speed, this is the mental model of the pedal.
Your users are one of these 3 groups

  1. Beginners
  2. Intermediate
  3. Advanced

The biggest group out of the three is group 2, the intermediates, most beginners turn intermediate quickly and most of them stay like that and never get to the expert group they stay perpetual intermediates.
One thing to remember here is that users don’t use the product in a frequent thus forget how some of the knowledge they accumulated.
Software UI needs to cater to the biggest group while not harming the other group’s usability.
I recommend reading this section in the book (pages 42-48) as it is one of the toughest points you will have to deal with while designing the product.

Now the book goes into understanding the users where qualitative research is to be done to establish Personas and Goals.
The research that is described in the section requires the following:

  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
  • User and customer interviews
  • User observation/ethnographic field studies
  • Literature review
  • Product/prototype and competitive audits

When trying to create the initial product in a startup we do not have the means to facilitate such a research and thus will need to create some alternative method in order to acheive partial Personas and Goals.
Some simple solutions will be to look at the competition and find out who of our friends/family/coworkers is using it, observer them and interview them.
If there are no competitors in the space we might be able to get some information from the same people while asking them to imagine the software.

When asking questions about a desired product use the guidance “Imaging that the software is magic” this will get you some ineresting responses.

If we have non of these we can try imagining what are users will be and give them qualities, we can use persona cards like organizational zoo to focus you on the type of persona’s and their associated behavioral attributes.

When approaching the personas definition (hypothesis) ask the following questions

  • What different sorts of people might use this product?
  • How might their needs and behaviors vary?
  • What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

When thinking about a persona we need to cover all aspects of the product usage.
Its nice when entering content is smooth and easy to a first grader but when the IT guy needs to create an export of that content and make it available to in the new upgrdaded environment we need to think of him too. He is a persona using the product.
In order to differentiate the Content Editor from an IT administrator we need to specify roles in the system usage. a role is constructed from a given number of tasks needed to be completed successfully with the system

Up to now we have a very flat persona with a Role and some character specifications but we need the persona to get some depth,
The depth of the usage is what we are more interested in as oppose to the theological thought that user might have, though they can indicate user behaviour.

The 3 measurement vectors are Frequency, Desire and Motivation.
Frequency represents the users frequency in usage of the feature.
Desire represent the will to do tha action.
Motivation is the reason behind the action, this could potentially be nowhere near the actions result.

So now you know more about the persona and its goals for some of the usage of the system.

From here the book will go into the methods of research which is valuble in the standard company improving product scanario, but has less relation to a startup before the first alfa, you can purchase the book by then with some funding on the table.

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